Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.

The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night.

CNN initially reported, based on conversations with some of the doctors, that the United Nations ordered the Belgian First Aid and Support Team to evacuate. However, Belgian Chief Coordinator Geert Gijs, a doctor who was at the hospital with 60 Belgian medical personnel, said it was his decision to pull the team out for the night. Gijs said he requested U.N. security personnel to staff the hospital overnight, but was told that peacekeepers would only be able to evacuate the team.

He said it was a "tough decision" but that he accepted the U.N. offer to evacuate after a Canadian medical team, also at the hospital with Canadian security officers, left the site Friday afternoon. The Belgian team returned Saturday morning.

Gijs said the United Nations has agreed to provide security for Saturday night. The team has requested the Belgian government to send its own troops for the field hospital, which Gijs expects to arrive late Sunday.

Responding to the CNN report that Gupta was the only doctor left at the Port-au-Prince field hospital, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body's mission in Haiti did not order any medical team to leave. If the team left, it was at the request of their own organization, he said.

Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, told reporters later that local security officers deemed the makeshift hospital unsafe.

"It seems that we've heard some reports in the international media that the United Nations asked or forced some medical teams to not work any more in some clinic -- that is not true, that is completely untrue," Mulet said Saturday.

CNN video from the scene Friday night shows the Belgian team packing up its supplies and leaving with an escort of blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers in marked trucks.

View or add to CNN's database of missing persons in Haiti

Gupta -- assisted by other CNN staffers, security personnel and at least one Haitian nurse who refused to leave -- assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little they could do without supplies.

More people, some in critical condition, were trickling in late Friday.

"I've never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous," Gupta said.

With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti's capital, ambulances had nowhere else to take patients, some of whom had suffered severe trauma -- amputations and head injuries -- under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic.

Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.

He and the others stayed with the injured all night, after the medical team had left and after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black.

Gupta monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition.

At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: "pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a crack med team tonight."

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He said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients behind but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to transport them.

"There is concern about riots not far from here -- and this is part of the problem," Gupta said.

There have been scattered reports of violence throughout the capital.

"What is striking to me as a physician is that patients who just had surgery, patients who are critically ill, are essentially being left here, nobody to care for them," Gupta said.

Sandra Pierre, a Haitian who has been helping at the makeshift hospital, said the medical staff took most of the supplies with them.

"All the doctors, all the nurses are gone," she said. "They are expected to be back tomorrow. They had no plan on leaving tonight. It was an order that came suddenly."

She told Gupta, "It's just you."

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake flattened Haiti's capital city Tuesday afternoon, affecting as many as 3 million people as it fanned out across the island nation. Tens of thousands of people are feared dead.

Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, lacked adequate medical resources even before the disaster and has been struggling this week to tend to huge numbers of injured. The clinic, set up under several tents, was a godsend to the few who were lucky to have been brought there.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there."

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are scared of the poor."

CNN's Justine Redman, Danielle Dellorto and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton meets voters at a campaign rally in St. Louis on Saturday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was ahead by a slim margin in Missouri on Wednesday, but the race remained in limbo pending word on whether rival Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont would seek a recount.

The delay postponed a definitive answer to whether Clinton had made a clean sweep of five big primaries on Tuesday night. Even if she does not prevail in Missouri, her other victories push her closer to the Democratic presidential nomination even as the considerably weakened Sanders vowed to press on with his insurgent campaign.

Clinton won big in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, while claiming a narrower victory in Illinois. In Missouri, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton was ahead 310,602 votes to 309,071. With a difference of less than 1 percent, state officials held off calling the race. A recount is not automatic, but Sanders could request one.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and her rival, Bernie Sanders, spoke about the challenges going forward after primary voters took to the polls in five states on March 15. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, said the campaign has not made a final decision on whether to request a recount and is still looking at the numbers. Because delegates are awarded proportionately, it’s not clear how much a small change in the vote totals would matter, he said.

“If it’s not going to make a material difference in the delegate count, we’re not going to put people through it,” he said.

[A good night for Trump and a better night for Clinton]

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook issued a memo to supporters and the media Wednesday that claimed a decisive advantage. He also took Sanders to task for turning negative.

"Both campaigns agreed that the measure of success for yesterday's pivotal contests was delegates," Mook wrote. "Sanders went all out in these 5 states, pouring more than $8 million on TV in the last 5 days alone," including at least one ad Mook termed negative.

"It's pretty clear this negative strategy backfired," he wrote.

Addressing supporters Tuesday night, Sanders did not mention the night's outcome, a disappointment for him after hopes that he could ride momentum from an upset victory in Michigan last week to victories in other large, delegate-rich states in the Midwest.

In a statement issued overnight, Sanders congratulated Clinton and pledged to continue a primary fight that he said he is confident he can still win. He did not mention Missouri or the other contests by name.

"With more than half the delegates yet to be chosen and a calendar that favors us in the weeks and months to come, we remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination," Sanders said.

But that path looked much more difficult, if not impossible, on Wednesday. Clinton's victories set her more than 300 delegates ahead of Sanders, and she is on track to collect a large share of the more than 1,000 delegates she still needs to lock up the contest. Sanders ended the day further behind in the delegate count — and needing to win a slew of upcoming states by improbably large margins.

“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November,” Clinton said at her victory party here Tuesday. As if to prove the point, she quickly pivoted to the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.

“Our next president has to be ready to face three big tasks," Clinton said during a speech that looked past her primary fight with Sanders and ahead to a probable matchup with Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

"First, can you make positive differences in people’s lives? Second, can you keep us safe? Third, can you bring our country together again?”

Clinton’s indictment of Trump’s policy positions sounded like a preview of arguments to come.

“When we hear a candidate for president call for the rounding up of 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him strong, it makes him wrong,” Clinton said.

Clinton has been eager to refocus her campaign to confront Trump more directly. But asked Tuesday if she was concerned that a protracted primary fight with Sanders would hobble Democrats ahead of the contest against a Republican nominee, she declined to encourage Sanders to leave the race.

Her campaign emailed a fundraising pitch Tuesday evening warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency and of complacency among Democrats.

“Tonight, Donald Trump could become the presumptive Republican nominee for president,” the donation request began. Too many Republicans tried to ignore him until it was too late, it said.

Sanders held a rally before about 7,000 people in Phoenix on Tuesday night, a week ahead of Arizona’s primary.

He said his campaign had “defied all expectations” but made no mention of the three states that had already been called in Clinton’s favor.

“What excites me so much as I go around the country is to see the incredible energy of people who love this country but know we can do so much better,” Sanders said to loud screams.

Some of his die-hard supporters expressed hope that he could still pull out the nomination.

“I still think the revolution is coming,” said James Homan, 55, a sound engineer for rock musicians, who has homes in Illinois and Arizona.

Homan expressed frustration that, as he saw it, “the fix was in” for Clinton among Democratic Party leaders, but he said he could see paths for Sanders to prevail, including the possibility of more fallout from the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Democratic primary voters were split on the candidates’ key attributes, with Clinton seen as more electable and Sanders as more honest, according to preliminary exit polls reported by ABC News.

By roughly 2 to 1, voters across Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri said Clinton had a better chance than Sanders of beating Trump in a general-election matchup. But roughly 8 in 10 said Sanders was honest and trustworthy, compared with about 6 in 10 who felt that way about Clinton. Sanders has dominated among honesty-focused voters all year, while Clinton has won by a wide margin those who care more about electability.

Sanders had embarrassed Clinton last week in Michigan and saw Tuesday’s contests as a chance to pull off more come-from-behind wins in states where voters feel damaged by globalization.

Repeating his playbook from Michigan, Sanders hit Clinton hard on her past support for “disastrous” trade deals, starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement when her husband was in the White House.

With the lesson of Michigan in mind, her campaign moved to retool her stance on trade by strengthening her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and emphasizing support for manufacturing in her jobs plan. In Ohio, Clinton took specific aim at elements of the pending trade package seen as harmful to the auto and steel industries.

Just over half of Ohio Democratic primary voters said free trade takes away U.S. jobs, according to the early exit polls. In Michigan, Sanders won among voters with that view by double digits. The anti-trade cohort was slightly larger in Michigan (57 percent) than in most states voting Tuesday, with less than half of Democrats in Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina saying trade costs U.S. jobs.

In Youngstown, Ohio, Dave Williams, 52, cast a ballot for Sanders.

“I lost my house when the stock market crashed,” said Williams, a member of the local cement finishers union. “I’m an angry voter, how ’bout that? I’m angry about the way the country is working for the blue-collar worker. Hillary gets a big, fat zero on that.”

In Missouri, Sanders aides were optimistic in part because much of the state closely resembles Kansas, where the senator easily defeated Clinton in the Democratic caucuses early this month. It’s worth noting, however, that Missouri was the smallest of the Democratic delegate prizes Tuesday.

Before the polls closed in Missouri, Clinton’s campaign announced that she had been endorsed by the mother of Michael Brown, the teenager whose 2014 shooting by police in Ferguson, Mo., brought more attention to officer-involved slayings of unarmed black men.

In Chicago, where Clinton spent her childhood, Sanders sought to leverage support from voters disenchanted with the tenure of the city’s embattled Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton ally. Emanuel’s approval ratings have dropped to all-time lows amid controversies over a police shooting and school closings, and his popularity with African American voters has taken an especially big hit.

In the closing days of the race, Sanders blasted Emanuel’s decision to close schools in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, and Sanders ran television ads featuring some of the mayor’s critics.

And Tuesday, Sanders had breakfast with Cook County Commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Emanuel in the Democratic primary last year.

Clinton’s lead in Florida was never in doubt, and she ended up capturing almost the same number of votes as the Republican winner, Trump — perhaps a preview of how competitive the state will be in November.

Florida posed several challenges for Sanders. It held a closed primary, meaning independent voters, who have propelled him to victory in other states, were not allowed to participate. The state’s voting population also includes a large number of older voters, who have sided with Clinton in previous contests.

Sanders’s aides have argued that the back half of the nominating calendar is more favorable to him, with several potential victories in the West and no contests remaining in the Deep South, which has been Clinton’s strongest region by far.

Sanders thinks he is well-positioned in all three states with contests next Tuesday: Arizona, Idaho and Utah. His decision to spend election night in Arizona signaled his intention to vigorously contest that state in the coming week.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.

You have to give President Barack Obama credit for one thing: consistency. Nothing is ever his fault. Nothing will ever be his fault. Faulting Fox News and the American people, on the other hand, now that's a different story.

Do you remember when Obama traipsed around the country and desperately pleaded with Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton because his agenda and his legacy were on the ballot? He made a similar pitch before the shellacking his party took in the 2014 congressional elections.

Yet did he acknowledge after this 2014 failing that he had anything to do with it? Does he own up to his leading role in last month's presidential election?

Let's rewind the tape further, to Obama's reaction to his party's stunning defeat in the 2010 congressional elections, which was largely about Obamacare. He didn't acknowledge any personal culpability for visiting that monstrosity on the American people through trickery and deceit. He simply lamented that he hadn't done a good enough job getting the message out to the American people about it, despite his 50 propaganda speeches trying to persuade us to ignore our lying eyes.

Do you see the pattern here? Obama's view is that the American people -- those in the red states, anyway -- are a little slow, paranoid and bigoted and need to be brought along carefully into the 21st century, where progressivism has ushered in a new age of enlightenment. His only failing has been in inadequately re-educating the bitter clingers.

Let me give you another example. Remember Obama's depiction of the Islamic State group as "a JV team"? How about his claim, the night before the terrorist massacres in Paris, that the Islamic State was "contained"?

Did he ever acknowledge his errors there? No. Again, his only failing was in not having communicated sufficiently his counterterrorism strategies to the American people. He said his strategy against the Islamic State was working. (This was before, as I recall, his admission that he had no policy.) The problem was that saturated media coverage after the Paris attacks was fueling terror fears in the United States. He said: "We haven't, on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we've been doing for more than a year now to defeat" the Islamic State. "If you've been watching television for the last month, all you've been seeing, all you've been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you. And so I understand why people are concerned about it."

Again, there's nothing to see here. It's not a terrorism problem but a perception problem. There's no Obamacare problem; it's just that the American people don't get it.

Even liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd acknowledged, in 2012, that Obama and his wife, Michelle, are condescending and aloof. The Obamas "do believe in American exceptionalism -- their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated," she wrote. The Obamas haven't disappointed Americans; "we disappointed them."

Even earlier, in February 2010, Obama pledged to "listen" to Republicans at a health care summit. But, as columnist Joseph Curl wrote, "turns out he meant he'd be listening to his own voice. By the end of the televised event, Mr. Obama had spoken for 119 minutes -- nine minutes more than the 110 minutes consumed by 17 Republicans. The 21 Democratic lawmakers used 114 minutes, giving the president and his supporters a whopping 233 minutes."

And why do the rubes keep misperceiving Obama's greatness? Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity.

In a recently published interview with Rolling Stone, Obama denied that he and his party overlooked the "cohort of working-class white voters" that supposedly accounted for Donald Trump's victory. Absolutely not his fault. "Part of it," said Obama, "is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grass-roots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments."

The challenge Democrats have, according to Obama, is not that they've neglected these communities from a policy perspective. "What is true, though, is that whatever policy prescriptions that we've been proposing don't reach, are not heard by, the folks in these communities. And what they do hear is 'Obama or Hillary are trying to take away (your) guns' or 'they disrespect you.'"

I repeat: This guy is remarkably, incorrigibly consistent. He has made no policy errors; his message just isn't getting through, partly because the conservative media are lying about it and partly because people are just too darned dense.

I hate to keep bringing up the past, but his war on the conservative media is nothing new, either. I wrote about it in 2010 in my book "Crimes Against Liberty." He began snubbing Fox reporters at news conferences for insufficiently pandering. The White House blog regularly denounced Fox News and other critics. White House communications director Anita Dunn recommended a "rapid response" to counteract "Fox's blows" against the administration, calling Fox News "part of the Republican Party." Presidential adviser David Axelrod said Fox News Channel is "not really a news station."

Remember when Obamacare's principal architect, Jonathan Gruber, openly admitted that the Obama administration was able to deceive the American people about Obamacare and chalked it up to "the stupidity of the American voter"?

So go ahead and cry us a river about how the conservative media are mistreating you, Mr. Obama, and misleading the public. You have been trying to deceive us for eight years, and the public has been onto you for at least 6 1/2 of those years. Now voters have handed you your biggest spanking yet, and you still will not listen. You can't listen. It's not what you do. But the American people have been listening, and they do understand your policies. And it's a new day in America.
BIGBANG is one of those musical entities that transcends language. It’s one of those rare groups that both innovates and defines the direction a genre takes. Covering a sound that includes hip hop, R&B and electronic dance, BIGBANG and its solo acts (G-Dragon, T.O.P, Taeyang, Seungri and Daesung) have left a musical imprint that has affected the global music market. In fact, even Diplo, a household name in EDM, worked with G-Dragon and T.O.P for their rap album. So when the band announced its world tour to promote the release of its third full-length studio album MADE after a 3 year hiatus, fans lost their minds – including myself. In fact, tickets for each of BIGBANG’s North American legs sold out.

As a result, I was lucky enough to witness this larger-than-life Korean pop group perform a couple Saturday nights ago on Oct. 10 at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. As I waited in line to enter the venue with my friends, mobs of fans raved about BIGBANG's new tracks (and surprisingly, not everyone was Asian). Leading up to this particular leg of their North American tour, BIGBANG released 2 songs every month starting from May to August, resulting in 8 freshly minted tracks.

After everyone pushed their way through security, a slew of fans rushed to the merchandise table hoping to get either apparel or light up accessories they could wave around during the concert. Being the broke boy I am, my friend and I instead made our way to our seats at the front of the upper level and waited for the BANG to make its appearance. (Floor admission was anywhere from $600 - $800.)

In the hour leading up to BIGBANG’s presence, a large screen played popular music videos from both the group as a whole and its solo acts. Though the pit was half full and other fans were sparsely scattered in the seated areas, fans emphatically cheered when their favorite idol appeared in a music video. Prudential Center wasn’t even a quarter full yet.

As the venue slowly flooded to capacity, the group finally made its appearance. Gradually, the lights dimmed while the sound of a motor revving filled the venue. Fans energetically waved their light-up flower accessories in anticipation and stood up. Almost immediately, the instrumentals to “BANG BANG BANG” blared through the speakers, and the 5 members walked out of the splitting screen previously used to play the videos. During the song, small fireworks burst from the top of the stage and popped timely on the hook’s lyric “bang.” It was then that everyone recognized the blissful hype BIGBANG was about to deliver for the rest of the night on.

As their set progressed, the band showcased their sentimental side, performing a set of slow ballads at once to drive home the theme of their first album single “LOSER,” yet also re-energized the crowd with another set of R&B and pop songs. In between, as if to both recharge their energy and quickly change into their costume-like clothes, each artist performed a song from his solo work. This break from the group’s work gave more casual fans a chance to witness how the band dedicated its time during its hiatuses.

The ultimate highlight came during T.O.P’s solo “DOOM DADA.” Adorning a suit printed with Mondrian’s patented “Composition” painting, instead of rapping his line, T.O.P looked at the audience and winked. And during that moment, my jaw dropped, and I questioned my sexuality.

In between a set of maybe three or four songs, the band either took the time to interact with the audience or reveal extended scenes from their Quentin Tarantino-inspired short film uploaded in April.

It was when the band members spoke to the audience that these Korean idols brought themselves down to earth. Despite occasionally tripping over their rehearsed English lines, each member gave us a glimpse of his more personal side. Some had further solidified their reputations. For instance, Daesung, the goofy, go-lucky singer and drummer, introduced himself just by yelling “YEAH” to the audience at least 5 times and waited for the audience’s response between each. T.O.P re-asserted himself as the cool, collected bad boy, asserting, “Yeah… You know who I am” when it was his turn at the microphone.

The others seemed to break out of fan expectations. While Seungri was the most mysterious before the concert, known more for his dancing than his singing, he ended up being the most charismatic of the group and spoke the most English. Taeyang also shed the hip hop image he tries to convey in his videos when he’s clad in Supreme. His initial interaction with the audience was inviting the fans to sing pitches with him, and later on, he would be the one to interject between the other members’ later interactions with the audience. And while G-Dragon is the eclectic leader of the group, he was surprisingly toned down compared to the chameleon style that has garnered him the attention of fashionheads everywhere.

The biggest surprise, though, was the group’s capacity for profanity. In an attempt to hype up the audience for his solo “Strong Baby,” Seungri yelled at the audience to “MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE.” For his part in “Zutter,” T.O.P repeatedly rapped “bitch” despite his line only requiring him to say it once. And at the end, G-Dragon introduced the final song as “FANTASTIC MOTHERFUCKING BABY.”

Of course, there are more moments that I could cover – like how Daesung made a scene about revealing his hair-covered eyes, or how he pelvic thrusted to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” or how T.O.P still uncoordinatedly dances in the back – but these moments are boring to read and seem underwhelming on paper.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s that this concert was an electric, out-of-body experience. I had the privilege of being in the presence of some of my favorite artists, foolishly screaming and singing and dancing along to some of my favorite songs live — all without the influence of drugs and alcohol. Despite their huge break, this comeback concert only proved that BIGBANG’s presence is stronger than ever and cemented my opinion that they’re the absolute best in Korean pop. Unfortunately, as the concert concluded, the very real idea that each member would undergo required conscription loomed closer. But it didn’t matter — if this was BIGBANG’s last world tour, it ended perfectly. If there is another years from now, though, I can’t wait to be there too.
WHAT?!??! I know. That’s what you’re saying right now.

“WHAT?! DISNEY HAS A DONUT SUNDAE AND I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IT?!” How do I know you’re saying that? Because that’s exactly what I was saying when Tina (<– amazing DFB photographer who’s frigging awesome) spotted this at the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor in the Magic Kingdom this week!

But it’s OK. It’s brand new — not even on the menu yet — so we didn’t miss out on too much of the Donut Sundae lifespan. And we’re hoping that lifespan is a nice, long one!

The Main Street Plaza Ice Cream Parlor can be found at the intersection of Main Street USA and Tomorrowland, just before you get to Cinderella Castle. And the sundae joins a few other must-have treats on the Ice Cream Parlor’s menu, including the house-made ice cream sandwich (preferably ordered with a drizzled sauce!), the “kids’ cone” (it’s totally OK to order this as a grown-up, too) with Mickey ears, and the Plaza Ice Cream Sundae. So…I’m really not envying you the decisions you’ll have to make when you get there! ;-D

After spotting the sundae on a placard, we grabbed it! It comes with a warm glazed donut, warm apple compote, vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, a cherry, chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips.

We found out that the donut was not house-made (it’s basically a Krispy Kreme), but it’s warmed just before serving. And with the warm donut and warm compote contrasting with the cold vanilla ice cream, there’s a LOT of amazing going on in this sundae!

I’m doubting the apple compote is house-made, or even fresh (probably canned), but it still works well with the sundae. Though the combo of apple compote with peanut butter chips is a bit strange?

At the moment, vanilla ice cream is the default flavor. The Cast Member we spoke to said that once this is officially on the menu, guests should be able to request whatever flavor they’d like.

At press time, this costs $5.99 and is not a Disney Dining Plan snack credit option. But at $5.99, you’re still getting a bargain as far as we’re concerned!

Our thoughts? This was fantastic! Donut? Good! Ice Cream? Good! Apple Pie Filling? Good! Whipped Cream? Good! It’s a winner all around. We can’t WAIT until this gets cemented onto the menu!

Pin it for later!

What do you think? Will you be heading to the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor for your Donut Sundae the next time you’re on Main Street USA? Let us know in the comments below!
A notorious protester convicted of wilfully promoting hatred against Muslims and criminally harassing a Muslim man and his family was sentenced Tuesday to nine months in jail. Eric Brazau handed out a flyer that “vilified Muslims and disparages their religion,” Ontario court Judge S. Ford Clements said in February, when he found Brazau guilty.

Eric Brazau was convicted of willful promotion of hatred against Muslims and criminally harassing a Muslim family. ( CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )

The case was far from being on the borderline between “rough and tumble debate” and hate speech, as Brazau had argued, Clements said in a College Park courtroom. Brazau handed out the flyer, which contained many offensive references to Islam and Muslims, in August and September 2012. While distributing it, Brazau sometimes yelled obscenities about Islam “in a tone of voice that suggested he was very angry and had little interest in debate,” Clements said. Brazau had argued that he did not intend to promote hate speech; instead he wanted to stimulate debate about censorship, “blasphemy laws” and Sharia law, Clements said.

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Clements disagreed. “He knew the material would deeply wound and anger Muslims,” said Clements. The content was not humorous, ironic or satirical, he said. “Mr. Brazau is far too intelligent to believe this to be so.” The flyer also contained a somewhat blurred photograph of a Muslim family on a downtown Toronto street.

The man in the photo testified that Brazau called him a “terrorist” on the day Brazau took the photo. In a second interaction a few weeks later on a sidewalk, the man, whose name is protected by a publication ban, said that Brazau approached him aggressively while photographing the family, making him “concerned and fearful.”

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Clements found this to be criminal harassment. During sentencing submissions, Crown prosecutor Derek Ishak described Brazau as an “unrepentant hatemonger … who abused his right to freedom of speech in a planned, deliberate manner,” Clements said Tuesday in his sentencing decision. However, Clements said that while Brazau’s conduct was “despicable” and his beliefs “repugnant,” the maximum sentence of six months for a summary conviction on willfully promoting hatred was unwarranted. He also noted the defence submission that Brazau committed his offences in public, where he was easily identifiable, rather than by stealth. Instead, he gave Brazau a four-month sentence, plus two months for criminal harassment and mischief and three months for breach of probation by not keeping the peace. Brazau, who had spent nine months in pre-trial custody, was sentenced to time served. Clements declined to ban Brazau from distributing flyers, since that could impede his right to freedom of expression. Outside the court, Brazau said he will appeal his sentence. He says he is aware the flyer was “problematic” and “would offend.” But his voice won’t be silenced, Brazau added, though he will keep in mind the hate speech laws, which he says he has learned to navigate over the past few months. “Hatred is the harvest he wanted to gather,” Clements said in his conviction decision, quoting William Butler Yeats. “I find this is true of Mr. Brazau.” Last month, a small claims court found that Brazau had been wrongfully arrested and detained while protesting near Sgt. Ryan Russell’s funeral procession in 2011. However, the deputy judge also found his conduct “reprehensible” and awarded him only $1,000 in damages.
× Some Seattle businesses closed for ‘A Day Without Immigrants’, but others decided against it

SEATTLE — While there is no official list of local businesses participating in this movement, “A Day Without Immigrants”, we did find some businesses that had closed their doors and posted signs up saying they were participating.

In fact, one business owner says he’s doing things a little bit differently. Instead of shutting down, he says he is choosing to pay it forward.

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Edward Moran moved from Mexico to the United States in 1984. He opened El Norte Lounge in Lake City about seven years ago. And instead of closing up shop along with many other immigrant small business owners across the nation, Eduardo was open for business Thursday.

“I don’t believe in closing a place just to protest,” says Eduardo.

Instead, he says he’s paying it forward. Eduardo is asking customers to pay in cash to avoid bank fees from credit card machines. He says he plans to donate a portion of his proceeds to a nonprofit that focuses on helping immigrants here in the Pacific Northwest. And he’s calling on other business owners to do the same.

“If we do this together for one week, I want to see the impact we have on this economy at the bank,” says Eduardo.

“We’re supporting him and his efforts and he's paying it forward,” says customer Kim Lawson.

“I think it's important to honor those people who are here and working really hard,” says customer Jill Scollard.

While there is no official list of businesses participating in this protest locally, we drove around Seattle tonight and found a few shops, including one on Capital Hill and one in White Center, with notices on the door saying they were shut down in support of “A day without immigrants”.

“I did think about closing, but my heart told me and my gut instincts said you are wrong,” says Eduardo.

While he knows some may criticize him for staying open, he says he’s doing what he thinks is best for his business and his employees.

“In this industry everybody makes money every day; tips, you stop it’s not just your paycheck, it’s your tips. Share the wealth instead of stopping and not doing anything work hard and share the wealth,” says Eduardo.
Today, Toyota announced changes in executives’ areas of responsibility, as well as personnel changes at the sub-executive managerial level. The most important change by far is the appointment of Akio Toyoda, the company’s CEO and grandson of founder Kiichiro Toyoda, as President of a new ‘EV Business Planning’ department.

Earlier this month, we reported–admittedly a little tongue-in-cheek–about Toyota announcing the creation of an electric vehicle division and putting only 4 engineers on the project with the goal to bring EVs to market by 2020.

The move seems a lot more serious now that Akio Toyoda is leading the effort, and several other executives, managers, and engineers have been assigned new responsibilities in the electric vehicle planning department, including the chief engineer of the Prius.

At the executive level, the changes will be effective today, while the managers were apparently put on the program throughout the month. You can see the full list of changes below.

It appears to be a clear sign that Toyota is more serious than ever about electric vehicles and it is not simply investing in fuel cell hydrogen to comply to new fuel consumption standards.

Changes to executives’ areas of responsibility

(effective December 1, 2016)

Name Current New Akio Toyoda ― President EV Business Planning Dept. (chief officer) Mitsuhisa Kato Executive Vice President Frontier Research Center (chief officer) Executive Vice President Frontier Research Center (chief officer)

EV Business Planning Dept. (chief officer) Shigeki Terashi Executive Vice President Strategic Top Executive Meeting Office (secretary general)

Corporate Strategy Div. (chief officer)

Research Div. (chief officer) Executive Vice President Strategic Top Executive Meeting Office (secretary general)

EV Business Planning Dept. (chief officer)

Corporate Strategy Div. (chief officer)

Research Div. (chief officer) Koki Konishi Managing Officer Mid-size Vehicle Company (executive vice president) Managing Officer General Administration & Human Resources Group

Changes to executive general managers’ areas of responsibility

(effective November 1, 2016)

Name Current New Shinichi Yasui Mid-size Vehicle Company ZS (chief officer), ZV (chief officer), ZD (chief officer), ZE (chief officer), ZF (chief officer) Mid-size Vehicle Company ZS (chief officer), ZV (chief officer), ZD (chief officer), ZE (chief officer), ZF (chief officer, concurrent chief engineer)

Personnel changes at the sub-executive managerial level

(effective November 1, 2016)

Name Current New Kouji Toyoshima MSZ, Mid-size Vehicle Company (chief engineer) MSZ, Mid-size Vehicle Company (chief engineer)

EV Business Planning Dept. (preliminary organization) (general manager)

(effective November 14, 2016)

Name Current New Kenichi Komuro Temporary External Transfer from Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. EV Business Planning Dept. (preliminary organization) (project general manager)

(effective December 1, 2016)
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. AP Images / Business Insider

North Korea attempted to fire a missile Sunday, but it blew up within seconds.

It happened one day after the anniversary of the country's founding.

While North Korea's missile program may be the shadowiest on earth, it's possible that US cyber warriors were the reason for the failed launch.

A recent New York Times report uncovered a secret operation to derail North Korea's nuclear-missile program that has been raging for at least three years.

Essentially, the report attributes North Korea's high rate of failure with Russian-designed missiles to the US meddling in the country's missile software and networks.

Although North Korea's missile infrastructure lacks the competence of Russia's, the Soviet-era missile on which North Korea based its missile had a 13% failure rate, and the North Korean version failed a whopping 88% of the time, according to the report.

While the missile failure on Sunday could have just been due to poor workmanship, US Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland seemed to leave room for speculation about espionage, telling Fox News, "We can't talk about secret intelligence and things that might have been done, covert operations, so I really have no comment."

Vice President Mike Pence on Monday visited the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, saying that "all options are on the table to achieve the objectives and ensure the stability of the people of this country," and that "the era of strategic patience" with North Korea "is over."

To those in the know, the campaign against North Korea came as no surprise. Ken Geers, a cybersecurity expert for Comodo with experience in the National Security Agency, told Business Insider that cyber operations like the one against North Korea were the norm.

While the US hacking another country's missile program may be shocking to some, "within military intelligence spaces, this is what they do," Geers said. "If you think that war is possible with a given state, you're going to be trying to prepare the battle space for conflict. In the internet age, that means hacking."

Reuters

North Korea's internal networks are fiercely insulated and not connected to the internet, however, which poses a challenge for hackers in the US. But Geers said it was "absolutely not the case" that hacking requires computers connected to the internet.

A recent report in The New Yorker on Russian hacking detailed one case in which Russia gained access to a NATO computer network in 1996 by providing bugged thumb drives to shops near a NATO base in Kabul, Afghanistan. NATO operators bought the thumb drives, used them on the network, and just like that, the Russians were in.

"That's where SIGINT (signals intelligence) or COMINT (communications intelligence) comes into collaboration with HUMINT (human intelligence)," Geers said.

He described the present moment as the "golden age of espionage," as cyberwarfare remains nonlethal, unattributable, and almost completely unpunished.

But a recent missile salvo from North Korea suggests that even a prolonged, sophisticated cyberattack can't fully derail its nuclear-missile program.

"Imagine you're the president. North Korea is a human-rights abuser and an exporter of dangerous technology," Geers said. "Responsible governments really need to think about ways to handle North Korea, and one of the options is regime change."

The test fire of Pukguksong-2 in February. KCNA/Handout via Reuters

Further, Geers said, because of the limited number of servers and access points to North Korea's very restricted internet, "if it ever came to cyberwar between the US and North Korea, it would be an overwhelming victory for the West."

"North Korea can do a Sony attack or attack the White House, but that's because that's the nature of cyberspace," Geers said. "But if war came, you'd see Cyber Command wipe out most other countries' pretty quickly."
We’ve always pictured Scandinavia as the home of grisly crime fiction, weird pop music and IKEA. But it looks like there’s a growing custom scene too.

Shops like the Wrenchmonkees and Unique Custom Cycles need no introduction. But straight after last week’s Norwegian Yamaha GTS comes this radical Honda tracker from Marcus Moto Design of Sweden.

It has no seat, it’s painted in a vivid Arctic White, and it’s the custom equivalent of an ice-cold shot of Aquavit.

The builder is Marcus Carlsson, a 41-year-old engineer who lives just outside Stockholm. “Bikes that are unique or a bit ‘weird’ are what get me going,” he says. “Too many custom bikes look the same nowadays.”

Five years ago, Marcus caused an internet meltdown with his stunning Ducati F1 Tracker. He then started work on an Aprilia SXV 550, but killed that project after deciding he didn’t like the look of the frame. (“I move slowly on my bike builds,” he admits.)

That’s fair enough—he builds his bikes in a small one-car garage, and has a full time job managing a team of 15 people for Ericsson. When his wife and 7-year-old twins are asleep at night, he sneaks into the garage to build.

“I go in for a couple hours, and I basically just sleep less than them,” he says.

After the hiatus with the Aprilia, Marcus found a 2006-model Honda CRF450 that lived near his family’s summerhouse, out in the country. It was a much better base for his vision of the ultimate street tracker.

“Ultimate in my mind means minimal bodywork, centralized weight distribution, lightweight carbon fiber and a ‘concept motorcycle’ feel,” he says. And with a modern aluminum motocross frame and a powerful four-stroke thumper engine, the CRF fitted the bill.

Marcus might work slowly, but he does everything himself—even the paint. So he welded and modified the FMF exhaust, welded on the aluminum sub frame, and made the foam bases for the new bodywork.

The gas tank, belly pan and remaining body panels were then hand-shaped with carbon fiber. Various other parts were designed in the CAD program NX, before being 3D printed.

The weight loss program is extreme: There’s no seat. “Every surface has been questioned,” says Marcus. “Is it needed or not? Seats are for touring bikes!”

Marcus has lowered the forks for road use, but the frame and swing arm are stock: Honda motocross components are top quality. But everything else has been modified or simply removed, and the aluminum subframe does double duty as the mounting point for the gas tank.

The license plate is Japanese, from a Tokyo moped market. “I’ll replace it with a Swedish one to reduce interest from traffic cops,” says Marcus. “They will probably have some opinions on the bike anyway…”

Indeed. We’re pretty sure the lighting will be inspected closely, for starters. At the front is an LED ring mounted on a 3D-printed bracket; further down is a tiny battery, hidden underneath the lower yoke. We’re pretty sure that’s another first in the custom world.

The tiny covers on either side of the front axle are also 3D printed, and there’s a matching aluminum cover for the rear brake caliper. Both are designed to add a touch of sleekness and a ‘concept bike’ vibe.

The modified FMF exhaust system has a shortened silencer, itself partially shielded from view. It’s tucked in underneath the engine, but the header length is standard to maximize power.

An aftermarket radiator keeps the engine cool, hooked up with red Samco silicone hoses. To slow things down, there’s an oversized front brake—and the rear brake has been treated to a Fasst Co. spring kit for a smooth, easily modulated feel—ideal for road use.

Those gorgeous wheels are one-off numbers from Warp 9, shod with Goldentyre flat track rubber.

Yes, this is a barely street legal racer, right down to the battery-powered lights. It’s perfect for short stints on the curvy village roads outside Stockholm.

Marcus is a MotoGP fan, and if you look closely, you’ll spot a couple of HRC logos on the bike. “In my dreams, this bike would be HRC’s version of a street tracker. Or maybe a gift to Marc Marquez, so he can hit the streets after he wins the Superprestigio in Barcelona!”

We reckon the pint-sized phenomenon would have a ball on this machine. And he probably wouldn’t even miss the seat padding.

Marcus Moto Design | Facebook | Instagram | Images by Simon Hamelius
Story highlights Tyka Nelson says her brother's favorite color was ... orange

The late musical artist's brand has been all about the color purple

(CNN) Tyka Nelson just tweaked a major part of Prince's legacy.

The sister of the late superstar talked to the Evening Standard about an upcoming exhibit of Prince artifacts set to open in London and mentioned one of his beloved instruments.

"The standout piece for me is his orange Cloud guitar," the publication quoted Nelson as saying. "It is strange because people always associate the color purple with Prince, but his favorite color was actually orange."

Full stop.

The singer, who died last year from an opioid overdose at the age of 57, was known as "The Purple One" and shot to megastardom thanks to his now-iconic 1984 film "Purple Rain."

Read More
There’s measuring the drapes, and then there’s measuring the drapes on a house you haven’t bought, and may never own, but you’re so convinced you will that, hey, let’s buy drapes!

And there’s hubris, Joe Miller-style.

So confident is Miller that he’ll win Lisa Murkowski’s Alaska Senate seat in November, he boasted last night to his over 4,000 Twitter followers that, on his trip to DC this week, he might do some house hunting. And perhaps buy some furniture. And also commission a name plaque for the door of his future Senate office.

The tweets were flagged by a source and sent my way. Check it out.

The blog Mudflats and Slate reporter Dave Weigel also noticed.

Today, they’re gone.

In Miller’s defense, he is leading his race. TPM’s Polltracker has him ahead by just over two points in a three way race with Murkowski and Democrat Scott McAdams.

But it’s probably for the best that he took those Tweets down. After all, everybody knows there are no big egos in the United States Senate.
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Thunder League Division Structure

Dear players! You have become acquainted with the Thunder League and watched some of the matches by the pro division teams. Your participation in the league events and the purchasing of League “Dog tags” has made it possible to increase the prize pool of the pro division. We thank you for your support with the eSports development in the game!

The time has come for our supporters to become participants - gather your teams and start to make your way to the top of the Thunder League - to the pro division!

The Qualifying tournament starts on February 2016

We announce two more divisions in the league:

Novice Division – a division for the novice teams.

Semi Pro Division – medium division.

Semi Pro Division will be established after the qualifying Novice Division tournament, where all the Squadrons may participate.

Rules of the qualifiers:

Tournament format: 7 vs 7.

Mode: realistic with markers for both sides.

A match means a single battle between two Squadrons on a random map in [Domination] mode.

Two respawns are available in every match.

Players in a team can choose any vehicles from those that the arbiters have authorised.

The best 24 Squadrons will be able to name 9 participants for the final group qualifying tournament. You can see the tournaments regulations here.

6 qualifying groups (4 teams per group) will determine 12 teams (2 best teams per group) and thus they will form the Semi Pro Division.

After the Semi Pro Division qualifiers we will run the first season.

First season rules:

The team that took 1st place qualifies for the Pro Division.

The team that took 2nd place will have a play-off match against the team that came 9th in the Pro-Division.

The teams that took 9th to 12th position, will have a play-off round against the best 4 teams in the Novice Division before the second season of the League.

Once the first season is over there will be no more final qualifying tournaments. Thus we will make the structure for the Thunder League, which will have constant rotation between the divisions.

Good luck in the future battles!

Index.

Structure of the groups to qualify for the Semi Pro Division after the Novice Division results (numbers mean place taken in the qualifier).

Group A Group B Group C Group D Group E Group F 1 2 3 4 5 6 12 11 10 9 8 7 18 17 16 15 14 13 24 23 22 21 20 19

Don’t know what the Thunder League is? Check WARTHUNDER.PRO​

Join the league by purchasing “Dog Tags”!
Ad blockers are often painted as the enemy of online publishers, but sometimes things are more complicated.

AdBlock Plus, for example, just announced that they’re working with startup Flattr on a new product that allows readers to pay the publishers who produce the content they read, listen to and watch.

As a result of the partnership, AdBlock Plus said it has also made a small investment of undisclosed size in Flattr .

Together, the two companies have created a new product called Flattr Plus. Like Flattr itself, it allows users to allocate a monthly budget that they want to pay publishers. Unlike Flattr, users don’t have to click a button to “Flattr” a website — instead, it will automatically track their browsing activity and distribute the money based on their engagement.

It sounds somewhat similar to the way a company like Spotify distributes subscription fees to musicians — except it’s not just for artists on a single website or app.

Plus, the question of exactly how to calculate engagement is a tricky one. You probably don’t want to reward a worthless article with a dumb-but-effective clickbait headline. You might also leave an article open for hours without actually reading it.

Ben Williams, who leads communication and operations at AdBlock Plus, told me that the product is still in beta testing (the plan is to do a full launch later this year) partly so the team can experiment with ways to measure engagement — it will involve some combination of factors like time spent and scroll activity.

Publishers will have to sign up with Flattr Plus if they want to get paid, b ut Williams said that if they’re don’t, the money they’re due will be held for them until they join the program . (Update: Williams said that actually, AdBlock Plus won’t hold the money — it’ll just tell them how much money they could have earned.)

The goal, he added, is to earn half a billion dollars in revenue for publishers next year. He doesn’t necessarily expect every AdBlock Plus user to volunteer to pay, but he predicted that many will — and when you’ve got 500 million downloads, just a small percentage of users paying a few dollars a month can add up.

In fact, he said the AdBlock Plus users who opt out of seeing any advertising whatever (even if it’s part of the company’s acceptable ads program), are the ones who “have been the most vocal in asking for solutions like this.” Basically, these users have told the company they don’t like any ads, period, but they still want to support publishers and creators. Now we’ll get a chance to see if they meant it.

Oh, and if you want to hear more about Flattr Plus and AdBlock Plus’ broader vision, I’ll be interviewing CEO Till Faida next week at Disrupt NY.
Get cool in-game extras with amiibo accessories! Just tap to score new characters, game modes, or other perks.

One amiibo may work with multiple games. You might get new outfits, power-ups, or other fun bonuses.

Link is the main character in The Legend of Zelda games. A young boy living in Hyrule, Link is often given the task of rescuing Princess Zelda and Hyrule from the Gerudo thief Ganondorf. Humble to the end, Link is known not merely as a hero but as a symbol of courage, strength and wisdom as well.

Compatible Games:

Write and Read:

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Read Only:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD

Mario Kart 8

Hyrule Warriors

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

ACE COMBAT® Assault Horizon Legacy +

Mario Party 10

amiibo tap: Nintendo's Greatest Bits

Super Mario Maker

Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash

Yoshi's Woolly World

Word Puzzles by POWGI (Nintendo3DS)

Word Puzzles by POWGI (WiiU)

Pokkén Tournament

Hyrule Warriors Legends

Metroid Prime: Federation Force

Metroid Prime: Blast Ball Demo

Style Savvy: Fashion Forward

Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games

Kirby: Planet Robobot

Mini Mario & Friends amiibo Challenge (WiiU)

Mini Mario & Friends amiibo Challenge (Nintendo3DS)

Picross 3D Round 2

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World

Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome amiibo

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Mario Party Star Rush

Mario Party Star Rush - Party Guest

Mario Sports Superstars

Miitopia

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
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Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States announces that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Ad Policy

The attorney general of the United States is a civil officer. If he has lied under oath to the Senate, that act demands impeachment.

After news reports published last Wednesday made it clear that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had deceived the Senate regarding his interactions with Russian officials, there were immediate demands that the attorney general recuse himself from investigations into issues relating to those lies and that he resign as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. Sessions announced Thursday afternoon that he would recuse himself from any examination of Russian involvement with President Trump’s campaign. But he gave no indication that he would consider the next necessary step of removing himself as attorney general.

Sessions has made his position clear.

This lawless attorney general is not going to do the right thing, so Congress must consider the prospect of impeachment. The founders anticipated such circumstance. This is why they outlined an impeachment process.

Here’s why: The Washington Post has revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Sessions was a close counselor and top surrogate for Donald Trump, he spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Sessions acknowledges the meetings now. But when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Trump’s nominee for attorney general in January, Senator Al Franken asked how Sessions might handle revelations that individuals associated with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian government.

Sessions replied: “I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

This was not the only denial from Sessions. According to The Washington Post:

In January, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote. Sessions responded with one word: “No.”

We now know that was not the case. And, unless Sessions is far too absentminded to continue to serve as attorney general (a circumstance that no one seriously entertains at this point), then we have been handed evidence that this man engaged in a blatant attempt to deceive the very Senate that was charged with determining whether he would take charge of the Department of Justice.

Sessions and his aides were busy making excuses Wednesday night and Thursday morning, claiming that he spoke with the ambassador in his capacity as a senator rather than as a Trump surrogate—and that the Russian ambassador was one of many foreign officials with whom he met as “a senior member of the Armed Services Committee.”

So what? The issue isn’t whether Sessions spoke with the ambassador. Nor does it matter whether he did so as a senator or as a Trump surrogate. He was both. What matters is what Sessions told fellow senators when he was asked straightforward questions. He volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians.” He replied “no” to a direct inquiry about whether he had such communications. If these were not overt lies they were, at the very least, legalistic attempts by Sessions to deceive colleagues who were charged by the Constitution with a duty to provide advice and consent regarding his nomination to serve as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.

Of course, Sessions had to recuse himself from inquires into inquiries into allegations that the Russians meddled in the 2016 election. As New York Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, explained, “[The] revelation about then-Senator Sessions’s contact with Russia’s ambassador removes all doubt that he must recuse himself from any investigation of Russia’s interference in last year’s election. He should do so without delay. The President should also appoint a special prosecutor to handle this matter whose work must complement a thorough investigation by a bipartisan commission.” Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now

Even Republicans who have been slow to hold the Trump administration to account were calling for recusal. House Oversight and Government Reform committee chair Jason Chaffetz tweeted: “AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself.”

The decision by Sessions to recuse himself addressed concerns about his personal involvement tainting specific investigations. But it did not address the issue of Sessions’s lying to the Senate.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi proposed a more appropriate response to the revelations regarding Sessions; declaring that “after lying under oath to Congress about his own communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign. Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign. There must be an independent, bipartisan, outside commission to investigate the Trump political, personal and financial connections to the Russians.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer agreed.

So did Senator Elizabeth Warren, who said: “We need a special prosecutor totally independent of the AG. We need a real, bipartisan, transparent Congressional investigation into Russia. And we need Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who should have never been confirmed in the first place—to resign. We need it now.”

True enough. But Sessions is not about to resign. And his record does not offer any indication that he intends to start telling the truth.

The founders anticipated such circumstances, which is why they wrote a constitution that outlined an impeachment process. The catch-all phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was intended to give guardians of the republic leeway for holding presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet members to account. An impeached official is not charged by a prosecutor and tried in the courts; nor is he or she jailed or fined if found guilty. An impeached official is charged by the House of Representatives, tried by the Senate, and removed from office if convicted.

The signers of the Constitution did not intend that this tool would be used only by the opposition party; the intent was that all members of the House and Senate might rise above partisanship and ideology when it came time to defend the American experiment. And, while no one is naive about the level of partisanship in today’s Washington, no one should make excuses for House members or senators who fail to rise above it.

Jeff Sessions disrespected the basic premises of that experiment and disregarded the Constitution. He did so in pursuit of a position: that of attorney general of the United States. He obtained that position under false pretenses. It is now time to relieve him of his responsibilities as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.

The tool, impeachment, is at the ready. It should be employed by all members of Congress who believe that constitutionally defined oaths must be upheld.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s postal service was hit by Wannacry ransomware last week and some of its computers are still down, three employees in Moscow said, the latest sign of weaknesses that have made the country a major victim of the global extortion campaign.

A man walks out of a branch of Russian Post in Moscow, Russia, May 24, 2017. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Wannacry compromised the post office’s automated queue management system, infecting touch-screen terminals which run on the outdated Windows XP operating system, one of the workers said. Terminals were still blank in some parts of Moscow this week but it was not clear exactly how many branches had been affected.

A spokesman for Russian Post, a state-owned monopoly, said no computers were infected, but some terminals were temporarily switched off as a precaution. “The virus attack did not touch Russian Post, all systems are working and stable,” he said.

Other institutions in Russia have said they were infected by the virus, highlighting Moscow’s readiness to show it too is a frequent victim of cyber crime in the face of allegations from the United States and Europe of state-sponsored hacking.

The Interior Ministry, mobile operator MegaFon (MFON.MM) and state rail monopoly Russian Railways all reported infections, with employees locked out of their computers and the creators of the virus demanding ransoms of $300 to $600.

The Russian central bank said on Friday the virus had also compromised some Russian banks in isolated cases.

That the infected post office terminals ran on Windows XP - which Microsoft stopped supporting in 2014 - points to the widespread use of outdated software in Russia, which experts say left the country disproportionately vulnerable to the attack.

Of 300,000 computers infected worldwide, 20 percent were in Russia, according to an initial estimate by cybersecurity researchers last week.

Globally, few ransoms have been paid after many victims found they could restore their systems from backups.

The post office outages also illustrate what investigators say is a common misconception about Wannacry: infected computers are more likely to be part of antiquated systems not deemed important enough to update with the latest security patches, rather than machines integral to the company’s core business.

“Many companies in Russia use outdated unpatched systems and older anti-malware solutions,” said Nikolay Grebennikov, vice president for R&D at data protection company Acronis. “In big companies upgrades are hard to perform and avoided because of budget and scale.”

SCRUTINY

Russia’s relationship to cyber crime is under intense scrutiny after U.S. intelligence officials alleged that Russian hackers had tried to help Republican Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency by hacking Democratic Party servers. Moscow has denied the allegations.

Investigators are yet to track down Wannacry’s criminal authors, saying they likely used a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and leaked online in April.

It has not previously been reported that the Russian postal service, which employs more than 350,000 people, had been hit by the virus.

“The head guys rang on Thursday and said we had to turn off the terminals immediately. They said this extortion virus had infected them,” a worker at a branch in northwest Moscow said, declining to be identified discussing internal company matters.

“They rang again yesterday and said we could turn them back on. We did that, but you can see they still don’t work.”

Employees at a second post office confirmed the electronic queuing system was broken but said they did not know why.

Two sources at Russian Railways said the company had suffered a “huge” cyber attack and a small number of computers were infected without damaging any important files.

The extent of the damage had been limited, one of the sources said, because a lot of computers were turned off at the end of the working week. “We were lucky it was a Friday night,” he said.

Megafon, which is Russia’s second biggest mobile operator, declined to comment on how the virus had got into its system.

It said the virus had caused a temporary outage of its customer support services. “Our sales points suffered worst of all because Windows, which had the exploited vulnerability, is more widely used in retail,” a company statement said.

COMPUTER PIRACY

The frequent use of pirated software in Russia also helped spread the Wannacry infection, investigators said, as unlicensed products do not receive security updates.

Reuters has found no evidence any of Russian companies infected with the Wannacry virus were using unlicensed software.

But computer piracy is a long-standing issue for technology companies in Russia, one which has as become increasingly acute as the country’s economic slump and falling earnings make licensed products prohibitively expensive.

A woman walks past a branch of Russian Post in Moscow, Russia, May 24, 2017. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Data compiled by the BSA Software Alliance trade group shows 64 percent of software products in Russia were pirated in 2015 - a black market industry worth $1.3 billion - compared to a global average of 39 percent.

“Piracy is still wide spread in Russia, especially if we are talking about home users,” Grebennikov said. “This is because of poverty. If an operating system costs say 500 rubles, people would buy it.”

Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system currently costs around 8,000 rubles ($140.92) in Russia, around a fifth of the average monthly wage of 39,000 rubles. Online, the same product can be illegally downloaded for free.
Stanley “Boom” Williams decided to enter the 2017 NFL Draft after a productive three year career at Kentucky. Williams rushed for 1,170-yards and seven touchdowns in the 2016 season. He boasted an impressive 6.8 yards per carry and posed a threat to hit a home run every time he touched the ball.

Now, he’s joining the Bengals as an undrafted free agent after going undrafted this weekend.

Williams could be an effective back in the league if he’s able to stay healthy. At 5’7”, 190 pounds, Williams has always had issues with durability. His small stature also presents issues when pass-blocking and running between the tackles. However, Williams’ athleticism and ability to break off the big run makes him deserving of a chance to make the roster in Cincinnati.

The Bengals selection of Joe Mixon was a big addition, but there’s still uncertainty in regards to when Giovanni Bernard will return from his ACL injury. On top of that, Jeremy Hill’s production has dropped off since his rookie season. Therefore, there is a legitimate opportunity for Williams sneak his way into a roster spot. If Williams can prove to be durable, he has the ability to be a productive change of pace back for the Bengals.
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F ancy cars have always been an important element in rap music. You can find many articles online talking about what cars rappers love the most, but they all lack the research, running their mouth with no backing evidence. Is rappers’ preferred ride Cadillac, Mercedes, Bentley, or Ferrari? Let’s turn to data science to settle this debate once and for all. By analyzing all lyrics on Rap Genius , we’ll see which rides have been celebrated the most. Check the results...

Digging deeper to look at songs released throughout the years, the following is a time series analysis to see which makes have gained popularity and which have lost favor. An interesting correlation here is a dip for some of the most frequently mentioned luxury car makes around 2008, 2009 financial crisis. Shout out to Johnny McNulty at Someecards who have some interesting analysis around the trend’s correlation with economy here .

As seen from the chart, the most frequently mentioned car make is Mercedes Benz. Rappers love to rap about their benzes, but they rarely mention what models. If we get down to the specific model that’s most frequently mentioned, there’s no debate — it’s the Chevy Impala, most specifically the ’64 year model.

The chart above is an overall view. We’ll break it into several categories in the following:

Top 3 Makes

There were more mentions of Cadillac relative to Chevrolet between 1997 to 2006, but the trend inverted since 2007. Benz managed to stay on top most of the time, except between 2004 and 2007 where it was briefly surpassed by Cadillac.

Makes Gaining Popularity Over Time

The following are makes that have been on an upward trend over the years. Worth noting that Porsche, Ferrari, Maybach, and Bugatti peaked around 2012/2013 but have declined since.

Makes Losing Popularity Over Time

The following are makes that have declined or maintain the same level of mentions in rap songs over time. Due to the increase in rap songs released over the years, these are makes that are losing popularity amongst the artists. Jeep and Hummer serve similar functions and have very similar levels of mentions across time. Lexus was extremely popular around 1998, but has since lost steam.

Endorsements

Some major car companies benefit from rappers as endorsers, a task the rappers often take on voluntarily. But who is doing the best job as pitchman? Seeing song mentions as a form of endorsement, the following is an analysis of the top endorsers.

Turns out The Game dominates the car endorsement game. The Compton artist wins the category hands down for seven of the major car makes, having logged more automobile mentions than any other rapper. The following are The Game’s most-endorsed cars, in order of frequency:

Chevrolet Impala

Chevrolet Impala

Chevy mentioned in 93 of The Game’s songs, 82 of them mention Impala. His love for Impala is expressed in his song “In My 64.”
Refined mansion tax proposal being fed into debate on abolishing 50p tax rate for those earning more than £150,000

The Liberal Democrats are pushing for the eventual disbanding of the 50p rate of tax to see the implementation of a new land tax levied on properties above £1m.

In a refinement of their controversial mansion tax policy launched at their party conference two years ago, the Lib Dems now believe there is an argument for levying capital gains tax on any money made from the sale of a property after the first £1m.

The Lib Dem idea is being fed into the debate surrounding how to bring down the 50p rate for those earning more than £150,000. A review into the rate is expected to confirm suspicions it does not bring in much revenue but serves to deter international business from locating in the UK at a time when the chancellor is seeking to encourage inward investment and spur growth.

Over the weekend, George Osborne gave his clearest sign that the top rate would come down.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Osborne said there was "not much point" in having a tax that raised scant funds but that served to drive businesses out of Britain.

Osborne said: "I've said with the 50p rate I don't see that as a lasting tax rate for Britain because it's very uncompetitive internationally, and people frankly can move. What is it actually raising? It's only been in operation for a year, this tax, put in place by the last government."

Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem Treasury chief secretary, has said supporters of abolishing the 50p rate are living in "cloud cuckoo land". Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary, has said if it goes it must be replaced by another imposition on the wealthy – possibly a mansion tax which would hit owners of the highest-value properties.
CHICAGO (STMW) — Three people were killed and at least 13 others wounded in shootings across the city between Friday evening and Monday morning.

The latest fatal shooting happened Sunday morning in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

About 11:25 a.m., officers responding to a call of a person on the ground in the 6500 block of South Fairfield found 18-year-old Dennis Bradford III unresponsive with gunshot wounds to the head and wrist, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Bradford, of the the 6200 block of South Mozart, was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:43 a.m., authorities said.

Earlier Sunday, a 28-year-old man died after being dropped off at a Far South Side hospital with a gunshot wound to the hip, police said.

He showed up at Roseland Community Hospital, 45 W. 111th St., shortly before 5 a.m. and later was pronounced dead, police said. His name has not been released.

Authorities are trying to determine where the shooting happened. Area South detectives are handling the homicide investigation.

The weekend’s first fatal shooting happened Friday evening in West Elsdon on the Southwest Side.

Lauren Membreno, 23, was in the front seat of a vehicle parked in the 5500 block of South Karlov about 7 p.m. when another vehicle pulled up and someone inside opened fire, authorities said.

Membreno — who wasn’t the intended target — was shot in the head and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 5:37 p.m. Saturday. She lived in the 5300 block of South Spaulding, authorities said.

A police source said her boyfriend, who was sitting in the driver seat, was thought to have been the target.

The most recent nonfatal shooting happened early Monday in the West Side Austin neighborhood.

A 25-year-old man was a passenger in a vehicle going westbound in the 5300 block of West Chicago about 12:30 a.m. when he heard gunfire and realized he’d been shot in the right foot. He was driven to West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, where his condition was stabilized, police said.

Four people were wounded during a two-hour spate of gunfire Sunday night.

About 10 p.m., a 14-year-old boy was shot in the hand in the Belmont Central neighborhood on the Northwest Side. He and two other people were walking in the 5700 block of West Belden when a gunman opened fire. The boy was taken to West Suburban Medical Center and transferred to Lurie Children’s Hospital, where his condition was stabilized, police said. Detectives were questioning a person of interest in the shooting Monday morning.

Twenty minutes earlier, a 25-year-old man was outside in Austin’s 4800 block of West Monroe about 9:40 p.m. when a gray car drove by and someone inside fired shots, striking the man in the right arm. He took himself to West Suburban Medical Center, where his condition was stabilized, police said.

About an hour earlier, a 43-year-old man was shot in both legs and the hand in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. The shooting happened at 8:50 p.m. in the 9200 block of South Cottage Grove and he was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where his condition was stabilized, police said. The circumstances of the shooting were unknown.

At 8:05 p.m., a bullet grazed the right shoulder of a man who heard shots while walking in the 8300 block of South Houston in the South Chicago neighborhood. He declined medical treatment.

At least eight more people were wounded in separate shootings between 8:30 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Monday.

(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2016. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
SAN FRANCISCO – A new edition of an international space exploration planning document to be released early next year will offer an updated plan for human missions to the moon and Mars, emphasizing the role that NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway could play.

In January, NASA and 14 international space agencies plan to publish their common goals for exploration, including an extended presence in low Earth orbit, a cislunar habitat, moon missions and eventual excursions to Mars, in an updated Global Exploration Roadmap being drafted by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG).

Since NASA’s first flight of its heavy-lift Space Launch System with an Orion capsule is scheduled for as soon as late 2019, it’s time to decide “what we are going to do with these vehicles,” Kathy Laurini, NASA senior adviser for exploration and space operations, said during a Global Exploration Roadmap community workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center Nov. 29. “We’ve been engaged with our international partners on how we’ll use these to explore together.”

ISECG, a voluntary organization whose members share non-binding plans and objectives, published its last Global Exploration Roadmap in 2013. ISECG members will use the new Roadmap to show domestic policymakers and funding agencies how specific programs will contribute to global endeavors, said Laurini, who also serves as ISECG chair.

NASA, for example, will point to the roadmap as it seeks funding and authorization for future SLS and Orion missions. NASA officials acknowledged, though, that the agency is waiting for confirmation of a new administrator and direction from the National Space Council. Future exploration plans will become clearer when the Trump Administration and Congress weigh in on the agency’s budget, said Mark Geyer, acting deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Human Explorations and Operations Mission Directorate.

NASA also is seeking domestic and international support for its conceptual Deep Space Gateway. “We see an orbital platform as playing a vital and synergistic role with anything you do on the surface,” said John Guidi, NASA advanced exploration systems deputy director. For instance, reusable landers could move astronauts to the Deep Space Gateway, which could also serve as a jumping off point for exploration of near Earth asteroids and Mars. “Cislunar orbit is the sweet spot. It’s close enough to Earth and the moon but out of the gravity wells,” Guidi said.

In the new Roadmap, ISECG will emphasize a shared commitment in the next 10 to 15 years to continue operations in low Earth orbit, where space agencies can conduct microgravity research and test life support systems for future exploration missions. Some of that work, though, may occur in new public or private space stations rather than the International Space Station.

The ISS partners have agreed to keep funding the space station through 2024. To date, NASA and its international partners have been able to maintain the aging space station with spare parts. However, older components, including the solar arrays, will need to be replaced by the end of the 2020s, said Robyn Gatens, deputy director of NASA’s ISS Division. Even if the ISS partners do not make commitments to support it beyond 2024, the transition from space station to another platform should be gradual, Gatens added.

The new Roadmap lays out a three-phase plan. The starting point, Phase 0, is ongoing research and testing on ISS. During Phase 1 in the 2020s, international agencies would explore the lunar vicinity. In that timeframe, NASA would work with partners to construct the Deep Space Gateway, a crewed outpost with less than 10 percent of the habitable volume of ISS, and agencies would send robotic missions to the lunar surface and prepare for human lunar exploration. By Phase 2 in the 2030s, agencies would send exploration missions to orbit Mars.

Under current budget projections, NASA could launch one crewed SLS/Orion flight per year, with each Orion spending approximately 40 days at the Deep Space Gateway, Guidi said. Four SLS missions in the 2020s could assemble elements of the Deep Space Gateway, including its power and propulsion bus, habitat, logistics module and airlock, Guidi said.

ISECG shared its draft Roadmap to encourage companies, government agencies and academic organizations to offer comments. “The Deep Space Gateway is a concept for government-led exploration endeavors,” Laurini said. “It is a commitment to being there. And because we are there, it will offer opportunities for commercial entities.”

Those commercial opportunities, ISECG partners believe, include playing key roles in delivering cargo to the Deep Space Gateway, relaying communications from the lunar surface, sending instruments to the surface of the moon to support government investigations of volatile organic compounds and transporting cargo to the moon to support crews spending time there.
Introduction

On Feb. 1, 2017, the United States led Coalition was accused by local activists and journalists that it had bombed the headquarters of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) located in the Carlton Hotel in the city of Idlib, Syria. Photos and videos allegedly showing the bombed headquarters quickly emerged online. This open source investigation aims to verify the various claims made surrounding this incident.

Content

Summary

Claims

Methodology

Open Sources

Findings

Summary

Based on open source research, it can be confirmed that the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) utilised the Carlton Hotel in Idlib city as a headquarters. It can also be confirmed that the Carlton Hotel was recently severely damaged. The US-led Coalition was accused of conducting an airstrike on the building in the early morning of Feb. 1, killing one SARC member, but the Coalition denies any involvement. Neither the exact date of the attack nor the perpetrator can be established based on open sources. What can be observed, however, is that a bomb appears to have pierced at least four floors before detonating.

Claims

The following claims are circulating on social media:

One or more airstrikes conducted by the US-led Coalition destroyed a part of the Carlton Hotel in Idlib city. The Carlton Hotel was used by the SARC as headquarters.

This open source investigation aims to verify those claims by answering the following questions:

Is there a Carlton Hotel in Idlib city? Was the Carlton Hotel in Idlib was used by the SARC as headquarters? Was the Carlton Hotel in Idlib was bombed? If so, was it bombed by the US(-led Coalition)?

Methodology

The investigation uses only openly available sources on the Internet. In addition, a request to comment on this incident and the accusation was sent to the Coalition’s public affairs office.

Sources were found by, for example, searches on social media using certain keywords of internet. One can think of a search on ‘Red Crescent Idlib’ in Arabic: “الهلال الأحمرادلب‎‎”. These social media include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. After the exact location of the incident was found, the coordinates have been used to conduct location-based searches in a 2-km radius on those same social networks. Reference photos have been found via geotagged pictures on Panoramio. All YouTube videos have been checked for the date and potential other, earlier uploads using Amnesty International’s YouTube Data Viewer, and images Google’s reverse image search has been used to see if the photos were not posted before the date of the attack. Bellingcat has published several how-to guides to for beginning or advanced open source investigations. All sources but one has geolocated.

Open Sources

These are the main open sources found and used outside of the use of freely available mapping data and satellite imagery via Wikimapia, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Bing Maps. Pro-opposition media, local activists and organisations have shared videos and photos showing the same severely damaged building, and large number of them accuse the Coalition for conducting the airstrikes:

Al-Baladi News also published a video showing SARC employees in a ravaged building [link/archived], and Al Jazeera Arabic also sent a reporter to the scene who said it is not clear who conducted the airstrike [link/archived].

Findings

1. Is there a Carlton Hotel in Idlib city?

Yes, based on open sources it can be confirmed that there is a Carlton Hotel in Idlib city.

First of all, the hotel (Arabic: فندق كارلتون) is listed as a four-star hotel on hotel booking websites (for example, hotelscombined.com [archived]) and Google Maps [archived].

The hotel is located in southern part of Idlib city, at the coordinates 35.9206001, 36.634748 (Wikimapia).

Secondly, the hotel is referred to in media, for example by esyria.net [archived] and dp-news.com [archived]. The articles are an interview with the hotel director and a news report that the hotel closed its restaurant in 2011, respectively.

Thirdly, photos that are geotagged on Panoramio, or that can be geolocated to the area, indeed show a building which bears a sign ‘Carlton Hotel’, including a logo and four stars.

2. Was the Carlton Hotel in Idlib was used by the SARC as a headquarters?

Yes, based on open sources it can be confirmed that the SARC used the Carlton Hotel in Idlib as a headquarters.

First of all, nearly forty SARC members of the Idlib branch posed with four ambulances in front of the Carlton Hotel in a picture uploaded to their Facebook page on Jan. 17, 2017. The same Facebook page also reported the attack which destroyed ‘most of [their] administrative offices but didn’t injure humans’ [link/archived]. Photos posted in Feb. 2016 shows that the Carlton Hotel was already used by SARC at that time [photo 1: link/archived; photo 2: link/archived; photo 3: link/archived; photo 4: link/archived]. Members of the SARC team declared to the Website for the Syrian Revolution that the building does not contain any headquarters of military factions.

Secondly, the official Twitter account of the delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria condemned the bombing, “a clear violation of [international humanitarian law”, hours after the attacked reportedly happened. This tweet thus suggests that the ICRC Syria is aware that there is an aid branch operating in the destroyed location, which brings us to the next point: Was the Carlton Hotel in Idlib indeed bombed?

3. Was the Carlton Hotel in Idlib was bombed? If so, was it bombed by the US-led Coalition?

Based on open sources, it can be established that the west wing of the Carlton Hotel has been severely damaged. Below are photos and screengrabs from videos showing that damage.

All footage taken outside of the building can be geolocated to the immediate surrounding of the Carlton Hotel. The map below shows all locations from where photos or videos of the ravaged hotel were taken.

In a news report [archived], MICRO SYRIA claims that the Carlton Hotel, which houses the Red Crescent, was targeted by unknown aircraft at three ‘o clock at night of February 1, 2017. A reconnaissance aircraft was seen in the sky an hour before the airstrike happened, media activist Ammar al-Adalba told Website for the Syrian Revolution. He said that it was most likely an airplane from the Coalition that struck the SARC headquarters, resulting in destruction and fire inside the building.

As there is no (open or commercial) satellite imagery available around the date of the alleged strike, the exact date of the destruction cannot be confirmed.

There are no obvious visual indicators, like weapon remnants, that could identify the perpetrator of the attack, or the cause of the damage. There is, however, footage of an object that appears to have pierced at least four floors of the building.

A rescue worker interviewed by Step News Agency claims that “a missile went from the roof down to the first floor.”

Some have suggested the damage at the Carlton Hotel may be due to a delay-action bomb, which is designed to explode some time after impact (think of a bunker buster, for example). Building upon that claim, it has been suggested that it must have been either the Coalition or the Russian Air Force that conducted the bombing; the Syrian Arab Air Force (SyAAF) is believed to be incapable of delivering such bombs during night time. However, as Tom Cooper detailed in this War Is Boring piece, may well have the capacity to operate at night.

There is currently no visual evidence to confirm the use of a delay-action bomb, so the above remains speculation.

In reply to a request of information, the Coalition’s public affairs office e-mailed Bellingcat that “the Coalition did not conduct airstrikes in Idlib on Feb. 1, 2017.”

With regards to injuries and casualties, the estimates by the local sources range from nine to eleven individuals that were injured.

At least one ambulance has also been severely damaged in the incident, photos and videos show.

Update: In a previous version, the article stated that an e-mail was sent to US Central Command. This is not correct, the e-mail was sent to the US-led Coalition. The reply came from the Coalition’s press desk, which is was an e-mail-address associated with the US military.

Update: An earlier version of this hotel incorrectly mentioned that the Ghreir family was killed in this incident. That is not correct, the Ghreir family was indeed confirmed by SARC as being killed in Idlib, but in a separate incident.
Winter isn't done with us yet.

Ottawa can expect another 10 to 15 centimetres of snow Wednesday as a storm system moves through the United States today.

Watch CBC Ottawa Go to Ian Black's weather page and follow his forecasts on TV on CBC News Ottawa starting at 5.

Environment Canada has issued a special weather statement for much of Ontario, as a mixture of rain and snow is expected along Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and snow is expected further north and east.

The advisory comes as a low pressure system passed over Arkansas this morning and moved northeast to Illinois this afternoon. The system is expected to move to northern Ohio by Wednesday morning.

As much as 10 to 15 cm of snow is possible Wednesday for Ottawa and eastern Ontario, the weather agency estimated.

School bus cancellations Will your bus be running Wednesday morning? Go to our school bus page for the latest updates.

"Driving conditions are expected to deteriorate and may become hazardous due to rapidly accumulating snow on untreated roads and low visibility in heavy snow," the weather agency said.

The snow is more likely to cause problems for commuters later in the day Wednesday, according to CBC Ottawa climatologist Ian Black.

"Your morning commute will be better than your drive home," said Black. "It is also going to be snowing into a good portion of Thursday, but the worst tomorrow will be later in the day."

The weather agency said it will issue snowfall warnings should estimates change and more than 15 cm is expected in a 12-hour period.
“It is something I have got used to since 9/11. From being called Osama Bin Laden to Paki-terrorist I have heard it all,” Zab Mustefa, a British Muslim journalist, who specialises in women's rights and culture, tells me.

Since the terrorist attacks on New York City that brought down the twin towers, it seems life has not been the same for Muslims that live in the western world. Suddenly there was a spotlight shone on Islam when most non-Muslims had barely given it a second thought before.

“Either you’re with us. Or you’re with the terrorists,” announced the then president of the USA George W Bush in a sombre tone at a press conference following the attacks.

And many people decided that all Muslims were against 'us'. Everything was under scrutiny. Their style of dress, their beliefs, their way of life. People that had never even read the Qu’ran believed they had more knowledge than Islamic scholars.

“Look at the way they treat their women!” is a statement that I often hear. “Forcing them to cover up. Not allowing them to go out alone and controlling everything that they do.”

“What about Saudi Arabia? They don’t even let women drive!”

But it's a false perception.

I am not denying that there are countries where the predominant religion is Islam where women are treated badly. But patriarchy is the problem, not Islam. In Islam, the rights of women were recognised much earlier than they were in the West.

In any case, we in the UK don’t come up smelling of roses when we examine the inequality between the sexes either. A UN human rights inspector recently declared the sexism in the UK to be more ‘pervasive’ and ‘in your face’ than any country she has ever visited and that included some Muslim countries.

What I find totally abhorrent is the fact that since concern for Muslim women is so often cited, how come they are the targets of so much abuse in today’s society?

'Anti-Muslim hate'

A report from the University of Birmingham, 'Maybe we are hated: The experience and impact of anti-Muslim hate on British Muslim women', says Muslim women are repeated victims of anit-Muslim hate. It cites verified figures from Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), which show attacks on Muslim women account for 58 per cent of all incidents reported to it. Of those, 80 per cent were visually identifiable (wearing hijab, niqab, or other clothing associated with Islam).

I have witnessed some of it first hand. It ranges from petty microaggressions to full blown physical attacks. I was told of a pregnant Muslim woman who was pushed down and stomped on last week. She was too scared to go to the police.

“Racist rhetoric from the likes of the EDL and Ukip is definitely making things worse,” Zab continues. “I am definitely feeling more hatred towards Muslims as a result. I went to the police but they failed to investigate, let alone take any action. This was the point, that an EDL supporter was threatening to come and ‘teach’ me a lesson simply because I am a Muslim woman. I have been called many things such as hummus eating, camel shagging, Paki Muslim slut. No joke.”

One lady that preferred to remain anonymous told me: “I was in London, and on the Tube and a group of three well dressed white men were sitting opposite me. One was looking at me singing 'Kill them all. Kill them.' His friend pointed out that I could hear him. The guy singing said ‘I don't give a f**k.’

"On the same day a man in a business suit told me to ‘f**k off’. I was with a white male friend at the time. We both stopped in our tracks and the white guy who swore turned around, pointed at me and said, ‘yeah you!’

"I feel unsafe, my husband told me not to go into London, both of us were worried that I may be attacked or have my hijab pulled etc. He was also really angry with me when I didn't tell the police, as he said they ought to know that Muslim women are being harassed. I was just shocked because it wasn't the expected type that you see on EDL marches. It was ‘educated’ people.”

Akeela lives in North West London but when she lived in Hull she often felt that she had to remove her hijab for her own safety. A lot of women have had their hijabs pulled off. She said that she has suffered a full range of abuse from the ‘v sign’ to being called a ‘Muslim bastard’. She also receives a steady stream of Islamophobic tweets.

What's going on?

Henna suggests a reason for these attacks: “It seems to me this flavour of violence is almost accepted as a 'cruel to be kind' compliment to integration to the British way of life, like bullying fat people to help them get healthier. I'm a South Asian looking woman, not obviously Muslim, I don't wear a hijab or any symbols. I'd consider myself culturally Islamicate or a secular Muslim. The fact that I get Islamophobic street harassment seems in itself a testament to the magnitude of the problem and degree of perpetrators' ignorance.

"In my experience it has been constant since 9/11 - at school I had my white friends rounding on me asking me why, by being a Muslim I supported OBL [Osama bin Laden]. To which I had to provide some self-denying murmuring excuse in order to quell their fears even though I was barely conscious of Islam beyond using fasting as an excuse to avoid PE.

"I've had a man pull up his Transit van in the street to scream ‘Afghan terrorist’. In Trafalgar Square, I had a guy walk in front of me to obstruct my path and then follow me down the street asking why ‘my people’ wanted to destroy the West and telling me I needed to go home. No one in the crowded square felt compelled to intervene.

"It’s the constant and wearing rhetoric that is most difficult. Always having to be on the backfoot - apologetic - because otherwise you're on Team Evil. And that's now prevalent in even progressive circles, certainly with people I know as friends.”

Her friend Annabel agrees, saying: “My Muslim identity would be defined very similarly to Henna's, except non-Muslim people rarely assume I'm a Muslim. This puts them in a supposedly safe space for making bigoted comments [like:]

'And obviously when I got on the plane I checked no-one looked like a terrorist.’

‘They could have anything under those veils. I'm not gonna get killed in the name of political correctness.’

"A guy I know wrote as his Facebook status that he changed Tube carriage when a bearded man was reading a book written in Arabic script and speaking under his voice.

"I should stress that it's not even solely white British people who make these comments - it's also fellow ethnic minorities, though from my experience the really angry rhetoric has come from white British people. Islamophobia is rampant - I must deal with multiple comments every week. It now exists as a social norm that provides a clear context for verbal or physical attacks on Muslims because racists create safe spaces for themselves to validate their own racism - which I see on a near daily basis.”

Sadly with so much Islamophobic rhetoric being used, in some cases by politicians looking to score points by feeding people’s fears, this problem may get even worse. We should be ashamed to live in a society that treats people this way on a daily basis.
The Ice Light is “a portable, dimmable, daylight balanced, continuous LED light source with a built in battery” that costs $450. In this post I will show you how I made a DIY version for less than $30.

Parts Used

You’ll only need to pick up 6 things to build a DIY ice light:

Defiant 700 lumen focusing LED flashlight ($19.88 from Home Depot. Model #: HD14Q406) 24″ PVC pipe, 1.5″ diameter (~$2) 1.5″ PVC coupler (~$1) 1.5″ PVC cap (~$1) 48″ Fluorescent bulb shield (~$2. This slides over a fluorescent bulb to prevent it from shattering) Small piece of aluminum foil. (Had it in the house, because we’re civilized)

The Steps

I redesigned the PVC pipe and made it about 5″ shorter. It was too long and unwieldy. I took a little more care in marking off the space to cut out. The blue tape worked perfect to keep a straight line.

Cut the opening in the PVC pipe. This can be whatever width you want. Mine is a little less than halfway through.

Cut the flourescent shield to the same length as the pipe. Then use a utility knife to cut it longways.

Sand the inside and outside of the fluorescent shield to create a “smoked glass” look and set aside. This shows how I got the fluorescent shield to stay large enough to snugly fit into the pipe. Just a simple slit on one side and the other side slides in. Also you can see how the once clear plastic looks after sanding it:

Remove the “crown” off of the bulb end of the flashlight. You will still have the reflector cone and clear focuser inside the light.

This takes a bit of sanding for adjustment but the 1.5″ coupler almost threads perfectly onto the end of the flashlight. Sand as needed and test fit.

Push 24″ PVC into the unsanded coupler end. PVC Cement can be used if desired.

I shoved a wrinkled disc of foil in the end cap to reflect light back. Don’t make it too thick or the PVC pipe wont go in all the way.

Cut a piece of aluminum foil slightly bigger than then end of the PVC pipe, shiny side toward the flashlight. Fit it over the pipe and slide the PVC Cap about half way on. If there’s any foil sticking out, trim with utility knife. Then press Cap on fully.

This step is optional: Using the leftover flourescent shield, insert it into the PVC pipe. This will be the paint shield so black paint won’t get on the inside of the light pipe.

Place hose clamp around end of PVC coupler and snug tight. (this is only for paint purposes so it will be in place for paint and won’t scratch if you try to put it on after painting.

I used Krylon matte black spraypaint that was specific for plastics. It bonds well and only takes about 15 minutes to dry. Several thin coats will work better than one thick coat. This is after a couple coats of paint (the paint shield keeps the inside clean and white):

After its dried, its time to fit it onto the flashlight. Replace the painted fluorescent shield with the sanded white shield.

For the Coupler I used, I had to cut a small (2 cm) piece of PVC pipe to fill in the gap on the flashlight side of the coupler. The clear plastic for focusing the flashlight falls out if there’s nothing there. This is a trial and error step. It will take some trimming to get a good fit.

Once the coupler is fit and the focuser is in place, tighten the hose clamp.

That’s it. The focuser on the flashlight acts as a dimmer for the light. When its set to wide beam it is dimmer since less light is reflecting off the foil at the end. This light also has two brightness settings so it dims down pretty well.

Here’s a photo showing how dispersed the light from the DIY Ice Light is:

Here’s an unedited photo of my unimpressed wife at 1am:

Finally, here’s a video in which I demonstrate how this DIY Ice Light works:

About the author: Justin Barr is a professional photographer based in Florissant, Missouri and serving the St. Louis area. You can visit his website here.
A Wall Street sign is displayed in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

The Dow Jones industrial average hit a new all-time intraday of 18,873.6, and closed more than 200 points higher Thursday, as Wall Street fears related to Donald Trump's election win gave way to hopes that the president-elect's policies could boost the economy, CNBC reported.

The S&P 500 gyrated between gains and losses, holding about 0.4 percent higher, with financials rising 4 percent to lead advancers.

The dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency's performance against a basket of currencies, rose 0.29 percent Thursday, with the euro near $1.089 percent. The safe-haven yen fell more than 1 percent versus the greenback, trading around 106.80.

It marked the second day of what investors have dubbed the "Trump Bounce."
As President Barack Obama begins his second term, democratically returned to office by a majority of Americans who seem to buy what he is selling, it would profit us to pause a moment and examine the discrepancies between the vision he expounded in his inaugural address and the economic reality that surrounds us. This leads to a pivotal question: What, exactly, is the underlying purpose of Obamanomics, and how would we know?

Logic offers two choices. We can take the president at his word, and then ask why the promised economic recovery, growth, prosperity, and equality, haven’t arrived yet. Or we can ascribe darker motives to the policies that have brought our country to the brink of ruin. That raises the horrifying possibility—unlikely as it might sound—that precipitating an existential crisis in order to bring about radical change has been Obama’s underlying agenda all along.

If we take the high road and accept Obama at his word, as most Americans have, we are led to three alternatives. The first is that the Keynesian nostrums applied to goose the economy—bailouts, stimulus spending, money printing, artificial suppression of interest rates, government “investments” in all manner of money-losing schemes, and a rapid expansion of the welfare state, all with the goal of increasing “aggregate demand”—are working fine. All we need is to give Washington a bit more time, a little more spending leeway, and a few more tax dollars extracted from those who can most afford it, and all will be well.

The second possibility is that the president’s macroeconomic policies are not working because they are too modest. Therefore, we must let Washington double down and play an even larger role in the economy, or all will be lost. Notables such as The New York Times’ Paul Krugman imply that this is the only way to restore prosperity, and that the one thing holding us back is stingy Republican recalcitrance.

The third possibility is that, noble intentions aside, the Keynesian plan is not working, cannot work, never has worked, and never will work. This implies we need to change course if we want to revive our struggling economy and restore our government to solvency.

The political battle being fought in Washington ranges largely across these three possibilities. But suppose none of them represent reality. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the series of deeper and deeper crises the nation is experiencing are not unintended consequences of failed policies but were the primary goal all along.

Yes, this requires taking a trip into the right-wing fever swamps occupied by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But these days, it seems that only in such decidedly unfashionable neighborhoods are government policies measured not by their stated intentions but by results. Examining the dismal results of the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression through such jaundiced eyes, we come to two alternatives.

The first is that our government is controlled by a group of self-serving, hopeless incompetents locked in mortal gridlock with a rival political party also comprised of self-serving, hopeless incompetents. This is the easiest hypothesis to defend, and the most likely, which makes it safe ground for critics and pundits.

But suppose, just for a moment, that Obama is as brilliant as his supporters say he is. Suppose he knows exactly what he is doing and is not the least bit surprised by the outcome. Suppose he is methodically executing the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy—which, if it is not succeeding in its objective of totally remaking America, you sure couldn’t tell by looking at the results.

Yes, I know, much ink has been spilled over this theory, the best being an American Thinker article from 2008, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. It’s worth revisiting, now that we have had a whole term to watch Obama in action.

The idea that a new age of social justice and redistributive equality can be brought about by overloading government systems until they collapse, precipitating a populist demand for a wholesale rejection of free market capitalism, was first espoused by two Columbia University professors in the 1960s. The idea gained currency in radical circles that included a diverse cast of characters, many of whom make cameo appearance in the life and education of our president and read like a who’s who of the American radical left, including Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Frank Marshall Davis, George Wiley, Saul Alinsky, Wade Rathke, ACORN, and George Soros, among others.

Yes, it is possible that Barack Obama has rejected all the radical ideas he marinated in as a young man, just as he claims to have rejected the vitriolic anti-Americanism of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in whose pews he sat for years and whose sermons inspired Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope.

Yes, of course, it is possible that all of the formative influences that made our president who he is are irrelevant to the policies he is enacting now, just as it possible that we are living through a bad dream and that in the morning we will awaken refreshed in a country that is not in the process of destroying itself.

Bill Frezza is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a Boston-based venture capitalist. You can find all of his columns, TV, and radio interviews here. If you would like to have his columns delivered to you by email, click here or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza. The cartoon is courtesy of TobyToons.
Ghazala Khan, the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier of Muslim faith, is responding to Donald Trump’s speculation that she didn’t speak at last week’s Democratic convention due to her religion.

“I can say that my religion or my family or my culture never stopped me saying whatever I want to say,” Khan said in an interview with CNN’s “New Day.” “And my husband is very supportive of me in these things that I have all the rights as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter.”

After Khan and her husband, Khizr, took the stage at the Democratic National Convention last week to deliver an emotional speech denouncing Trump’s proposed Muslim immigration ban, the GOP presidential candidate suggested that Mrs. Khan wasn’t allowed to speak because of her Islamic religion.

Also Read: 'The Simpsons' Derides Donald Trump, Theorizes Dog Toupée (Video)

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said.

The Republican candidate received backlash for his comments, notably from Mrs. Khan.

“I have done very well saying my mind out, but that time was different. And anybody can see it was different that time when I was standing there in front of America,” Khan said.

Also Read: Ann Coulter Hammered by Conservatives for Smearing US War Hero's Dad as 'Angry Muslim'

The Khans’ son, Army Capt. Humayun, had served in Iraq and died during a suicide car bombing. They said Trump’s ban would have prevented their son from serving his country.
And yet no one knows whether women will show up for Ms. Sandberg’s revolution, a top-down affair propelled by a fortune worth hundreds of millions on paper, or whether the social media executive can form a women’s network of her own. Only a single test “Lean In Circle” exists. With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at the foundation offices of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.

Even her advisers acknowledge the awkwardness of a woman with double Harvard degrees, dual stock riches (from Facebook and Google, where she also worked), a 9,000-square-foot house and a small army of household help urging less fortunate women to look inward and work harder. Will more earthbound women, struggling with cash flow and child care, embrace the advice of a Silicon Valley executive whose book acknowledgments include thanks to her wealth adviser andOprah Winfrey?

“I don’t think anyone has ever tried to do this from anywhere even close to her perch,” said Debora L. Spar, president of Barnard College, who invited Ms. Sandberg to deliver a May 2011 commencement address about gender in the workplace that caught fire online. (Ms. Sandberg, who will grant her first book interview to the CBS program “60 Minutes,” declined to comment for this article.)

Despite decades of efforts, and some visible exceptions, the number of top women leaders in many fields remains stubbornly low: for example, 21 of the current Fortune 500 chief executives are women. In her book, to be published by Knopf, Ms. Sandberg argues that is because women face invisible, even subconscious, barriers in the workplace, and not just from bosses. In her view, women are also sabotaging themselves. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes, and the result is that “men still run the world.”

Ms. Sandberg wants to take women through a collective self-awareness exercise. In her book, she urges them to absorb the social science showing they are judged more harshly and paid less than men; resist slowing down in mere anticipation of having children; insist that their husbands split housework equally; draft short- and long-term career plans; and join a “Lean In Circle,” which is half business school and half book club.
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

Dec. 22, 2016, 2:19 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 22, 2016, 5:08 PM GMT By Carrie Dann and Andrea Mitchell

Donald Trump is calling on the Obama administration to veto a now-delayed U.N. resolution regarding Israeli settlements, weighing in on one of the most significant pressure points in U.S. foreign policy just weeks before President Barack Obama leaves office.

The draft resolution, circulated by Egypt on Wednesday night and originally slated for a vote Thursday, demands that Israel cease all settlement building in the West Bank, and it declares that existing settlements have "no legal validity."

But the vote, originally scheduled for 3pm ET today, has been delayed under intense pressure from Israel.

In a statement on Twitter and Facebook early Thursday, Trump called on Obama to veto the measure, saying the resolution "puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis."

"As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations," he said.

Trump's statement comes hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also urged the U.S. to veto the resolution, calling it "anti-Israel."

The resolution would need nine affirmative votes and no vetoes by the United States or any of the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in order to be adopted.

But several diplomatic sources tell NBC NEWS that the outgoing Obama administration was planning to abstain - going against both Netanyahu and Trump.

The White House has been trying to lay down markers against Trump on the Middle East - especially since the president-elect nominated hardliner and pro-settlement advocate David Friedman to be his Ambassador to Israel.

Friedman and Ivanka Trump's father in law - Charles Kushner - co-founded the Bet El foundation, which supports the most radical of the settlers.

At a DC conference two weeks ago, Friedman compared members of "J Street," prominent American Jewish leaders who support a two-state solution, to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in concentration camps.

Friedman's nomination requires confirmation by the Senate.
New York Red Bulls Homegrown midfielder Tyler Adams earned a start for the United States Under-18 National Team yesterday in a 4-0 win over a youth side from Chivas Guadalajara.

Adams joined the U.S. U-18s over the weekend for camp in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The U.S. U-18s will face two other club sides based in Guadalajara, Club Universidad and Atlas Futbol Club, over the next week.

Adams, a native of Wappinger’s Falls, N.Y., joined the Red Bulls youth system through the Regional Development School program, and then advanced through the academy system before signing his first professional contract with New York Red Bulls II in 2015. Adams joined the New York Red Bulls first team on an MLS Homegrown contract prior to the 2016 season. The midfielder made his MLS debut in April against San Jose.

Adams has represented the United States at a number of youth international levels, including time with the U.S. U-17 residency program, and as part of the 2015 FIFA Under-17 World Cup roster. ​

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The eight World Cup second round matches are spread over the course of four days. Here’s previews for the first half…

Uruguay v South Korea

Uruguay have been one of the most impressive teams so far – playing for and achieving a draw against France, destroying South Africa and recording a solid 1-0 victory over Mexico.

They started the competition with a 3-5-2 shape, which became more like a 5-3-2 when the wing-backs had to contain France’s wingers. They’ve since switched to a 4-3-1-2 with Diego Forlan playing behind the main two forwards, and they’ll surely play the same formation after their two wins.

South Korea’s first XI is fairly predictable. The only changes they’ve made so far have been at right-back, bringing in Oh Bum-Suk against Argentina – but he was the worst player on the pitch, so Cha Du-Ri has regained his place.

The formation will probably be 4-2-3-1. Playing Park Ji-Sung on the left-hand side might be useful to track the forward runs of Maxi Pereira, although he was fielded in the centre of the three against Argentina.

Picking up Forlan is the obvious task – with two holding midfielders, Korea will have a man tracking him, but must worry this will concede the midfield ground to Uruguay. Korea should look to play down their left-hand-side, because Uruguay’s shape tends to be slightly lopsided. Alvaro Pereira, generally a left wing-back, is playing a more central role but tends to drift back out wide, sometimes meaning Uruguay look like two banks of four minus a right-sided midfielder.

USA v Ghana

The US start as favourites, but this one might suit Ghana tactically; they will be content to sit back and soak up pressure, before hitting the US on the counter-attack. The American full-backs have appeared a little slow in recovering their position after forays forward so far in the tournament, which will be perfect for the pacey Ghana wingers.

The best course of action for the US is to put the Ghana centre-backs under as much pressure as possible early on. Ghana will probably have a 3 v 2 advantage in the centre of midfield, so more direct balls towards the strikers (with Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan supporting very close by, something they did particularly well against England) might be a better approach than playing through midfield. In particular, 20-year-old Jonathan Mensah has looked slightly nervy so far, and Jozy Altidore should be able to get at him.

The midfield battle will probably be quite reserved. Both central midfields generally sit deep rather than look to make penetrative runs, so they may play in front of each other, and create a slightly static contest.

The US will dominate possession and territory – but finding a way past Ghana’s good defence won’t be easy. This one calls for all of Bob Bradley’s tactical ability – so far he’s generally got his team playing better after half-time, but below-par first halves won’t be acceptable in the knockout stages.

Germany v England

If the two sides perform to the standard as they have so far in the competition, then England are in for a thrashing. First and foremost, their ball retention must be far better.

As with all 4-2-3-1 v 4-4-2 battles, the main task for Fabio Capello is to work out how to deal with Mesut Ozil – the match-winner for Germany against Australia and Ghana. Those two teams both allowed him far too much space between the lines, and it’s likely that Gareth Barry will have the task of tracking him, something he did well against Algeria.

This would mean a numerical disadvantage further forward in midfield, where Frank Lampard would be forced to pick up the runs of both Sami Khedira and Bastian Schweinsteiger, so it’s likely one of England’s two strikers will be given more defensive responsibility when out of possession.

The natural man to do this is Wayne Rooney, who has consistently shown his defensive awareness throughout his career, particularly when playing on the wing for Manchester United. However, Jermain Defoe has done well in recent months in this respect. Capello won’t want Rooney to become overburdened defensively, nor will he want Defoe playing a permanently withdrawn role and negating the threat of his pace in behind the German defence – so it’s likely they’ll take it in turns to pick up the Germans’ deepest holding midfielder – most likely Schweinsteiger, if fit.

Germany’s most important player in a defensive sense could be Thomas Muller, on the right-hand side. He’s impressed at Bayern Munich for his discipline, and he’ll be up against Ashley Cole, possibly England’s best performer so far. With Steven Gerrard always likely to drift in from the left, stopping Cole is vital because it gives England no natural left-sided option, and with them struggling to keep the ball in the centre of the pitch, makes their attacking threat rather basic.

German pressing will also be key – the distribution from England’s centre-backs so far has been appalling, and putting them under pressure early on will expose this even further.

This all assumes that Fabio Capello will stick with 4-4-2 – but he shows no sign of ditching the system.

Argentina v Mexico

A fascinating contest, that Mexico might be reasonably well set up for with their fluid defensive system. 2 v 1 at the back against Gonzalo Higuain, Rafael Marquez marking Lionel Messi, the two Mexican full-backs picking up the Argentina wingers – Mexico might be able to blunt Argentina’s attack.

That’s easier said than done, of course, and the all-Barcelona Marquez v Messi contest might decide things.

Pace is the key in getting past the Argentina defence, who have maintained a surprisingly high line so far. Getting the ball towards Giovani dos Santos as early as possible will surely be Mexico’s main route of attack. The probable return of Efrain Juarez (after suspension) in the centre of midfield will offer the other driving threat from midfield, and he could get the better of Javier Mascherano, who often becomes isolated in front of his defence.

In the one game Mexico have won so far, their biggest outlet has been Carlos Salcido, in the left wing-back position. Against France he constantly stormed forward, stretched the play and swung crosses in – but against Uruguay, he was muted because of the presence of either Edinson Cavani or Luis Suarez. Diego Maradona and Carlos Bilardo will look to occupy him, which means Carlos Tevez could revert to the right-sided role he played against Nigeria, rather than the left-sided one he played against South Korea.

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One family says the ratings-grabbing reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" turned their personal tragedy into a practical nightmare, leaving them with virtually nothing but a lawsuit.

The Higgins family, five kids between the ages of 14 to 21-years-old, lived in a two-bedroom apartment in California, orphaned by the deaths of their parents. Their story grabbed headlines.

Producers at the reality show took notice. The family's church first raised money to help them out. Then, “Extreme Makeover" contacted the church to arrange an interview with the young adults. Maybe they could be the next “deserving family.”

Fellow church members, the Leomiti family, offered to take the Higgins family into their home. The lawsuit claims the family's motivation wasn't to save the kids from a life of despair. It was to get a newly built nine-bedroom house, mortgage paid, a weeklong vacation and other gifts like computers, stereos and cars.

According to the suit against the Leomitis, ABC and the producers of “Extreme Makeover,” around the time the episode aired, the Higgins' moved out one-by-one as a result of a “orchestrated campaign” by the Leomiti family to get rid of them.

Mrs. Leomiti called the lawsuit “bogus” in an interview with the Abrams Report over the phone.

Charles Higgins, the oldest of the five Higgins children, and the Higgins' family attorney, Patrick Mesisca, explain their case to "The Abrams Report"

DAN ABRAMS, 'ABRAMS REPORT’ HOST: Charles, first let me start with you. Tell me first of all what happened here.

CHARLES HIGGINS, SUING 'EXTREME MAKEOVER': What happened was we were supposed to be promised a house that was to be built for everybody. My brothers and sisters were supposed to have a place to stay and now we‘re practically homeless. We‘re not together —we‘re not living together in one home. We‘re living in separate homes with each of our friends and it really hurts because I‘m 22.

I‘m trying to pull an extra load. I‘ve got a lot on my shoulders here. I‘m trying to be a good role model but it's hard when you don't really have a place to stay or a place for your younger brothers and siblings to call home, so they can wake up in the morning and they don‘t have to worry about where they are going to live or what they're going to do. It really hurts, it hurts me to see the look on their face every day because I know they worry.

ABRAMS: Patrick, were you literally thrown out of the house or is it basically that you felt that you weren‘t wanted there anymore?

HIGGINS: I'm not really going to comment on that right now because all of that is in the lawsuit. But practically what I‘m going to say is my brothers were done wrong by the show, by ABC.

ABC promised that we were going to have a home and that we were going to be together. And basically what happened was, we're not in a home. The thing is they keep airing our show almost like every other weekend and so that show, every time it gets aired, it makes money. They‘re practically making money off of us, and it's telling a story that's not really true. It's telling a story that we‘re all in a house together, we‘re happy, we're a loving family, we’re happier than we ever could be in our lives, but it's really not true.

ABRAMS: Mr. Higgins look, I'm sorry. Charles' family‘' story is obviously a heartbreaking one. It's one the led them, ABC, to act and to try and build this home to accommodate them. But I don‘t get how the program is responsible for what sounds like a family versus family squabble.

PATRICK MESISCA, HIGGINS‘ FAMILY ATTORNEY: The program, or, if you will, corporate entities that make up the program made a promise to the Higgins' family and told them that they were going to provide a home for them. The only home that was provided was an expansion of the residence in which the Leomitis live, and when all was said and done and the broadcast aired, the only benefit that the Higgins‘ children received was the right to be visitors in that home.

ABRAMS: But everyone knew that. I mean that clearly happened. By the end of the show, there was this big house built and they were all in the house. I mean you would think that if you were going to sue, that would be the time to sue as opposed to now, when it appears for some reason that you won‘t discuss, there was some sort of family versus family problem.

MESISCA: Well you have to realize that all this of has taken place since March 27 of this year. On March 27, that's when the program aired and here we are in August, a period of about four or five months and in that period of time, the Higgins children, all of them have left the Leomiti's home.

ABRAMS: But why is that ABC‘s fault? That's what I do not understand. If they want to sue the family and say, look, this was the deal. You knew what the deal was. You effectively suckered ABC into coming in here because our family was the one that made a great story. I get that. What I don‘t get is how ABC or the production company is responsible for these problems.

MESISCA: I can approach this on a number of levels. First, the Higgins have experienced a nightmare. This has been a very difficult time for them, loosing both of their parents last year. The home would have never been provided for the Leomitis in the absence of circumstances that the Higgins were involved...

ABRAMS: So you sue the Leomitis.

MESISCA: It was the Higgins who were told that a home would be provided for them, that a place would be constructed for them to live in. I think what happened was ABC and the production companies involved steered this into a joint enterprise, if you will, between the Leomitis and the Higgins', instead of just going forward and providing the Higgins with a place for them to live. There was never a disclosure made to the Higgins concerning the fact.

ABRAMS: Why is ABC obligated to build houses? I mean, they get to choose who they want to build a home for and the Higgins have this very compelling story and they're very deserving of it. But again, it seems to me that you're focusing on the wrong defendant.

MESISCA: We could argue this all day long. In California, and I think most jurisdictions, if a person responds to a need, a person is drowning in the middle of a river and you send a lifeboat out to get them, you can't turn the lifeboat around and not pick them up once you've reached the destination or worse, you can‘t just travel right past them and let them drown. ABC undertook here to provide a residence for the Higgins family.

I believe that the way this was done, the failure to give proper advice to the Higgins, as to what options were available to them, how their interest might most properly be protected.

ABRAMS: Very quickly, I got to read ABC‘s statement, “We‘re extremely proud of ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ and the positive impact the show has had on people‘s lives. While we don‘t comment on litigation, it's important to note the episode is about the rebuilding of the Leomiti family's existing home to accommodate the inclusion of the five Higgins siblings, whom the Leomitis had invited into their lives following the death of their parents.”

It sounds to me like you‘re going to have a real lawsuit against the Leomitis here. I predict that the lawsuit against ABC and the production company will be thrown out, but I am wrong in the past and more importantly, Mr. Higgins, look it sounds like you‘re a guy with a good head on his shoulders and I wish you the best of luck. You don‘t deserve any of this regardless of how the lawsuit comes out, so good luck to you.

Watch the 'Abrams Report' for more analysis and interviews on the top legal stories each weeknight at 6 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV.
US-led coalition air strikes on a jail run by the Islamic State group in eastern Syria killed at least 57 people, monitors said on Tuesday.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air strike took place on Monday at dawn, hitting a building in the town of Mayadin, south of Raqqa, that was being used as a prison.

"The strikes hit an IS jail in Mayadin at dawn on Monday, killing 42 prisoners and 15 jihadists," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Many of the dead are thought to be civilians, as well as captured rebel fighters from the Free Syrian Army.

If the toll is confirmed, it would make it one of the deadliest single incidents since the US intervened in the Syrian war in 2014.

Islamic State is believed to have moved most of its leaders to Mayadin in Syria's Euphrates Valley, southeast of the group's besieged capital Raqqa, two U.S. intelligence officials have said.

Among the operations moved to Mayadin, about 50 miles west of the Iraqi border, were its online propaganda operation and its limited command and control of attacks in Europe and elsewhere, they said.

"The Coalition conducted strikes on known ISIS command and control facilities and other ISIS infrastructure in (Mayadin), Syria, June 25 and 26," Colonel Joe Scrocca, coalition director of public affairs, said in an email.
Whenever something momentous happens in superhero comics history, mysterious figures always seem to appear and observe proceedings. In the Marvel Universe, it's the Watcher (we still have no idea why he was at the Black Panther/Storm wedding. I'm betting it was for the hors d'oeuvres). In the DC Comics Universe of the 1980s, the Monitor observed the actions of heroes and villains. In the new DC Universe ushered in by the publisher's New 52 initiative, the latest arcane observer -- and the record holder for the most appearances of a single comic book character within one month ( 53 to be precise) -- goes to the enigmatic and sensational character find of 2011, The Woman in the Red Hood.

We don't know her true name or powers yet, which definitely cuts down on her potential to become a DC Direct action figure, but she does give the attentive comics reader a seek-and-find game in the style of Where's Waldo? I've read the New 52 comics and found the Woman in the Red Hood hidden in each and every comic, with varying degrees of difficulty. To paraphrase those Scrubbing Bubbles: I found her, so you don't have to. Red-Hooded Woman appears at the end of Flash's odyssey in Flashpoint #5 in the double-page spread on page 24-25 (all page references in this article are based on the story pages, not comic pages) and tells Barry Allen he's instrumental to weaving three earths together. Barry's able to put his universe back into place...but not quite . Fittingly for the first hero of the Silver Age, Barry's created this new DC Universe, a home of heroes and villains we're still exploring. But, with Barry's usual luck, he's not only created a world in which his mother was fated to die, but in which he hasn't (yet?) become romantically involved with wife Iris. Good job, Flash...and tough breaks.

The Woman in the Red Hood won't speak again throughout the first month of the New 52, but she appears in one panel in each of DC's 52 relaunch comics , from Justice League to Voodoo .

New 52, Week Zero -

Justice League : She's in the bleachers at the Ford Titans football game starring Vic Stone (page 18, panel 2). No word on whether she was at the pre-game tailgate party. Why here rather than at the historic Batman/Green Lantern/Superman meeting? We'll find she doesn't always show up at what we think are the most "important events."

New 52, Week One:

Action Comics : She's the only calm passenger on the crashing Metropolis train (page 23, bottom panel) turned into a bullet targeting Superman.

And, could this be her in the crowd at the bottom of page 17? If so, it's the only double appearance in a single book that I've spotted in the 52 books.

Animal Man : She's present at the San Diego hospital where Animal Man defuses a hostage crisis, watching as Buddy's eyes start bleeding (page 12, bottom panel). He gets better, but that's gotta hurt.

Batgirl : Speaking of hospital rooms, she's reflected in the window as Batgirl fights Mirror (page 19, bottom panel). Is she standing on a window ledge outside? Or floating ? Needless to say, everybody's a little too busy to notice her.

Batwing : Standing alongside Batwing's Tinasha police car (page 17, panel 1). He gets into the car in the next panel and doesn't notice her. Is she invisible to those around her, or has she vanished quickly? And also, that's a rotten parking job. How's that red truck going to get out?

Detective Comics : The Woman in the Red Hood is outside Roscoe's Pharmacy when the Joker's bomb explodes (page 15, bottom left panel). Batman spies a figure with a purple overcoat and umbrella entering an elevated rail station, but he doesn't seem to notice her , at the front of the crowd. Is she beyond the perception of the World's Greatest Detective?

Green Arrow : While Oliver Queen quotes David Byrne, she's present in the crowd on a leisure boat cruising the Seine in Paris (page 8, first panel). She's a little overdressed for a high society party.

Hawk & Dove : She's alongside the Capitol Reflecting Pool in the Washington, D.C. National Mall (page 19, first panel). Perhaps not unusually for a comic drawn by Rob Liefeld, we don't see her feet.

Justice League International : Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice...she's glowing among the protestors behind Booster Gold (page 7, panel 1).

Men of War : The Red-Hooded Woman is in the crowd as Rock's company fights a destructive superhuman (page 17, bottom panel) in an unnamed foreign country. You know, when armed men and jeeps with mounted guns are storming right in front of you, it's time to get out of the way.

OMAC : She's present in the crowd of employees evacuated from Cadmus Industries during OMAC's attack (page 6, lower left panel). Appropriately for a comic created by Jack Kirby, she's surrounded by a subtle red Kirby Krackle energy signature.

Static Shock : Peeping Woman in the Red Hood! She's outside the Hawkins home in New York City, looking in as Virgil talks to his Dad (page 15, top panel)...

Stormwatch : ...and she's spying on Apollo in a Moscow alley (page 15, panel 1).

Swamp Thing : The Woman in the Red Hood is unseen by Dr. Alec Holland and friend Paul on a construction site in Louisiana (page 5, panel 3).

At this point it's worth noticing that she appears at what seem to be random moments of widely varying importance. She's at a vital emergency which will result in Superman's capture, and she's at a football game watching a future hero score touchdowns. She's present at a major explosion in Gotham City, but she's also hanging about a parking lot. Are these seminal or random moments to her? They aren't by any means the most vital and significant incidents in the story.

Further, we can now tell she can either travel through time or has been appearing for many years. The Red-Hooded Woman is present prior to the formation of the Justice League, and during the early career of Superman. Both events occur before the current "now" time of most of the New DC 52 books.

New 52, Week Two:

Batman and Robin : The second week of the New DC begins and she's really getting around: she's standing alongside the pool Batman uses to extinguish a fire at Gotham University's Miller Building (page 17, panel 4). Why they built a swimming pool above an atomic research reactor, no one can say. Did you design this building, Frank Miller?

Batwoman : Look for her in crowd behind Commissioner Gordon, in the upper right-hand corner of page 17, one of J.H. Williams' impressive double-page spreads. Since Batwoman was scheduled nearly a year ago and then postponed for the September launch of the New 52, it's probable this figure was added to the artwork well after the page was created.

Deathstroke : Right on page one, third panel: observing an assault team facing off against Slade Wilson in Moscow. She's behind and to the right of the assault team; when you're facing Deathstroke the Terminator, you really don't want to be anywhere near his enemies. She's behind a concrete plinth, or maybe she can't be harmed by bullets, even the extra-special mega-deadly ones Deathstroke shoots.

Demon Knights : Time traveling again? She's in the Dark Ages among the marching, conquering army heading for Alba Sarum (page 7). It's a splash page so here's a closer view of her, in her familiar red buttoned cloak. Hiding behind the giant "n."

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. : She appears smack-dab in the middle of a two-page spread of Frank battling monsters in Bone Lake, Washington (pages 17-18). She does not choose calm places to visit, does she? Also present: a "foom" sound effect, presumably on loan from Marvel.

Green Lantern : ...and then she appears in the Coast City crowd as Hal Jordan has a conversation with Carol Ferris (page 12, panel 4). Nothing world-changing or dramatic here, if you don't count Hal asking Carol out for a date in the next panel.

Grifter : Grifter five-finger-discounts a hat and scarf from a New Orleans costume shop (page 14, lower left panel) and Red-Hooded Woman is there! Wait a minute...red coat...knows when you're naughty and nice...I think we're on the right track here. She's Ms. Santa Claus! Eh, possibly not.

Legion Lost : Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, in an atypical setting for the Legion of Super-Heroes: the 21st century! 31st century escaped criminal Alastor is tearing up the town (page 10, top panel). How bad is his rampage of destruction? He has totaled Van Halen's car.

Mister Terrific : In London, the World's Third Smartest Man is too busy chasing battle-suited CEO Miles Dalton across London to notice the Woman in the Red Hood in the crowd (page 4, panel 2).

Red Lanterns : Page 16, top panel: In Small Ockdon (a UK fictionopolis in the DC Universe), the Red-Hooded Woman watches as the grandsons of a murdered mugging victim address their blood-spitting rage. Is this the origin of a new Red Lantern? Ehhhhhhh...might be!

Resurrection Man : She might not be immediately obvious, so I've highlighted her appearance here to save you many minutes searching (page 15, panel 1), while Mitch Shelley flees the scene of the plane crash that killed him (Spoiler: He got better).

Suicide Squad : Nobody notices Red-Hooded Woman in the ultra-secret torture room (page 4, panel 2) holding Deadshot captive. It's a strong argument towards the theory that no one can see her. Except us. We are the most powerful beings in the DC Universe!

Superboy : Zaniel Templar arrives at N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to order the release of Superboy from the virtual reality world (page 19, panel 1), and Dr. Caitlin Fairchild isn't happy about it. And the RHW is there...not to see Superboy released, but the landing of Templar's helicopter. Superboy narrates "There is someone else, too. No. Some...thing." Is he detecting Templar...or our mysterious woman?

We're now halfway through the New 52 and a few more patterns begin to emerge. Although we have seen her travel to or exist in other time periods, we have not yet seen the Red-Hooded Woman off of Planet Earth. There are extensive off-planet scenes in Green Lantern and Red Lanterns, but her appearances in those books take place on Earth. Nor does she appear in Superboy's virtual reality or the Ant Hill, S.H.A.D.E.'s microversal headquarters in Frankenstein . We also see her in a cloak of different shades of red, violet, and sometimes even grey, with subtle design differences from appearance to next. I'm going to chalk that up to different artists rather than an in-story shape-changing ability.

Week Three:

Batman : At the bottom of the first panel on page one, the Red-Hooded Woman stands near, but not with, Gotham City homeless warming themselves around a burning garbage can. Her glowing eyes give her the look of a Jawa, but I think we can discount that theory. Unless she later says "utini," I'm not counting that as a possibility.

Birds of Prey : In the Gotham City of "two weeks ago," she stands in a doorway as Black Canary is tailed to a meeting with Barbara Gordon (page 8, panel 3). She doesn't notice the woman in a red hood in the next doorway.

Blue Beetle : El Paso, Texas: She watches as Jaime Reyes flees the pursuing Venom (page 17, bottom panel). No, sorry, not Venom, but an assassin sent to capture the beetle scarab from the Brotherhood of Evil.

Captain Atom : She's in a crowd of onlookers in New York as Captain Atom battles radioactive meteors from a nuclear plant hit by a volcano (page 18, panel 1). Busy day for Cap there.

Catwoman : If we weren't all so busy watch Batman and Catwoman boink in that last book, we might have spotted her on Catwoman 's page 8: in the large first panel, a hedonistic party of a Gotham City criminal mob is infiltrated by Catwoman and the Red-Hooded Woman. Catwoman's serving drinks, RHW's just watching. As we've learned by now, "she likes to watch."

DC Universe Presents: Deadm an : Page 2, panel 3: the Woman in the Red Hood stands behind clowns at Deadman's circus. Nobody likes to look at clowns. She is clearly, as Monty Python taught, a master of not being seen.

Green Lantern Corps : Another comic book with outer space action and still she only appears on Earth -- in, as we're reminded, Space Sector 2814 (page 9, panel 2). She's standing directly between construction workers -- some facing her directly -- and John Stewart's power ring-created architecture plans. AT this point it's clear she's invisible to human (Kryptonian, Martian) senses and technology (CCTV and Lantern rings), and most important, invisible to Batman . And he sees everything (as we saw in Catwoman ).

Legion of Super-Heroes : At last! Concrete proof she can travel off-world, to the planet Panoptes in the 31st Century (page 7, first panel). She's watching Chameleon infiltrate a base on the border of Dominator space, but still, she's there at one of the quietest moments of the book. She's either not looking for specifically important periods in time, or these relatively peaceful moments are later to be of great importance. My cynical guess/theory: The DC New 52 creators were told to toss a cameo in each issue and like many things in analyzing superhero comic books, I may be overthinking specific appearances. That said, I bet she can keep track of all forty-seven thousand six hundred twelve active members of the Legion, and their civilian names and home planets.

Nightwing : In Gotham City, Red-Hooded Woman is in the stands at Haly's Circus when Dick Grayson returns (page 12, panel 2). That's the second time she's been to the circus in one month. I hope she's getting her circus frequent guest card punched.

Red Hood and the Outlaws : Let's get this out of the way first: she's not on this page:

So you can stop staring at that page for hours at a time.

In fact, she doesn't even pop in on the heroes -- she's outside a Chicago slaughterhouse (page 16, panel 1) for the "B" plot of someone discovering via internet that Starfire's on Earth. R.H.W.'s very clearly hovering in this panel, but her cloak appears white. Artistic license, probably? More important, what's she here for? What's she looking at? A truck full of sausages?

Supergirl : With her new-found super-hearing, Supergirl's overwhelmed by deafening random noises and sounds from around the globe (bottom of page 14) including quotes we've seen spoken in Nightwing, Aquaman , and Birds of Prey . Nightwing is set in Gotham under night-dark skies, and there's storm lightning in the sky. Aquaman is in a Boston seafood restaurant at sunset. It's a rainy night in Gotham City when Starling quips about being damned in Birds of Prey . It's dawn in Russia, as the rising sun fuels Kara's superpowers. That scene in Gotham City (long set in DC history as located on the East Coast) can't be pure night at the same time it's sunset in Boston, but it could be a very dark dusk exaggerated by the pouring rain on the Birds of Prey's side of town and the fast-approaching storm around Nightwing. If this is the case, then whether by intent or design, this timing is all absolutely accurate . Many timezones encompass Siberia including twelve hours after East Coast time. In other words, dusk on the US's east coast equals dawn in parts of Siberia. That's the kind of cool synchronicity that makes me love shared-universe fiction, whether the creators planned this or not. (And oh, yes, the Red-Hooded Woman is there, too.)

Wonder Woman : The Woman in the Red Hood is watching from the woods as Diana and Zola face off against murderous centaurs in Virginia (page 17, panel 4). I don't care how expert Wonder Woman is, that's definitely not a proper dressage mount there.

After examining the first three weeks of the New 52, we can start to put together a rough timeline of some of the stories: The beginning of Birds of Prey #1 and the end of Nightwing #1 take place simultaneously with the appearance of Supergirl on Earth in Supergirl #1. The Red-Hooded Woman makes appearances (although likely not in this chronological order) two weeks before the events at the beginning of Birds of Prey . On the morning of the day BoP begins, she appears at Haly's Circus to watch Dick Grayson arrive; that evening she appears in Boston to watch Aquaman order but not eat a seafood dinner, then almost instantly to watch Kara Zor-El being attacked in Siberia. Instantly... or simultaneously ? Is the Red-Hooded Woman cross-crossing her own personal history by traveling in time? How much of a master of time is she, anyway? (And do we know any other red/purple hooded masters of time?)

New 52 Week Four:

All Star Western : Back in Gotham City of the 1880s, the Red-Hooded Woman is more difficult to spot than Waldo in a sea of cowboys, frontiersman, saloon girls, guns for hire, and stuffed animal heads (page 10, panel top panel). She's wisely gone by the time Jonah Hex starts a barroom brawl a few minutes later. Let's hope she paid up her tab before leaving.

Aquaman : Here's the scene that happens concurrently with three other key moments in the DCNu (page 12, panel 4). A few seconds and two panels later Aquaman says "I don't talk to fish," but she's looking in completely the opposite direction. One of the themes of the new series is the perception the general public has of Aquaman. Is she watching the reactions of the civilians rather than Aquaman? Is that an important moment? Did she order the unlimited crab legs for $17.99?

Batman: The Dark Knight marks yet another trip to Gotham City -- she's been here many more times than any place on Earth-DC, including Metropolis. You'll find her standing just inside the gates... the open gates of Arkham Asylum (page 14, top panel). Is it any wonder there's an Arkham break-out twice in four Batman #1 books? Geez, guys, invest in some Master Locks.

Blackhawks : Red-Hooded Woman looks right at us...or more probably, the man taking a photo of the departing Blackhawks (page 8, panel 5). She probably doesn't show up on the iPhone anyway (or the LexPhone or WaynePhone either).

Flash : Blink and you'll miss her: in Central City, watching Barry Allen's girlfriend (and co-worker... bad idea, Barry) Patty Spivot shepherd Barry away from the flirtations of Iris Allen (page 12, final panel). It occurs to me: if there's no Barry/Iris romance and marriage, then where did Kid Flash in Teen Titans come from?

The Fury of Firestorm, The Nuclear Men gives us not only the longest title in today's DC publishing plan but multiple Firestorms. R.H.W. is there at a critical and historical moment: the birth of Firestorms Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch (page 18, panel 2). Now that's the way to please fans of both iterations of the character. (Psst, DC: Batgirl, Inc . Everybody's happy. Call me!)

Oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the name of Walton Mills High's football team: The Wikings.

Green Lanterns: New Guardians : Kyle Rayner: PWNED! I bet even R.H.W. is giggling at that (page 15, middle bottom panel). And here's another book with substantial scenes taking place in outer space, but she appears on Earth, leaving her sole journey off planet in Legion of Super-Heroes . Even time travelers don't like to go that many time zones away, what with the spaceship lag. I would also point out that this comic book is the first time I've ever seen men line up for the restroom. Consider this: Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern because he stepped out into an alley to pee. I bet he doesn't want that in his Secret Origins issue. Insert your own "powerless against the color yellow" joke here.

The Savage Hawkman : Carter Hall is on the wing; his Hawkman battle armor reappears in time for him to do some serious damage to a morphing alien warrior (page 16). The Woman in the Red Hood watches in the background. Is this comic saying that the best view of Hawkman is from the rear? In a line of comics featuring half-dressed Catwoman, naked-in-bed Wonder Woman and bikinied Starfire, why not? The DCU needs beefcake, too.

Superman : AIIEEEEE! Red-Hooded Woman is nine feet tall! She's blown out of proportion at the dinner for the demolition of the old Daily Planet building and the opening of the new one (page 3, panel 2). You woulda thought Lex Luthor would have taken the old Planet globe and made a Kryptonite-lined Hamster Ball of Death out of it, wouldn't you?

Teen Titans : Fake police cop is heavily caffeinated as he pulls over Cassie "Don't Call Me Wonder Girl" Sandsmark, while White -Hooded Woman lurks yet again in the woods (page 12, panel 1). I'm guessing this is just a coloring mistake, or a lighting effect, or maybe that's latter-day Raven and I'm completely mistaken.

Another oddity: Who's this ultra-tall, top-hatted black-clad man in the background at the beginning of Teen Titans? That's just too distinct a figure to be just set dressing. Is it the Shade from Starman ? The Phantom Stranger with a new chapeau? A cross-dressing Zatanna? A goth version of the Mad Mod?

Voodoo : Finally, and thankfully, RHW is not masquerading as a stripper at the Voodoo Lounge. You'll find her outside watching the aftermath of Fallon's fistfight with a bunch of young thugs (page 8, panel 6).

There's other hooded women in the new DCU; don't mistake them for the one we've been looking at. Below: Rama from Deadman (top), Batgirl's enemy Mirror (bottom left), and the Brotherhood of Evil's Phobia in Blue Beetle (bottom right).

Accept no substitutes for the real Red-Hooded Woman. Most of what we know is speculation and guesswork. We know she's watching the DC Universe. She watches in the past, watches in the future, and watches right now. She watches, mostly on Earth, but off-world as well. She can almost certainly travel in time and is undetectable to humans and tech. She needed Barry Allen's power to help her knit the DC, Vertigo superhero, and Wildstorm universes together, and now she's keeping watch over the result.

But who is she? Could she be the Time Trapper, longtime nemesis of the Legion of Super-Heroes? Is she a new Harbinger, foretelling a brand-new Crisis on 52 Earths? Could she be the Marvel Universe's new Crimson Cowl, heralding a return to the great DC/Marvel crossover events? Maybe she's Red Riding Hood from Vertigo's popular Fables , leading up to the first team-up of Batman and Jack of Fables? (A: No.)

The New DC Universe is still uncharted territory. Things we've taken for granted in a fictional universe that's almost 74 years old ( Wonder Woman's origin , Superman's pal, Flash's wife) have been changed dramatically. We've seen this multiverse break apart and change through several crises, reboots both hard and soft, and the too-soon abandoned concept of Hypertime. Maybe the clue is in that "almost 74 years." 2013 will mark the 75th anniversary of Superman's debut in 1938, and I bet DC has a big crossover event planned for that. But whenever and wherever the Red-Hooded Woman's story is told, I'm eager to be along for the ride. We're all pioneers in the New DCU, and the thrill is in the ride of discovery on the way.
Executive summary

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the employment effects of increases in the minimum wage. It organizes the most prominent studies in this literature by their use of two different empirical approaches: studies that match labor markets experiencing a minimum-wage increase with an appropriate comparison labor market, and studies that do not. A review of this literature suggests that:

The studies that compare labor markets experiencing a minimum-wage increase with a carefully chosen comparison labor market tend to find that minimum-wage increases have little or no effect on employment.

The studies that do not match labor markets experiencing a minimum-wage increase with a comparison labor market tend to find that minimum-wage increases reduce employment.

A better understanding of which approach is more rigorous is required to make reliable inferences about the effects of the minimum wage. This paper argues that:

Labor market policy analysts strongly prefer studies that match “treatment” with “comparison” cases in a defensible way over studies that simply include controls and fixed effects in a regression model.

The studies using the most rigorous research designs generally find that minimum-wage increases have little or no effect on employment.

Application of these findings to any particular minimum-wage proposal requires careful consideration of whether the proposal is similar to other minimum-wage policies that have been studied. If a proposal occurs under dramatically different circumstances, the empirical literature on the minimum wage should be invoked with caution.

Introduction

President Harry Truman famously joked that he wanted to hire a one-armed economist because all of his staff economists would resort to “on the one hand… but on the other hand…” formulations when giving policy advice. Truman just wanted a straight answer. Today, policymakers and the public also seem to want a one-armed economist in discussions of the minimum wage. Minimum-wage policy in the United States is made at the federal, state, and local level. The federal government imposes a minimum wage nationally (currently $7.25 an hour for most workers) that Congress can raise. Many states and even local governments set minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum. One group of well-regarded economists contends that increases in the minimum wage reduce employment by raising labor costs, while another group insists the evidence shows that minimum-wage increases do not reduce employment, likely due to factors such as reduced turnover, increased productivity, and small price increases. Responsible economists understandably mention both strands of the literature. Nevertheless, it would be helpful if there were some way to determine which side has the more persuasive case, something a little closer to Truman’s one-armed economist.

There are many criteria that could be used to make sense of the empirical literature on the employment effects of the minimum wage. This report focuses on the distinction between studies that use what I will refer to as “matched comparison groups” to estimate these effects, and those that do not. The term “matching” is used here in a relatively broad way, to describe a family of methods that identify a comparison group as an appropriate match for a treatment group, thus mimicking a randomized experiment. A matching design is strongly preferred by economists working on a variety of applications because it is often the closest study design to randomized experiments available. Whether or not a study uses matching is a broad criterion, but an important one for discriminating between studies and clarifying who provides more persuasive evidence in the minimum-wage debate.

The first section of this report reviews the two major approaches to studying the minimum wage—studies with and without matched comparison cases—and compares the major findings from these two approaches. The second section makes an argument for preferring studies that use matching over studies that do not. The report concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for policy.

Two approaches to studying the minimum wage

The empirical literature on the impact of the minimum wage is large, but much of it (and all important recent studies) can be classified into one of two categories: one, studies that match and compare cases involving an increase in the minimum wage with a similar control group, and two, studies that do not match cases of a minimum-wage increase to a similar control group. This distinction is only one of many possible ways of thinking about the empirical literature, but it is critical for answering the question of who is right about the employment effects of the minimum wage.

Matching studies

Analyses of the minimum wage that use matching first received wide attention with David Card and Alan Krueger’s 1994 paper on an increase in New Jersey’s state minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05. Card and Krueger were concerned with distinguishing changes in employment at fast food restaurants that would have happened anyway from changes occurring in response to the minimum-wage increase. Their solution was to use comparable restaurants in Pennsylvania immediately across the border from New Jersey as a control group of establishments operating in a similar environment, but not subject to the minimum-wage increase. These Pennsylvania establishments provided a baseline for determining what would have happened in New Jersey if the minimum wage had remained constant. Deviation from that baseline in the New Jersey restaurants could thus be safely attributed to the minimum wage. A true experimental design would have randomly assigned increases in the minimum wage in order to control for alternative influences, but in the absence of random assignment the authors identified the next best alternative: a close match.

The Card and Krueger study concluded that there was no evidence that the minimum-wage increase in New Jersey reduced employment in that state relative to the comparison group of Pennsylvania restaurants. Criticisms of the quality of the study’s phone survey data were raised at the time, which led the authors to analyze more reliable administrative payroll data from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Card and Krueger (2000) confirmed the original finding that the minimum-wage increase in New Jersey had no discernable employment effect.

The matching approach pioneered by Card and Krueger has been applied with increasing sophistication and stronger data sources than the initial phone survey data in the 20 years since the New Jersey analysis. The most notable advance in matching has been in the work of Arindrajit Dube with several coauthors, which uses counties that neighbor each other across state borders as control cases. Rather than a restricted analysis of one state’s minimum-wage increase, Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) compare every pair of neighboring counties along every state border in the country (similar study designs are used in other papers by Dube and his colleagues). By exploiting variation in the minimum wage across the country and over the course of 16 years, this research estimates minimum-wage effects from a larger sample than earlier matching studies, and produces estimates that are more representative of the typical response to a minimum-wage increase and not the special circumstances of a particular local labor market.

Dube and his colleagues consistently find no evidence for reduced employment as a result of regular increases in the minimum wage using the county pair match. In fact, even before using county pairs, as Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) add increasingly more precise geographic matching into their models, the negative impact of the minimum-wage increase identified in the nonmatching literature (discussed in more detail below) gradually evaporates. Table 1 reports Dube, Lester, and Reich’s (2010) estimates of the percentage change in employment resulting from a percentage change in earnings as a result of an increase in the minimum wage. The authors analyze two different samples of employment data: one that includes all counties (the first column), and one that includes pairs of neighboring counties (the second column), with county pair matching performed on the latter sample.

Table 1 Percentage change in employment for each percentage change in earnings due to a change in the minimum wage All county sample County pair sample No matching -0.784* -0.482** No matching, control for Census division differences -0.114 — No matching, control for state differences 0.183 — No matching, control for MSA differences 0.211 — County-level matching — 0.079 * Statistically significant at the 10 percent level.

** Statistically significant at the 5 percent level. Source: Estimates drawn from Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010), Table 2 (this is not a reproduction of their Table 2) Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

The first row in Table 1, which presents results when no matching is done, is representative of most study designs before Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010), and many since. When no matching is done, the minimum-wage increase is estimated to have a negative effect. However, as the comparison is increasingly narrowed to more similar counties, first in the same Census division, then the same state, then the same metropolitan statistical area (MSA), the statistically significant negative effect of the minimum-wage increase is eliminated. In the analysis that uses actual pair-matching of bordering counties to construct a comparison group (the last row), the higher minimum wage has an estimated positive effect on employment. However, because this result is statistically insignificant it cannot be statistically distinguished from a finding that the minimum wage has no effect on employment. In any case, the stronger designs that use matching strategies clearly contradict the theory that minimum-wage increases reduce employment. Other examples of this approach include Addison, Blackburn, and Cotti (2009; 2012), which have conclusions that are similar to Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) and other matching studies.

One possible critique is that by over-parameterizing (i.e., adding too many controls to) their models, Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) are mistakenly attributing true employment-discouraging effects of minimum-wage increases to other variables in their model, or that statistical significance is lost due to the difficulty of estimating such a complex model. However, the authors point out that these fears can be easily dismissed by comparing estimates of the impact of the minimum wage on employment with estimates of the impact on earnings. Only the estimate of the impact on employment becomes positive—and loses statistical significance—as more rigorous matching strategies are introduced. The effect of the minimum wage on earnings stays consistent across these models. Since the same statistical model with the same risks of over-parameterization is being used regardless of the dependent variable (earnings in one case, employment in the other), the case that specification problems are driving the result is harder to justify.

There are many different explanations for the lack of substantial disemployment effects in matching studies. One suggestion is that employers exercise “monopsony power,” or bargaining power associated with being one of a small population of buyers in a market (an analog to the monopoly power exercised by sellers). Just as a monopoly will not reduce its output in response to an imposed price reduction, a monopsonist can absorb a price increase (such as a minimum-wage increase) without reducing demand for workers. Although such theoretical explanations are possible, a more straightforward argument is that an increase in the minimum wage does not have a disemployment effect because the increased labor costs are easily distributed over small price or productivity increases, or because fringe benefits are cut instead of employment levels. Less work has been done on the impact of the minimum wage on these outcomes than on the employment impact. Alternatively, disemployment effects might be avoided due to reduced fixed hiring costs as a result of lower turnover.

The most comprehensive and best known matching studies find that a higher minimum wage does not have a negative impact on employment, but this finding is not unanimous. Some matching studies do find disemployment effects. For example, Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen (2012) find negative effects on employment when they compare New York state with several comparison states, and Hoffman and Trace (2009) find that a minimum-wage increase in Pennsylvania reduced the employment prospects of “at-risk” workers relative to comparable workers in New Jersey. Perhaps the best quality study using matching methods that identifies a disemployment effect is that of Singell and Terborg (2007), who find negative effects associated with much larger increases in the minimum wage in Oregon and Washington. Finally, Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) use a “synthetic control method” and find negative minimum-wage effects. This important contribution to the matching literature is discussed in more detail below.

Each of these studies is open to criticism. Hoffman (2014) shows that rectifying questionable data choices eliminates Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen’s (2012) negative result. Finally, all of these analyses use state-wide data, which arguably provide a weaker match than Card and Krueger (1994), Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010), and other studies that match neighboring counties rather than states. Even if these negative results are taken at face value, the strongest studies investigating the widest range of minimum-wage increases by Dube and his colleagues find that on average, minimum-wage increases have little or no effect on employment.

Studies without matching

The alternative to a matching approach is to run a model using state-level or individual-level panel data (i.e., data collected over time) on employment levels to estimate how employment changes after states enact a higher minimum wage. These models have a number of valuable features, most notably their ability to control for idiosyncratic differences between states or individuals that do not change over time. These stable differences are called “fixed effects,” and the models are therefore referred to as fixed-effects models. Regardless of whether fixed-effect models use state or individual-level data, they rely on variations in the minimum wage among states to determine the effect of the policy.

Notably absent from the fixed-effects models is any matching of comparison cases to treatment cases. While Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) used counties immediately across a state border as comparison cases, the fixed-effects models implicitly treat every state not experiencing a minimum-wage increase as a coequal comparison case to every state that does have a minimum-wage increase. This potentially introduces “selection bias” into the results. Minimum-wage laws are not imposed under experimental conditions. This means that states that “select into” higher minimum wages by enacting increases may be systematically different from states that do not. Fixed-effects models can handle this problem if the researcher has data on the factors that are associated with the differential adoption of minimum-wage laws or if these factors do not change over time (in that case, the inclusion of fixed effects controls for the nonrandomness that is introduced due to the lack of a true experiment). However, if factors correlated with the adoption of minimum-wage laws vary over time and across states, fixed-effects models will produce biased estimates of the effect of the minimum wage.

This sort of bias is very plausible in practice. Many states in the South and Central United States are experiencing rapid population and economic growth. In contrast, communities in the Midwest and Northeast are already densely populated and in many cases undergoing a structural transition associated with the decline of manufacturing. None of these changes are the result of the minimum-wage policy, but all are correlated with the minimum wage, which tends to be lower in the South and Central United States and higher in the Midwest and Northeast. Other trends specific to states or counties rather than regions are also conceivable. Some of these trends may be controlled for in certain studies, but fixed-effects models are not structured to capture the more comprehensive set of state-specific trends that matching studies can account for. State-specific time trends that are not accounted for will move a fixed-effects model further away from results that would have been estimated by a randomized experiment.

The economists most closely associated with the fixed-effects model approach to studying the minimum wage are David Neumark and William Wascher. In 2007, Neumark and Wascher conducted a thorough review of 102 minimum-wage studies, covering policies implemented both inside and outside the United States, and at the federal and state level. They identified a subset of studies that they deemed “credible,” most of which fall into the category of state and individual-level fixed-effects models. This subset of studies, selected for special mention by the most prolific authors who use the fixed-effects method, is therefore an excellent vantage point for understanding the consensus of this literature. Most of the studies mentioned below come from this list. Neumark and Wascher’s most recent minimum-wage study with J.M. Salas is not a standard fixed-effects model. This is discussed in more detail in the next section.

A typical state-level fixed-effects approach is offered by Neumark and Wascher (1992), published two years before the great disruption of the Card and Krueger (1994) study. This research estimated that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduced teenage employment by 1 to 2 percent and young adult employment by 1.5 to 2 percent. These findings were notable because they were comparable to earlier estimates from the time series literature, which relied on variation over time rather than across states to estimate employment effects.

Neumark and Wascher (1996), Neumark (2001), and others soon extended the fixed-effects modeling framework to individual-level data to understand the impact of the minimum wage on specific vulnerable groups. The authors find in both cases that increases in the minimum wage reduce employment for the population of interest (typically teenagers or low-skill workers). These studies use the same design as the state-level studies, relying on variation among states and over time to estimate how changes in the minimum wage affect employment. As such, they are vulnerable to the same criticisms outlined above. Individuals in a high-minimum-wage state may experience lower employment rates, but it is difficult to determine whether that is the result of fundamentally different local labor market conditions that are unrelated to the minimum wage.

The most comprehensive exploration of the sensitivity of the fixed-effects model results to their ability to control for differences among states is by Allegretto, Dube, and Reich (2011). This study uses Neumark and Wascher’s preferred fixed-effects modeling framework, but includes controls for Census division and state-specific labor market trends that Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) suggest might be driving the strong negative employment effects in most fixed-effects analyses. After controlling for these trends, the standard disemployment effects become statistically indistinguishable from zero effects. What is notable about Allegretto, Dube, and Reich’s (2011) contribution is that the result of little or no disemployment effects of the minimum wage is not generated from models related to the matching studies described in the previous section. Instead, the study uses the methods that are usually employed by Neumark and Wascher.

The method has also been extended beyond standard employment outcomes for the United States. Couch and Wittenburg (2001) use a fixed-effects model to assess the impact of the minimum wage on hours worked, while Neumark and Wascher (2004) use these techniques to understand how labor market institutions are relevant for international differences in the effect of the minimum wage. Both studies find the traditional negative impact. Meer and West (2013) use state fixed-effects models and numerical examples to argue that matching studies that include location-specific time trends (discussed in more detail in the next section) may provide inappropriate employment estimates if the principal impact of changes in the minimum wage is on employment growth rates.

Which approach makes more sense?

Matching cases of minimum-wage increases to a control group is essential because it is often the closest social scientists can get to the gold standard of an experiment using random assignment. Although the minimum-wage literature as a whole is divided on the question of the impact of minimum-wage increases, the strongest studies that use matching strategies find little or no evidence that such increases have a negative impact on employment.

It is difficult to overstate how uncontroversial it is in the field of labor market policy evaluation to assert the superiority of matching methods to the nonmatching approaches described above. The seminal evaluations of the effects of job training programs, work-sharing arrangements, employment tax credits, educational interventions, and housing vouchers all use at least some sort of matching method, if not an actual randomized experiment. In their widely cited survey article on non-experimental evaluation, Blundell and Costa Dias (2000) do not even mention state-level fixed-effects models when they list the five major categories of evaluation methods. In a similar article, Imbens and Wooldridge (2009) do mention fixed-effects models as a tool for policy evaluation, but clarify that these were used before more advanced methods were developed, noting that the modern use of fixed-effects models is typically in combination with other more sophisticated techniques. For example, Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) also use a fixed-effects model, but more importantly it is a fixed-effects model that utilizes rigorous matching strategy to identify the effect of the minimum wage. Sometimes fixed-effects models are the best available option if no natural experiment or other matching opportunity emerges to provide a more rigorous approach. Well specified fixed-effects models can still be informative. But faced with the choice between a well matched comparison group and a fixed-effects model, the former is unambiguously the stronger study design.

Given the unanimity of the evaluation literature on the importance of these methods, how is it possible that so many minimum-wage studies use only state-level fixed-effects models? One possible answer is that unlike many of the programs studied in the evaluation literature, everyone is subject to the minimum wage. The minimum wage is not like a training program or a tax credit where some people receive it (are treated) and others do not. It is instead just one of many “rules of the game” in the labor market. As such, economists may not think of the minimum wage in the context of the evaluation literature and the methods of that literature.

Potential signs of progress

In the immediate aftermath of the Card and Krueger (1994) study, many critics simply dismissed the finding as an abandonment of sound economic theory. Fortunately, today these reactions are less common (though still not unheard of), and the major voices in the discussion seem to be developing a mutual appreciation for the importance of hammering out credible study designs. An excellent example is the recent exchange between Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) and Allegretto et al. (2013). Instead of advancing new work in the tradition of a state-level fixed-effects model, Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) raise criticisms of the county matching approach of Dube and his colleagues, and then go on to offer an alternative matching approach that they feel to be more appropriate. They suggest that a better method is the “synthetic control” approach of Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), which generates weights for a number of comparison cases that together provide a good match to the treatment case. After running models using the synthetic control method, Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) find evidence for negative effects of a higher minimum wage on employment, consistent with their work with state-level fixed-effects models. Allegretto et al. (2013) responded by defending their county-pair approach and further developing the synthetic control method, including rectifying problems in Neumark, Salas, and Wascher’s (2013) work. In a separate paper, Dube and Zipperer (2013) argue that Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) fail to properly implement the synthetic control method, using an approach that is quite different from the earlier literature in that tradition and much less defensible. Allegretto et al. (2013) and Dube and Zipperer (2013) conclude that across both methods (their contiguous county approach and a properly executed synthetic control method), the minimum wage does not have substantial disemployment effects.

The most important development in this recent work is not that it has resulted in agreement on the impact of the minimum wage. Numerous econometric disagreements remain, and of course Neumark, Wascher, and others continue to defend fixed-effects studies on the grounds that the biases in these analyses are not substantial. The critical advance has been that Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2013) appear to concede that some sort of modern matching approaches are essential for evaluating the effect of minimum-wage increases in the absence of a randomized experiment. The authors continue to disagree on the best way to implement such a study, but the more recent focus on credible non-experimental designs is a step forward.

What do we need to keep in mind in applying research to policy?

Study design offers a means of arbitrating between studies in the often conflicting minimum-wage literature. The strongest designs seem to consistently find little or no evidence of disemployment effects associated with increases in the minimum wage. However, when applying this research to policymaking, these findings do come with caveats.

First, we can only make inferences about the impact of a minimum-wage increase if it is relatively similar to the sorts of minimum-wage increases that have been studied. Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010, 962) caution that their “conclusion is limited by the scope of the actual variation in policy; our results cannot be extrapolated to predict the impact of a minimum-wage increase that is much larger than what we have experienced over the period under study.”

The recent bill introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 represents a 39.3 percent increase above the current federal minimum wage of $7.25, to be implemented over the course of three years. The typical increase in the legal minimum wage associated with the proposed change to $10.10 is of course lower than 39.3 percent because some states affected by the change at the federal level already have state minimum wages exceeding $7.25. States without a higher minimum than $7.25 would experience the full increase. Table 2 provides context for this increase by comparing it to prior federal minimum-wage increases.

Table 2 Proposed and past federal minimum-wage increases Nominal minimum-wage increase Harkin-Miller proposal 39.3% in three steps 2007–2009 40.8% in three steps 1996–1997 21.2% in two steps 1990–1991 26.9% in two steps 1978–1981 45.7% in four steps 1974–1976 43.8% in three steps 1967–1968 28.0% in two steps Source: EPI analysis of Fair Labor Standards Act and amendments and the proposed Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

The increase in Harkin and Miller’s proposed Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 is typical of the federal minimum-wage increases since the late 1960s. The largest increases during this period (i.e., 1974–1976 and 1978–1981) came at a time of considerable inflation, so their magnitude to a large extent reflects an effort to keep up with consumer prices. However, the 40.8 percent increase between 2007 and 2009 is also larger than the Harkin-Miller proposal, despite the fact that it occurred in an environment of dramatically subdued inflation.

Figure A presents the distribution of all percentage changes in effective minimum wages for all states from 1980 to 2011 using data from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research. The “effective” minimum wage is defined here as the highest of either the federal or state minimum wage in a given state. Almost all increases were lower than 15 percent. The minimum-wage increase in New Jersey studied by Card and Krueger, at 18.8 percent in one year, was much larger than the average one-year increase during this period. Despite the magnitude of this increase, Card and Krueger found no notable disemployment effects. The proposed federal increase to $10.10 comes in three stages: a 13.1 percent nominal increase, followed by an 11.6 percent increase in the first year and a 10.4 percent increase in the second year after the initial increase. These increases are in the upper half of the distribution of changes in the effective minimum wage presented in Figure A, but well within the historical ranges studied by the empirical literature on the minimum wage.

Figure A “Effective” one-year minimum-wage increases for all states, by percent change, 1980–2011 One-year increases 0-5% 85 5-10% 153 10-15% 219 15-20% 14 20-25% 5 25-30% 4 30-35% 5 35%+ 0 Chart Data Download data The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel. The data underlying the figure. Note: The “effective” minimum wage is defined here as the highest of either the federal or state minimum wage in a given state. Periods with zero percent changes are excluded from Figure A. Source: Author’s calculations from the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research’s (2012) state-level data of economic, political, and transfer-program information for 1980–2011 Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

The relative size of any proposed increase does not necessarily imply that the results from the matching literature are irrelevant, but these findings should be invoked with caution in cases that depart from historical norms. Ultimately, what matters is not the absolute increase in the minimum wage, but whether or not the minimum wage is in excess of the value of workers’ production to employers.

Finally, policymakers need to remember that even the best national studies, such as Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) or Allegretto et al. (2013), provide only average effects of the minimum wage across a wide sampling of counties. The effect of a federal minimum-wage increase in any given local labor market is likely to vary with local conditions. This point is made emphatically in Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010, 957); the authors show the variation in minimum-wage effects across different local labor markets in their sample. These estimates are all heavily concentrated around zero, consistent with their finding of negligible disemployment effects. However, the local labor estimates also show a nontrivial probability of having a considerably more positive or negative employment effect. This suggests that while on average the minimum wage does not have disemployment effects, some localities may exhibit these effects. Dube, Lester, and Reich’s (2010) estimates suggest that other localities may experience positive effects from the minimum wage, providing motivation for state or local minimum or living wages in excess of the federal minimum wage.

Ultimately, even skeptics of the matching literature reviewed here need to consider total effects of the minimum wage, and not simply whether or not a disemployment effect can be identified. The disemployment effects identified in the weaker empirical strategies are still small, and the earnings gains for minimum-wage workers keeping their jobs are substantial. The net effect of a minimum-wage increase is therefore likely to be quite positive, even if concerns remain about a small population hurt by the minimum wage and in need of other assistance. Studies with the strongest study designs of course suggest that this population is extremely small if it exists at all.

Conclusion

Thinking about the designs of the major studies in the minimum-wage literature helps to approach Truman’s ideal of a one-armed economist. The best evidence we have comes from studies that try to match treatment cases with appropriate control cases. This research suggests that historically typical minimum-wage increases have no impact on employment, on average. This is valuable information for thinking about policy. It suggests that raising the minimum wage would not have the negative effects attributed to it by critics, but would increase the earnings of low-income families.

Policymakers and the public should demand empirical rigor in research impacting the lives of low-income working families. Minimum-wage research should be conducted with the best feasible study designs, just as federal agencies demand the best designs when they seek out evaluations of other labor market policies.

About the author

Daniel Kuehn is a doctoral student in American University’s Department of Economics with field specializations in labor economics and gender economics. Before coming to American University he was a research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population. He has a master’s degree in public policy, specializing in labor market policy, from George Washington University.

Acknowledgements

The paper benefited from comments and review by Josh Bivens, David Cooper, J. Bradford DeLong, Arindrajit Dube, Doug Hall, Robert Murphy, Ryan Murphy, Michael Reich, Heidi Shierholz, and David Wynn.

Endnotes

Within this family of methods, there is an approach to policy evaluation called “propensity score matching” that literally establishes a match between one treatment case and one or several comparison cases using an estimate of the probability of receiving a treatment. This paper, which is targeted to a broader audience, does not use “matching” to refer specifically to propensity scores, and instead uses it to describe any study design that consciously constructs comparison groups for treatment cases (here, cases experiencing an increase in the minimum wage). These include difference in difference models, regression discontinuities, synthetic control models, and other “natural experiments.”

David Card published a study two years earlier, in 1992, examining the impact of a minimum-wage increase in California. This paper also used a matching strategy, even before the celebrated 1994 paper. However, the match in this paper was between California and a set of comparison states that roughly reproduced the demographic and labor market characteristics of California. This is not as clear of a match as the cross-border match in Card and Krueger (1994) nor does it set the same kind of precedent for future work by Arindrajit Dube and his colleagues, but Card (1992) should also be counted as an early example of the matching literature on the minimum wage. The author found no evidence of a decline in teenage employment or employment in retail.

See Card and Krueger (2000). In their reanalysis of administrative payroll data, Card and Krueger (2000) also provide evidence of selection bias problems associated with data on New Jersey and Pennsylvania restaurants provided to Neumark and Wascher (2000) by Richard Berman, a public affairs executive who advocates on behalf of the food and beverage industry. Neumark and Wascher’s (2000) analysis of the Berman dataset finds that the minimum-wage increase reduced employment in New Jersey, although this finding is not consistent with the administrative payroll data.

A detailed discussion of all of Dube’s work on the minimum wage is excluded in the interest of briefly outlining the differences between matching and nonmatching studies. Another critical contribution of Dube and his colleagues, Allegretto et al. (2013), is discussed below. Also of note are Dube (2013), which looks at minimum-wage effects by industry; and Dube, Naidu, and Reich (2007), which looks specifically at San Francisco. Recent work by Giuliano (2013) controls for unobserved heterogeneity by restricting the analysis to stores within a single firm. Giuliano also finds no evidence of disemployment effects from the minimum wage.

This elasticity is estimated as the ratio of the minimum-wage coefficients in the employment and earnings regressions in Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010).

In models that match counties that straddle a state border, additional “fixed effect” variables must be added indicating that a given county in the dataset is a member of a county pair. The inclusion of these fixed effects dramatically increases the size of the model that must be estimated.

Notably, the standard errors of the estimates of the minimum-wage effect increase more substantially from the baseline model for the earnings regressions than they do for the employment regressions. The source of the difference between the earnings and employment regressions is thus driven by the change in the point estimates themselves, and not the precision of the estimates.

For example, by using the entire state of Pennsylvania, Hoffman and Trace (2009) are comparing employment outcomes in Pittsburgh and rural western Pennsylvania with those in New Jersey. These communities are quite different and they are experiencing different types of economic change. In contrast, the original Card and Krueger (1994) study, which focused on border establishments, and Dube’s work with border counties compare far more similar local labor markets.

Recall once again that “matching methods” is used here to describe a range of quasi-experimental methods that try to construct a comparison group that is a good match to the treatment group.

See for example Leonard’s (2000) discussion of the reaction to Card and Krueger (1994). A particularly questionable and combative example is the case of the late Nobel laureate James Buchanan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1996, “Just as no physicist would claim that ‘water runs uphill,’ no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”

The University of Kentucky dataset begins in 1980, in the middle of a three stage increase in the federal minimum wage. The first two stages, which are not in the data, were larger than the third.

Some localities have implemented “living wages” that are higher than minimum wages and therefore may be associated with greater percentage changes in the minimum wage at the time of their implementation. These are not considered here, nor are they studied in the minimum-wage literature discussed above. See Holzer (2008) for a review of the literature on living wage laws.

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Martin Sheen says he’s “disgusted” by President Trump in a new Democratic fundraising pitch.

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The driver of a bus that struck and killed a cyclist just outside the Olympic Park in Stratford while ferrying journalists between venues has been bailed until August, police have said.

The 28-year-old man was knocked down by the doubledecker in Ruckholt Road, at the junction with the A12, at about 7.40pm on Wednesday. An air ambulance doctor pronounced him dead at the scene.

A Metropolitan police spokesman said a man in his mid-60s had been arrested just outside the Olympic Park at 9.28pm on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.

The victim is expected to be formally identified later on Thursday. A date for a postmortem examination is yet to be fixed.

After the fatal incident, Bradley Wiggins, who by winning a gold medal on Wednesday became Britain's most decorated Olympian, warned of the perils of cycling in the capital. "It's dangerous and London is a busy city and [there is] a lot of traffic. I think we have to help ourselves sometimes," he said.

"I haven't lived in London for 10 to 15 years now and it's got a lot busier since I was riding a bike as a kid round here, and I got knocked off several times.

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Wiggins said he would like to see the introduction of a law making it compulsory to wear cycling helmets.

He later clarified his comments on twitter. "Just to confirm I haven't called for helmets to be made the law as reports suggest."

"I suggested it may be the way to go to give cyclists more protection legally if involved in an accident.

"I wasn't on me soap box CALLING, was asked what I thought."

Responding to his comments, Chris Peck, the policy coordinator for the UK's national cycling organisation the CTC said that making helmets compulsory would be counter-productive. He told Radio 5 live. "Making cycle helmets compulsory would be likely to have an overall damaging effect on public health, since the health benefits of cycling massively outweigh the risks and we know that where enforced, helmet laws tend to lead to an immediate reduction in cycling."

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said he was "hugely saddened" by the death. A spokesman for the mayor said: "Any road death is a tragedy and the mayor's thoughts are with the cyclist's family. As this is now under police investigation it would be inappropriate to say anything else."

Johnson cycled into Whitehall for this morning's ministerial Olympics meeting at the Cabinet Office wearing a bike helmet. But he appeared to be opposed to mandatory wearing of protective headwear by cyclists, as advocated by Wiggins. "I think they should do if they want to," Johnson said.

A London 2012 spokesman said: "We can confirm that a cyclist tragically died as a result of a collision with a bus carrying media from the Olympic Park this evening.

"The police are investigating the accident and our thoughts are with the cyclist's family."

The Metropolitan police's road death investigation unit is looking into the collision.
We have some bad news for ATI fans, AMD has announced that it will be killing the ATI brand in favor of its Fusion project which aims to build hybrid CPU and GPU chips. The Radeon and FirePro branding will be remaining intact, but ATI Eyefinity will now be known as AMD Eyefinity and the first set of graphic cards to be shipped with the new branding strategy will be released later this year.

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One of King of the Cage's champions is currently in a dispute with the promotion, with Lowen Tynanes saying he is currently stuck in a 3-year deal contract he did not sign. Although not specifically named by the talented prospect, KOTC representative Bobby Burguland did state Tynanes' former coach, Kai Kamaka, as the person who signed the deal for him.

Shortly after the report ran on this site, Kamaka has decided to release an official statement. He maintains that while he did sign the dotted line, it was done with Tynanes' consent.

"I asked if he was able was able to email back the contract to KOTC and he replied "No, because I don’t have a scanner". I asked him if he wanted me to sign for him and email it back for him and he replied, "If can coach", meaning yes," Kamaka tells Bloody Elbow as part of his statement, "I told Lowen that I would do it since I had a scanner."

Kamaka also disputes that this was all done without his fighter's knowledge, alleging that Tynanes' contract with KOTC was discussed with him on numerous occasions. As for motivation for bringing up this forgery issue, Kamaka speculates that Tynanes may simply be looking to "capitalize on the moment" after breaking out as an MMA star.

"I would like to see Lowen in the cage as well. I believe he has the potential to be the next BJ Penn for Hawaii and I have said this time and time again. I honestly believe things just moved a lot faster then he expected and now that it has, he is trying to capitalize on the moment."

"If it were not for KOTC opening up opportunities for Lowen, he would still be fighting in small amateur shows. KOTC kick started his career by giving him the URCC fight and the ONEFC contract to represent KOTC. With that being said, I wish Lowen all the best for his future."

More details from Kamaka are available on full statement below where he airs his side of things:

There is a lot of missing pieces to this story. The only part being exposed is that Mr. Lowen Tynanes is the victim and had no knowledge of the contract and so forth. I want to clarify that Terry Tribelcock and I are very close and our relationship is not only based on fights, though it started that way. It is through my relationship with Terry that all my fighters get to fight across the US and abroad. So our relationship was well known to my fighters, including Lowen; as far back as when Lowen competed as an amateur for KOTC. I want to take you back to square one from where this all started.

Terry called me with a URCC fight opportunity in the Philippines against Eduard Folayang. Terry asked if I had a 155 lber that could take the match. Terry asked me to take a look at the fighter’s profile and to let him know what I thought, and if I could give him a name of whomever I chose to take this fight. I initially offered Ray "Bradda" Cooper, my nephew, as he is THE best 155 lber I know in Hawaii. After discussions with Ray, it seemed that he was going in another direction. I then called Lowen to offer him the fight as this opponent was perfect for Lowen’s style and the opponent had a name that would boost Lowen’s career if he fought him. I went on to tell Lowen that URCC was offering $2000 to show, and an additional $2000 to win, including flight and hotel. His response was "Shoots coach, let’s do it". Lowen wins this fight and his fight purse totaled $4000.

The day after the URCC fight, Terry took both Lowen and I to the other side of the Philippines to do some shopping. Terry checked us in to a fully paid 5-Star hotel suite that included room charges, and then headed to eat lunch. During lunch, Terry informed Lowen and I that there was another fight opportunity, but Lowen needed to be "on the team" and if he didn’t want to, it would still be "cool". Basically, Terry wanted a fighter that would represent KOTC well in this organization. At the same time, Terry told Lowen and I the terms of the KOTC contract in full detail, the plans and steps we would take to make Lowen a MMA star and what was expected from KOTC. After beating Eduard Folayang like we knew he would, Lowen became an instant STAR in Asia. Then Terry continued to tell Lowen and I that we got an offer from One FC but didn’t have the full details at the moment but they really wanted Lowen to fight for their circuit. Lowen’s response was "I’m down for whatever, I just like fight".

Back in Hawaii, Terry emails me the KOTC contract which I forwarded to Lowen. Couples of weeks go by and Lowen still has not returned the contract. During this time, an interview form from a MMA website was sent with the contract. I received an email from KOTC regarding the status of Lowen’s contract. It stated that we couldn’t move forward until this is done. I called Lowen regarding the interview form and Lowen tells me that his girlfriend, Logan, was finishing the up the interview. He then asked if I could finish filling up the rest of the interview because he didn’t know how to respond to some of the other questions. I told Lowen that I could finish up his interview for him. I asked if he was able was able to email back the contract to KOTC and he replied "No, because I don’t have a scanner". I asked him if he wanted me to sign for him and email it back for him and he replied, "If can coach", meaning yes. I told Lowen that I would do it since I had a scanner.

Next was the OneFC contract, which Lowen initials and signs during practice, which was about 9 days later after sending the KOTC contract. In the contract, there was a section KOTC put in there that stated that OneFC contract will not conflict with the KOTC contract which I explained to him in detail. While we went over EVERY PAGE, he initialed that section and continued through the rest of the ONEFC pages. Since we were at our training facility (Powerhouse Gym Aiea) I e-faxed it from the gym office. Lowen was given a copy of that contract and took it home. Then the bout agreement for the Colossa fight came in (which was Lowen’s FIRST OneFC fight). Lowen signed it, we emailed it back. Lowen wins the $2000 to show, $2000 to win, and an additional $1000 finish bonus. Victor Cui was so impressed with his performance; they sent Lowen an additional $1000 " locker room" bonus when he got home. This was a total of $6000 in his 3rd pro fight.

During this time I referred him to a manager, Jason Karpel, of Elite Management. I told Lowen that he would need a manager because "I know you will blow up and these guys can help you get more sponsorship money and into the big shows". At this point, Lowen is going into his 2nd OneFC fight against Felipe Enomoto making $2500 to show, $2500 to win, with a finish bonus of a $1250 and a 20% increase off the whole sum for every win. Lowen wins and purse totals $6250. I told Lowen that I have taken him as far as I could and at the next level he would need a manager. So Jason Karpel talks with Lowen and his father, Myles, and begins to work on Lowen’s behalf in good faith that Lowen will sign with Jason Karpel. Karpel then went on to get Lowen sponsored by Jaco Clothing and some other main sponsors. I was able to land him a local sponsor (Pound 4 Pound), which paid for Lowen’s gym membership as well as travel money when he fought. Lowen VERBALLY agreed to sign with Karpel. He ended up NOT signing with Karpel after he already received sponsorship and gear for his first OneFC fight. It was 9 months later and well into both contracts that Lowen finally signs with Karpel.

Meanwhile, during this time Karpel is still working on behalf of Lowen with only a verbal agreement. Lowen then fights in California for the KOTC World Title; again signing a contract IN FRONT of the California Commission at weigh-ins acknowledging his commitment and fulfillment of his KOTC contract. Lowen wins the title, his KOTC purse is $1000 to show, $1000 to win (after California commission taxes and licensing, he walks away with $1600). We all go out to dinner with Terry Trebilcock. There is about 8-10 of us on the dinner table (Kai Kamaka, Lowen Tynanes, Logan Garcia, Kaleo Kwan, Nathan Thorell, Ian Dela Cuesta, Myles "Boonie" Tynanes, Hawaii Promoter Jay Bolos). Terry once again is explaining the plan for Lowen and the rest of the team for their KOTC fights. This is when we learn about Lowen’s next fight, which was setup for OneFC versus Felipe Enomoto.

So, as you can see there were numerous occasions when Lowen and Terry had discussions about his contract. So the next morning we were driving from LA to Las Vegas for Ian Dela Cuesta’s tryout for the 135lb Ultimate Fighter. On our way to Las Vegas, Terry calls and informs me that he arranged and paid for our group have 3 rooms paid by him for 3 days so we could all be comfortable and have fun.

Two months later, we head to back to Manila for the Enomoto fight.

Next fight was scheduled for July 5, 2013 in KOTC in Manila, which Lowen unexpectedly pulled out due supposedly to a nose injury and needed surgery. This info was given to my by his teammate at the time, Ian Dela Cuesta. LOWEN DID NOT TELL ME AT ANY TIME that he did not want to fight for KOTC. On Saturday, 6-22-13, Lowen’s father contacted me to say that Lowen didn’t want to fight for KOTC because "KOTC is cheap". I immediately scrambled to find him a replacement and did with Kaleo Kwan, another teammate at the time. Since that day Lowen has not trained with the 808 Fight Factory.

All Tynanes brothers are great athletes and very humble kids. I would like to see Lowen in the cage as well. I believe he has the potential to be the next BJ Penn for Hawaii and I have said this time and time again. I honestly believe things just moved a lot faster then he expected and now that it has, he is trying to capitalize on the moment. In conclusion, if it were not for KOTC opening up opportunities for Lowen, he would still be fighting in small amateur shows. KOTC kick started his career by giving him the URCC fight and the ONEFC contract to represent KOTC. With that being said, I wish Lowen all the best for his future.
Image caption Waking up too early and having problems settling back to sleep may have a negative impact on the heart, a study shows

People who have trouble drifting off to sleep may be at increased risk of heart failure, researchers say.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, followed more than 50,000 people for 11 years.

Scientists found those who suffered several nights of poor sleep were more likely to develop the condition, in which the heart fails to pump properly.

Experts say further research is needed to see if a lack of sleep causes heart failure or the link is more complex.

"Luckily many of the things that reduce the chance of heart failure also reduce insomnia; good diet, exercise, weight loss and not smoking Dr Tim Chico, Univeristy of Sheffield

Scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at more than 50,000 people aged between 20 and 89. At the beginning of the study, none of them were known to have heart failure.

In this condition the muscles of the heart are often too out of shape to do their job properly - they may be too weak or too stiff to pump blood around the body at the right pressure.

More than 750,000 people in the UK have heart failure and for the majority there is no cure.

People with the disorder may feel increasingly breathless and exhausted.

And as heart failure worsens, it can be difficult to get a full night's rest - but the Norwegian study is one of few to investigate whether poor sleepers without the condition are at risk of getting it in later life.

'Stress hormones'

During the research, the participants were asked whether they had any difficulties getting to sleep or staying asleep and whether they felt fully restored after a night's slumber.

People who had trouble falling asleep and remaining asleep each night were three times more likely to develop heart failure than those who reported no trouble sleeping.

Those who experienced substandard sleep that failed to leave them fully refreshed were also at risk.

And this link between a bad night's sleep and heart failure remained true despite researchers taking smoking, obesity and other well known triggers of insomnia and heart problems into account.

The researchers say it is unclear exactly why poor sleep and heart failure are associated in this way.

Dr Laugsand, lead author of the study, said: "We don't know whether insomnia truly causes heart failure. But if it does, the good thing is it is a potentially treatable condition.

"So evaluating sleep problems might provide additional information in the prevention of heart failure."

He suggests the lack of sleep may provoke harmful responses in the body.

Heart Failure In this condition the heart fails to pump blood around the body effectively. Most commonly this is due to damage to the muscles of the heart because of: Heart attacks

High blood pressure

Excessive alcohol

Cardiomyopathies - a group of diseases that affect heart muscle

Some people are born with heart failure British Heart Foundation

"When you have insomnia your body releases stress hormones which in turn may effect the heart in a negative way," he said..

The same team of researchers have previously reported a link between people prone to insomnia and heart attacks.

'Unpleasant condition'

And diabetes, depression and poor brain function have all been linked to missing restful hours in bed.

Dr Tim Chico, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Sheffield said: "This is an association study - it links insomnia to heart failure, but does not prove that insomnia causes heart failure or vice versa. Studies like this raise interesting suggestions that need further work to examine.

"Insomnia is a very unpleasant condition, but there are effective lifestyle changes that can reduce it, such as weight loss and exercise.

"Luckily many of the things that reduce the chance of heart failure also reduce insomnia - good diet, exercise, weight loss and not smoking."

June Davison, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This research shows a link between insomnia and your heart, but this doesn't mean sleepless nights cause heart failure.

"It's well known that getting enough sleep is vital for your mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

"Trouble drifting off can be helped by taking a warm bath to relax, or avoiding caffeine and heavy meals too close to the end of the day.

"If lack of sleep is becoming a problem and affecting your daily life, have a chat with your GP."
Chanting “Long live the Intifada,” University of Texas at Austin activists recently stormed a class to protest and disrupt a talk by a guest lecturer.

Waving Palestinian flags and shouting anti-Israel epithets, twelve members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) entered the public event, sponsored by Institute for Israeli Studies Professor Ami Pedahzur and hosting Stanford University military historian Dr. Gil-Li Vardi.

Throughout the incident — during which Pedahzur insisted that the invasive students either “sit down and learn something” or leave — the PSC activists filmed everything on their cellphone cameras.

Since that episode, which took place on Friday, November 13, mere hours before Paris was brutally attacked by ISIS terrorists, Pedahzur, professor of government and founding director of the Institute for Israel Studies, has become the focus of a PSC intimidation campaign. This includes a petition circulated by the PSC and claims that Pedahzur was violent.

“We were met with physical force and intimidation,” the PSC said in a statement.

A UT Austin professor as well as an attendee escalated what was supposed to be a reading of a prepared two-minute statement, culminating in professor Ami Pedahzur physically pressing his body against a PSC member, nose-to-nose in a move to physically intimidate the student. Pedahzur had to be restrained by 3 people.

Watching the video of the episode, which was uploaded to YouTube by PSC members immediately after they crashed the event, one gets a sense of the menacing nature of the demonstration — on the part of the students, not those trying to subdue them.

In an exclusive interview with The Algemeiner on Tuesday, Pedahzur described the incident, the first of its kind he says he has experienced in his career — as professor of government, the Arnold S. Chaplik Professor in Israel and Diaspora Studies and founding director of the Institute for Israel Studies — and the ongoing nightmare he is now living as a result of it. Wearing a disguise on campus and fearing for the safety of his family and students says it in a nutshell.

“Along with the PSC petition smearing my name and accusing me of inappropriate behavior, I’ve received death threats,” Pedhazur said. “But no one at the university has offered to protect me or my students. That is why I went to the police last Monday to request protection for my class — titled ‘Suicide Terror’ — which is in a basement, so in an emergency situation, it would be very hard to evacuate 95 students. I couldn’t take the chance that because of my name, someone would try to do away with a ‘Zionist professor.’”

The first course of action Pedhazur took was to vacate the offices at the Israeli Studies Institute, and, he said, “Police gave us recommendations on how to secure the facility, so as not to put anybody at risk.”

What the university did in the immediate aftermath of the incident was to instruct Pedahzur to defer all requests from journalists to its public affairs department. Pedahzur’s silence “gave the groups the opportunity to smear me. The whole field was open to them.”

In addition, he said, “I read press releases about the intention of these students to press charges against me. So I hired a lawyer.” (It was his attorney’s permission that enabled this interview.)

It was not until 10 days after the event that the university offered an official response. On November 23, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Randy Diehl issued the following statement, which was also sent to The Algemeiner, following a request to speak to Pedahzur:

Amidst the current controversy concerning the disruption of an academic lecture sponsored by the Institute for Israel Studies, I want to reiterate my deep admiration for the work of Professor Ami Pedahzur and the Institute for Israel Studies in conducting courses and public programming that represent the highest standard of academic discourse and dispassionate reasoning and research on a controversial subject of enormous importance. Students and faculty of every background, including Palestinians and Israelis alike, have enthusiastically received Prof. Pedahzur’s courses and his supervision of undergraduate and graduate research. Although reviews are still ongoing, I wish to emphasize that there are places on campus for responsibly discussing disagreements. Disruption of a visiting scholar’s invited academic lecture violates principles of academic freedom and free speech that are crucial to our mission as a great university.

Asked why this particular lecture, open to the public and titled, “The Origin of a Species: The Birth of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Military Culture,” sparked particular outrage, Pedahzur said that it was “completely orchestrated” anger and part of a nationwide campaign.

“It was a targeted opportunity; it was entrapment,” Pedahzur said. “We at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies have never had a single problem since we started the program in 2007. But last week’s episode, based on what I’ve heard, was an attempt by different groups to attach themselves to a larger movement that has been afflicting campuses, such as Mizzou [University of Missouri].”

Pedahzur, an Israeli who has been in the US for 12 years, pointed to the fact, for example, that the PSC students “didn’t say a word about the news from Paris that same night. These rioters said nothing on Facebook nor condemned the attacks. They call themselves ‘Palestinian,’ but most of them don’t even speak Arabic, other than what they’ve learned in language classes at the university. Most of them are not even Muslims; they’re American kids that don’t have anything to do with Islam.”

But, he added, “I am going to do whatever I can as a researcher to find out who is behind this group,” whose leader has openly called on people to rally behind Hamas, Islamic jihad and other groups against the Palestinian Authority, which he views as ‘collaborators’ with Israel.

Pedahzur also laughed bitterly at the notion that the students in question, while defaming his character, are claiming to be the ones who are living in fear. “Really? Who, exactly, are they afraid of? Kids at Hillel House?”
This is a tale of New Jersey politics. So it is only fitting that it begins — as it will end — in a courtroom. It is the spring of 1978, and a boy wants to sue the government. Charles A. Poekel Jr., a suburban attorney, is staring across his desk at his client, a Livingston High School junior who’s trying to run for a minor office but has been disqualified because he can’t vote. The 16-year-old sits next to his parents, but he does most of the talking. He knows the names of all the county bosses and town committeemen. Poekel understands impatient ambition — he ran for Congress himself at the age of 28. But he’s never met anyone like this boy, David Wildstein.

“It is very unusual that someone of that age would be that all-consumed with politics,” Poekel recalls many years later. “It was like having a child prodigy as a musician, but he was a child prodigy as a politician. I would call him a political Mozart.”

Wildstein takes his case to court. He makes the local TV news, the Times, and the front page of the Livingston weekly paper, the West Essex Tribune, which has been covering his activities since middle school. (It straightforwardly reported his defection from the Democrats to the Republicans at the age of 12.) When the judge rejects his request, the boy remains defiant. “I am in no way over the hill,” he declares, “and can assure the voters of Livingston that they have only just begun to see the name of David Wildstein.”

Video: A Brief History of “Bridgegate”

Back at Livingston High, Wildstein is considered an oddball. He is chubby, with glasses, and a strident conservative. Wildstein doesn’t fit into any of the school’s cliques, but he hangs around the margins of the baseball team. He is a baseball nerd — loves the strategy, the way the game can be broken down into numbers — and acts as team statistician. Livingston is a championship contender, and the players are popular. Everyone loves the catcher, who is the president of the class a year behind Wildstein’s, a beefy jock with a shaggy haircut named Chris Christie.

That May, as Wildstein is trying to run for office, Christie makes the paper for socking a home run into a neighboring swimming pool. Christie’s middle-class family lives in a modest brick home on the other side of town from the Wildsteins, who own a successful manufacturing business and live across the street from the estate of Tom Kean, soon to be New Jersey’s governor. But Wildstein and Christie do cross paths, working together as volunteers on one of Kean’s campaigns and taking a road trip to a rally in Trenton. They are friendly, but then Christie is that way with everyone. He wears his ambition as amiably as a varsity jacket.

Wildstein’s ambition fits him awkwardly, like a grown-up suit a few sizes too large. When he’s a senior, he runs a write-in campaign for the school board on a platform of cracking down on drug use and vandalism. He submits endorsement letters to the local paper from fellow students and his social-studies teacher. The teacher promptly accuses Wildstein of “political manipulation,” claiming he was tricked into signing a letter he hadn’t written. Though they later issue a joint statement, saying the matter was “basically a misunderstanding,” Wildstein still finishes with just 37 votes.

Christopher Christie, class of 1980. Photo: Courtesy of the Livingston Public Library, NJ

So now it’s 1984. Ronald Reagan is running for reelection, “Born in the USA” is piping out of every radio, and Christie is graduating from the University of Delaware, where he ran the student government and met his future wife, Mary Pat Foster. Wildstein has returned home from Washington, D.C., where he attended college and worked as a congressional aide. He has been managing campaigns for Jersey politicians, including a state senator named Louis Bassano. In an era before ubiquitous computers, Wildstein pores over reams of precinct-level voting results, looking for angles. (“He would spend hours and hours and hours,” Bassano recalls. “I would walk into the office and there he is, looking over the figures, making notes, making notes.”) Wildstein has an obsession with New Jersey political lore, loves the old stories of clubhouse skulduggery.

When Wildstein says he plans to run for office himself, Bassano thinks it’s a bad idea — the kid has got tactical talent but a backroom personality. Wildstein proves him wrong, winning a seat on Livingston’s town council. Two years later, amid a racially tinged uproar over affordable housing, the Republicans win a majority on the council and elect Wildstein to the rotating position of mayor. He is just 25.

“He was quite a phenom,” says Chuck Hardwick, the Speaker of the New Jersey state assembly at the time, for whom Wildstein worked as an adviser. “The talk then was that he was going to be the first Jewish president of the United States.”

But Wildstein is preoccupied with being king of Livingston. “We used to call him the Wild Man,” says his former high-school classmate Leonard Sorge. “He had some wild ideas.” The post of mayor is a part-time position with little power, but he is always at town hall, meddling with the bureaucrats. He shows up early to monitor what time they come to work. Teachers at the high school think he visits an inordinate amount, chumming around with the kids in Key Club, for which he is an adviser.

“He was into everything, he wanted to know everything, and he had something to say about everything,” says Pat Sebold, a longtime Democratic officeholder from Livingston. “He was a major disaster.”

Visiting the high school, Wildstein allegedly tells a group of students that a certain township policeman is “a bad apple.” The cop sues him for defamation. The mayor verbally attacks a municipal judge, claiming that he “continues to take the side of criminals” because he released a pair of shoplifting suspects from Brooklyn. The judge’s admirers are outraged. “I look forward to the time when Livingston will again have a mayor who puts the township first and his own political ambitions second,” Todd ­Christie — Chris’s younger brother — writes to the Tribune.

Toward the end of his term, Wildstein organizes a coup against the Republican councilman who is supposed to rotate into the mayor’s office next. The councilman accuses him of “terror politics” and trickery. “David’s ploy must be criticized on two counts,” he tells the public. “Most importantly, it was wrong. Secondly, the scheme was doomed to backfire from the start.” That September, facing dim prospects, Wildstein announces that he is dropping his bid for reelection. Democrats retake the Livingston council, which remains in their control to this day.

“A lot of people say that it stays Democrat because of David,” Bassano says. “He would probably have done the party a lot more justice if he had stuck to electing other people.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in New Jersey, Chris Christie goes through a debacle of his own: a term on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders full of mudslinging, infighting, and litigation, culminating in an ignominious last-place finish in his reelection bid. By the end of the 1990s, both Christie and Wildstein appear to be finished in electoral politics. Christie, an attorney, is back in private practice, working as a lobbyist. Wildstein is running his family’s company, Apache Mills, a leading manufacturer of doormats.

Christie and Wildstein share a laugh, during the third day of Fort Lee’s traffic gridlock.

On February 1, 2000, a crudely designed website appears on the internet, run by a person who goes by the name Wally Edge. The real Edge was a newspaper publisher, two-time Jersey governor, and tool of the Atlantic City machine of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration of the Prohibition-era series Boardwalk Empire. The pseudonymous Edge is a purveyor of political gossip. It is actually Wildstein, hiding behind a characteristically obscure historical reference. The same personal attributes that were liabilities to him as a politician — his obsessiveness, his lack of tact, his fascination with personal conflict — prove to be well suited to the internet. The word blogging doesn’t yet exist, but that is what he aims to do, offering readers a mix of score-settling rumors, lobbyist chatter, trial balloons, and arcane trivia.

For the next decade, the true identity of Wally Edge is the subject of much speculation in political circles, but few guess it’s David Wildstein. He’s gotten married and moved to the town of Montville, where he lives in a brick McMansion on two wooded acres. He has been selling floor coverings and doing a little political consulting on the side. One of the politicians he has stayed in contact with is Bob Franks, who represented Livingston in the state assembly during Wildstein’s mayoral tenure. Franks is a brilliant strategist who mentored many operatives. By 2000, Franks is a congressman running a long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate. In its early days, Wildstein’s site, PoliticsNJ, seems to exist, at least partly, to promote Franks’s candidacy. His regular column, “The Inside Edge,” defends Franks from his primary rivals’ attacks, suggesting they worked out a corrupt bargain to coordinate against him.

Wildstein’s agenda, though, proves to be larger than advancing any one candidate. In a posted mission statement, he says the site “means to inject our views into the political arena.” His biases, he admits, are personal: “We have favorites just like you, and there are some New Jersey pols we really dislike.” Wally Edge’s favorites include three operatives from the Franks campaign: Mike DuHaime, Bill Stepien, and Bill Baroni. All three will go on to become major players in New Jersey politics and key figures in the Chris Christie administration.

Wally Edge is not overtly partisan, though. As they say in baseball, he is a fan of the game. He disdains those he deems phonies and appreciates operators. (“Among those of us who pay inordinate attention to politics in New Jersey, Wally Edge had an unusual seat at the table,” says Robert Torricelli, the Democratic power broker known as “the Torch,” who was a U.S. senator at the time. “I always liked him because I was always one of his favorites.”) Wildstein would sometimes describe his audience as “people who get the joke.” The joke is that, beneath all the theatrics of ideology, politics is about people competing for status. In that sense — and in many others — our institutions of government are not so different from high school.

Chris Christie has found a new calling, too. He spends the 2000 campaign raising money and working as a lawyer for George W. Bush, drawing Wally Edge’s ire when he appears to be cooperating with one of Franks’s primary opponents. But then Bush appoints Christie to be a U.S. Attorney, and he begins to arrest public officeholders for corruption. In New Jersey, criminal investigations are considered to be politics by other means — that’s another part of the joke — and Wildstein is quick to appreciate how cannily Christie is positioning himself. In 2002, the website names him its “Politician of the Year.” It constantly touts his prospects for higher office, attaching “corruption-busting” before every mention of his name.

And there is so much corruption to bust! Christie obtains an indictment for Essex County executive James Treffinger, one of Franks’s old GOP-primary opponents, and has him handcuffed in front of his family home. Politics­NJ is credited with the scoop and revels in Treffinger’s downfall. After he pleads guilty, the site publishes a Photoshopped picture of the politician in prison stripes. Christie later arrests developer Charles Kushner, a major Democratic contributor, who ultimately pleads guilty to making illegal campaign contributions and retaliating against a witness, his brother-in-law, by luring him into a videotaped encounter with a prostitute. (PoliticsNJ refers to him as a “budding filmmaker.”) Whenever Wally Edge finds out that Christie is investigating someone — as he frequently does, somehow — he writes that the target is “hearing the cellos,” a reference to the Jaws theme.

In 2004, Governor Jim McGreevey, a Democrat, starts hearing the cellos. An FBI informant has caught him on tape uttering “Machiavelli,” which is allegedly a code word signaling his complicity in an illegal fund-raising scheme. The governor hastily resigns, explaining that he is a “gay American” and has been carrying on an affair with a former aide. (PoliticsNJ has been dropping hints about the aide and his “unique skill set” for years.) Republican leaders then try to draft Christie to run for governor, and Edge has an authoritative description of Christie’s thinking as he considers, and then rejects, the opportunity. Christie will always deny leaking, but he definitely appreciates the site’s influence. Long after Wildstein has stopped blogging, Christie still calls him “Wally.”

Wally Edge has more power than David Wildstein ever did. Communicating almost exclusively by AOL Instant Messenger, Wildstein maintains a web of informants inside both parties. Over the years, PoliticsNJ evolves into a real news organization. The site hires a small staff of professional reporters, none of whom know their boss’s true identity. Wildstein turns out to be a good judge of talent. One of the website’s first hires is Steve Kornacki, who goes on to become a political analyst on MSNBC.

Wildstein has dreams of expanding his model into every state, but the site can never generate much revenue from its few ads. In 2007, he decides to sell the site to someone who can invest. An unlikely buyer materializes: Jared Kushner, Charles’s 26-year-old son. Wally Edge announces the sale with his own invocation of Machiavelli: “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.”

Wildstein’s email presented during hearings on the lane closures. Photo: Mel Evans/AP Photo

The Kushner family is also from Livingston. Charles’s reputation may be tarnished, but Jared has a plan to expand their influence by buying media properties, first in New York (he already owns the New York Observer) and now back home in New Jersey. Wildstein agrees to sell on two conditions: He wants to remain anonymous, and he wants to keep possession of Wally Edge’s AOL email account, which contains much information that might interest the Kushners. (“The repository of secrets that David collected is like nothing I’d ever seen,” says Jordan Lieberman, who managed the business side of PoliticsNJ for years.) Kushner agrees. He tells his employees at the Observer that they could learn something about digital media from Wally Edge, whom he admiringly calls “a wild man.” Wildstein swoons for Kushner, decides he is another prodigy. He ends up attending Kushner’s wedding to Ivanka Trump.

Kushner puts Wildstein in charge of building a national network, and they hire staff in 17 states. But it turns out statehouse gossip is hard to produce at scale. After the 2008 election and the real-estate crash, Kushner decides to abandon the project and lays off most of the staff. Wildstein goes back to running the New Jersey site. The 2009 governor’s race is coming up, and Kushner has a very personal interest in that, because Christie is on the ballot.

Kushner harbors a deep antipathy toward the prosecutor who locked up his father, and Wildstein knows how his new boss wants the race to be covered. “In 2009,” says a former Observer employee, “the site exists to destroy Chris Christie.” When Christie wins, though, the governor is forgiving: He has a job for Wally Edge. He needs an agent at the Port Authority. When Wildstein defects, sources say, the Kushners are furious. Someone leaks Edge’s true identity to the Newark Star-Ledger.

The near-universal reaction among the insiders he covered is: David who? But Wildstein is known to people who matter, especially Mike DuHaime, now Christie’s chief political strategist. Wildstein’s new post, at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, comes with a huge salary, by government standards, and the specially created title of director of interstate capital projects. It quickly becomes evident that Wildstein is not there to build bridges.

“Wildstein has been waiting his whole life to get into a massive government bureaucracy,” says a former colleague, “with all kinds of nooks and crannies and levers.”

Why would Christie want to turn David Wildstein into a power broker? The Port Authority may look like a boring bureaucracy, but it’s really a self-propelled patronage machine. Every time you cross the Hudson River, or land at one of the region’s airports, or swipe a MetroCard at the World Trade Center transit hub, a coin rings in the Port Authority’s coffers. It has a 1,700-member police force, an army of engineers and lawyers, and the capacity to spend billions of dollars on construction projects. The governors of New York and New Jersey jointly control the authority, and the two sides clash eternally. The New Jersey faction is convinced that it is being cheated out of its fair share of the budget.

Wildstein’s direct boss at the authority is Baroni, his close friend from the Franks campaign, but Wildstein is seen as Christie’s inside man. (“He came directly — like a missile — out of the governor’s office,” says a former Port Authority executive.) Wildstein meets frequently with Christie’s advisers, DuHaime and the other Franks-campaign veteran Stepien, and more occasionally with the governor himself.

“When David Wildstein walked into a room, it was clear that Chris Christie was represented,” says Torricelli, who dealt with the Port Authority as an attorney for an auto-importing facility that had a lease dispute with the agency. “I thought they had rather direct communication.”

Wildstein can imagine many creative ways to put the machinery of the Port Authority to use. (Stepien will later allegedly tell the governor that Wildstein came up with “50 crazy ideas a week.”) And because the Port Authority is an independent agency, Christie can maintain a deniable distance. When the Port Authority needs to raise tolls, Wildstein and Baroni come up with an elaborate ruse to make it look like Christie is heroically fighting the bureaucracy. When the city of Bayonne is about to go bankrupt, they orchestrate a land deal that bails it out, removing the burden from Christie.

Inside the authority, Wildstein makes it plain that he is watching out for the governor’s interests. The civil servants who work at the authority are accustomed to some political interference, but Wildstein’s conduct shocks them. (“It was extreme,” says a former port official. “Full intimidation: ‘I’m Christie’s guy. I rule.’ ”) Co-workers report that Wildstein is seen poking around the office before dawn. He shows up at meetings he isn’t invited to and begins tapping notes on his tablet. In an email to an aide, Scott Rechler, a powerful board member from New York, references the widespread concern that Wildstein may be eavesdropping on phone conversations.

Wildstein clashes with the authority’s professional department heads and conspires to purge low-level employees, replacing them with his own people, who are assumed to be spies. His powers reach into every area: port operations, the airports, the police. There is a rumor that he uses an emergency-access lane to cut the line every morning at the Lincoln Tunnel. One day, during a routine tour of the George Washington Bridge, he notices a set of orange cones are blocking off three toll lanes, offering direct access to drivers approaching the bridge from neighboring Fort Lee. He is annoyed and wants to know why the town appears to have its own entryway. The bridge’s manager tells him there is a long-standing deal with the mayor. Wildstein apparently files the observation away.

By 2013, everyone in Christie’s orbit is working toward one objective: the White House. He is going to run, for sure, and the only question is whether Republicans are ready for a blunt-spoken, sometimes rude northeastern populist with a flair for social media. Christie first has to get past his reelection campaign in New Jersey, but that’s just a formality. He’s so popular that the Democrats only put up a token opponent. In order to demonstrate his centrist appeal, though, Christie’s strategists want to run up the score by winning endorsements from as many Democratic officeholders as possible.

The endorsement push is coordinated by Stepien, Christie’s campaign manager, and Bridget Kelly, a state official who runs the governor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. (The two are also quietly dating.) The governor’s allies at the Port Authority are key players in their strategy. Drawing on a list of targeted mayors, Baroni raids a JFK hangar filled with debris from the Twin Towers and distributes pieces of steel to towns around New Jersey for use in memorials. He and Wildstein conduct so many VIP tours of ground zero that they demand — and receive — a new entry gate for their convenience.

The courtship is not subtle: Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, later recounts that when Wildstein offered his family a tour, he repeatedly referred to Sokolich as “the one I was told to be nice to.” But after hemming and hawing, the mayor eventually makes it clear to Kelly’s office that he’s not going to back the governor. Soon after, in what prosecutors will describe as an act of political reprisal, Wildstein and Kelly start discussing a scheme. On August 12, 2013, Kelly checks with her staff one final time to make sure they won’t win Sokolich over. Early the next morning, she sends Wildstein a terse email.

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

“Got it,” Wildstein replies.

A month later, on the first day of school in Fort Lee, Wildstein arrives at the bridge at dawn to supervise the implementation of his plan, which he calls a “traffic study.” All the Port Authority employees involved know something strange and colossally stupid is afoot, but no one says anything, because they are all terrified of Wildstein. The cones are reconfigured so that Fort Lee’s access is cut to a single lane. Inside the bridge’s command center, via a live video feed, Wildstein watches as the rush-hour traffic begins to build. Soon, Fort Lee is totally gridlocked: Buses can’t get children to school. “Is it wrong that I’m smiling?” Kelly, a divorced mother of four, later texts Wildstein. “I feel badly about the kids … I guess.” He responds that they are the children of Democrats.

A Port Authority policeman named Chip Michaels texts Wildstein a report from the streets: “Its fkd up here.” Michaels is another guy from Livingston. He and his brother, a Republican lobbyist, have known both Wildstein and Christie for years. Michaels picks up Wildstein and takes him on a drive to observe the traffic. Then they go to a diner, where they have breakfast and discuss Christie’s presidential hopes.

The first day of the traffic pileup.

All right, so now it’s September 11, the most solemn day of the whole political calendar, and Chris Christie — the candidate who never neglects to mention he was appointed U.S. Attorney the day before the terrorist attacks — is yukking it up with Wildstein at the World Trade Center site. They’re there for the annual memorial service, but it’s also the third day of the closures, and Wildstein has been monitoring the traffic, along with Mayor Sokolich’s increasingly desperate messages to Baroni. (“Radio silence,” Wildstein orders.) Photos of the event show Wildstein standing next to the governor, checking his phone, and sharing a hearty laugh with Christie, Baroni, and others. No one knows what’s so funny, but Wildstein will later allege that they discussed the bridge. It is the last time he and the governor will see each other in person, at least publicly.

By the next day, Sokolich and others in Fort Lee are screaming about public safety and political payback. The “Road Warrior” columnist for the Bergen Record contacts the Port Authority about the mysterious gridlock, and Wildstein forwards the message to Kelly, who is heading down the shore with the governor, responding to a major fire on the Seaside boardwalk. No one knows what she tells Christie, but the lane closures continue. The Record column draws the attention of the Port Authority’s executive director, Pat Foye, a New York appointee. This is the first he’s heard of a “traffic study,” and he freaks out. He orders the lanes reopened, saying the “hasty and ill-advised” closure is both dangerous and illegal. A couple of weeks later, the email from Foye makes its way to reporter Ted Mann at The Wall Street Journal. Wildstein presumes Foye is waging factional warfare, rather than worrying about ambulances and school buses stuck in traffic.

“Holy shit, who does he think he is, Capt. America?” Stepien texts Wildstein.

“Bad guy,” Wildstein says. “Welcome to our world.”

The Christie administration brushes aside accusations of its involvement in causing the gridlock as an absurd conspiracy theory, but the Journal continues to pursue the story, and other outlets follow. Legislative hearings are called, subpoenas are issued, and the governor and his aides hold crisis-management meetings. As late as December 2, Christie is still trying to laugh off suggestions of retaliation. “I worked the cones, actually,” he says sarcastically at a press conference. “Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there in overalls and a hat.”

One day, Wildstein disappears from his office at the Port Authority headquarters, never to return. He can hear the cellos.

In early December, the dormant Wikipedia account Montclair0055 — whose sparse prior contributions include creating a page for the state senator who gave Wildstein his first paying job at age 12 and laudatory additions to the entries for Baroni and DuHaime — stirs to life. As the clamor of the investigation intensifies, ­Montclair0055 writes late into the night on subjects that mirror Wildstein’s obsessions, adding a critical entry for an obscure Democratic Party hack who was one of Wally Edge’s favorite targets and another about “the Curse of the 38th,” a phrase (used exclusively on PoliticsNJ) to describe the voting history of a Bergen County legislative district. The editor revises the page of Steve Kornacki to note that he got his start at PoliticsNJ. Montclair0055 seems determined to ensure that the picaresque characters and episodes that so enthralled Wildstein are preserved for posterity. Many of the contributions are later deleted by other Wikipedia editors on the grounds of insignificance.

The night of December 4, Wildstein has dinner in New Brunswick with his friend Mike Drewniak, the governor’s spokesman, and tells him that Christie was aware of the lane closings as they were happening. The message is implicit: He won’t go down alone. The governor’s chief counsel calls Wildstein and tells him his resignation is required immediately.

Wildstein’s subpoena from the state legislative committee arrives on December 12, and he hires a criminal-defense attorney. They could fight to quash it, but instead he hands over 900 pages of emails, texts, and documents. One of those emails is the fateful one from Kelly: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Those eight words are all it takes to ruin several lives.

You can imagine Christie, the former prosecutor, wondering: Why didn’t she just use the goddamn phone? His reputation as an incorruptible truth-teller is rendered ridiculous. Even his hero Bruce Springsteen, in a hilarious knife-twisting gesture, duets with Jimmy Fallon on Late Night in a song about the traffic jam set to the tune of “Born to Run.”*

Christie holds a two-hour press conference, in which he says he was “blindsided” and “humiliated” by the actions of his staff. “Let me just clear something up, okay, about my childhood friend David Wildstein,” he says scornfully. “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.” Christie’s office later circulates a memo to supporters that describes Wildstein as untrustworthy, citing, among other things, the high-school dispute with his social-studies teacher and his odd habit of registering web addresses for the names of his enemies. In January 2015, Wildstein reaches a deal to plead guilty and testify. Baroni and Kelly are indicted four months later.

Christie decides to run for president anyway. He announces his candidacy at Livingston High School. Inside a sweltering gym bedecked with championship banners, the governor is received by a boisterous contingent of his old friends from the class of 1980. “Lots of people have asked me over the course of last week, why here?” he says. “Why here? Because everything started here for me. The confidence. The education. The friends. The family. And the love that I’ve always felt for and from this community.” Outside the gym, protesters picket the speech, waving signs that read BULLY.

On the campaign trail, he keeps getting incredulous questions about the juvenile traffic-jam prank. He drops out after a poor finish in New Hampshire and endorses Donald Trump. This puts him in the awkward company of the nominee’s son-in-law and strategic adviser, Jared Kushner. Kushner finally bests his father’s accuser, crushing Christie’s hopes of the vice-presidential nomination, but Christie still retains an important place in Trump’s small circle of loyalists. If Trump wins, you can assume there will be a place for him in the administration, perhaps as attorney general.

That prospect must make Wildstein extremely nervous. After the scandal, he moves to Florida, sells the house in Montville, and loses a precipitous amount of weight. When he arrives at court to enter his guilty plea, the reporters covering the case hardly recognize him. By the terms of his deal with prosecutors, he is expected to be the star witness against Kelly and Baroni, who, if convicted, would likely face two to three years in prison. It is rumored that their trial will bring significant further disclosures. Wildstein, the collector of secrets, is said to have walked out of the Port Authority with an enormous amount of documentary evidence, including the hard drive to his former friend Baroni’s computer.

Looming over the trial is the question of Christie’s level of involvement in his old classmate’s crazy bridge idea. Prosecutors have filed a sealed memorandum, listing people who were aware of the scheme; it is widely presumed that Christie’s name is on it. If he is called to testify, the governor will have to tell his story under oath. At a minimum, the spectacle will be embarrassing for Christie and threatening to any future chance of a cabinet post. At worst, the trial could destroy what is left of a career he’d once thought could plausibly culminate in the presidency.

Among veteran observers of New Jersey politics, there is an ongoing debate about who is most to blame for Chris Christie’s downfall. There are essentially two theories. One holds that Christie, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to authorize a retaliatory traffic jam. The other holds that Wildstein, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to go forward with his scheme without Christie’s approval. The trial is scheduled to begin on September 19. Soon we may hear the rest of the tale and, at long last, get the joke.

*This article appears in the September 19, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.

*This article has been corrected to reflect that Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon performed a song about the traffic closure on Late Night, not SNL or The Tonight Show.
The College Football Playoff committee released its first rankings to great fanfare. The list is sensible, with proper credit given to teams with good wins and/or acceptable losses, and there is a pretty obvious explanation for why and where these rankings differ from, say, the AP Poll or F/+ rankings.

Ole Miss ranks three spots higher via the committee, thanks both to the win over Alabama and, in theory, a lower level of recency bias (the Rebels lost just last week) in the committee room. TCU ranks three spots higher than in the AP poll, potentially because it wasn't dragged down by preseason rankings. Notre Dame, lacking any sort of marquee win, ranks four spots lower than in the AP poll.

We'll see how things like recency and conference leads factor moving forward. I still feel it's misguided for the committee to put out weekly updates. It serves no purpose but to open up opportunities for unexplained movement and criticism. Still, this was a pretty good start. Now let's figure out what to expect moving forward.

***

Each Wednesday, I've been using the F/+ rankings and the win probabilities derived from them to peer into the future a bit. (For example, here's last week's ACC piece.) Odds change as more evidence becomes available and the rankings themselves shift, but it's a good way to look at odds, expectations and potential pratfalls. With all of the power conferences now getting updated each Wednesday at Football Study Hall, let's turn our gaze here to the national title race.

We'll start with the most obvious question. Of the teams ranked in the committee's current top 25, which ones are the most likely to finish with the best records?

Below are two tables, one showing you both the differences between the Playoff rankings and F/+ rankings and teams' current projected win totals, and one showing you each team's odds of finishing with a given regular-season record.

Rankings and win projections

Team Record CFP rank AP rank F/+ rank Projected wins Mississippi State 7-0 1 1 4 10.53 Florida State 7-0 2 2 11 10.51 Auburn 6-1 3 4 2 9.41 Ole Miss 7-1 4 7 1 10.21 Oregon 7-1 5 5 5 10.57 Alabama 7-1 6 3 3 9.92 TCU 6-1 7 10 7 10.37 Michigan State 7-1 8 8 10 10.26 Kansas State 6-1 9 11 17 8.96 Notre Dame 6-1 10 6 19 9.08 Georgia 6-1 11 9 14 9.94 Arizona 6-1 12 14 27 9.18 Baylor 6-1 13 12 20 9.58 Arizona State 6-1 14 15 18 9.82 Nebraska 7-1 15 17 13 10.42 Ohio State 6-1 16 13 8 10.18 Utah 6-1 17 18 32 7.96 Oklahoma 5-2 18 19 6 9.69 LSU 7-2 19 16 12 9.02 West Virginia 6-2 20 20 25 8.59 Clemson 6-2 21 22 9 9.58 UCLA 6-2 22 25 24 8.74 East Carolina 6-1 23 21 46 10.13 Duke 6-1 24 24 28 10.07 Louisville 6-2 25 15 8.71

Win probabilities for each ranked team

With trips to Ole Miss and Alabama on the horizon, Mississippi State, No. 4 in the current F/+ rankings, doesn't have the greatest chance in the world of finishing undefeated. But there's still about a 1-in-2 chance that the Bulldogs reach the SEC title game (if they qualify) at 11-1 or better.

Meanwhile, it appears Oregon and Nebraska have the best chances to reach their respective conference title games with just one overall loss.

If the season ended today by Jason Kirk Here's the best guess as to how the six big New Year's bowls would look. The top four in the rankings go to the Rose and Sugar semifinals, with No. 1 getting its closer site. Conference ties determine the Orange. The top non-power-conference team is guaranteed a spot. And the committee matches up the other three games according to geography and appeal. Peach No. 8 Michigan State vs. No. 23 East Carolina Fiesta No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 7 TCU Orange No. 6 Alabama vs. No. 21 Clemson Cotton No. 9 Kansas State vs. No. 10 Notre Dame Rose No. 2 Florida State vs. No. 3 Auburn Sugar No. 1 Mississippi State vs. No. 4 Ole Miss

Let's get to some obvious questions.

FSU might finish 10-2?

One of the most interesting parts of last week's ACC projections was the slack FSU does not get moving forward.

FSU has crept back into the F/+ top 10 and is still getting slight dings for Winston missing the Clemson game and for Oklahoma State's J.W. Walsh getting injured right after the FSU game. So all of the Seminoles' win probabilities are probably slightly low because of that. [...] A lot of our assumptions, however, are premised around the helmet FSU wears. If Clemson were 7-0 with a few close wins, we wouldn't trust that the Tigers would continue to win. If Louisville or BC were in this position, we really wouldn't trust it. Because FSU won the national title last year, and because we recognize so many star-caliber names on the two-deep, we perhaps justifiably assume the 'Noles will be just fine. I know I do.

With road games remaining against two good teams, the win projections weren't incredibly kind to FSU last week. And with Miami's dominant win over Virginia Tech pushing the Canes to 16th overall in the F/+ rankings, FSU's odds aren't any better this week. I don't think you'll find too many people willing to bet on FSU losing to both Louisville and Miami in the coming weeks, but the numbers are pointing out that it's at least a possibility.

Nebraska and Duke? What?

Nebraska has crept up to 13th in the F/+ rankings. The Huskers don't have much to offer beyond Ameer Abdullah's rushing yards, but that alone has gotten them into the top 30 of Off. F/+. Meanwhile, the defense is up to 13th thanks to a lack of true weaknesses and an occasionally great pass defense.

Here's the Huskers' remaining conference slate: Purdue (64th), at Wisconsin (29th), Minnesota (42nd) and at Iowa (49th). The trip to Madison looks a lot tougher after the Badgers' total dominance of Maryland last week, but F/+ still really likes Nebraska.

It also really likes Duke, though that's more a function of schedule than quality. The Blue Devils do rank a relatively healthy 28th overall, but that's not exactly the level of a national title contender.

But here's their remaining schedule: at Pittsburgh (38th), at Syracuse (76th), Virginia Tech (30th), North Carolina (59th and rising) and Wake Forest (89th). Pitt is occasionally great and occasionally awful -- the proverbial crazy guy in the fight, capable of ripping off 300 rushing yards or seven fumbles in a single game -- which makes that game a bit of an unknown. Survive Pitt, however, and Duke will be favored in each remaining season game, perhaps by a decent margin. That would put them in position to potentially steal a Playoff bid with an upset of FSU. And while the Blue Devils have to leap a ton of teams for this shot, remember the "we'll place extra value in conference titles" committee proclamation.

(That Duke-FSU upset obviously isn't likely. Just consider yourself warned that "Duke could make the Final Four!!!" might become a story line we actually discuss in about five weeks ... as long as the crazy guy in the fight doesn't take the Devils down this weekend, anyway.)

How does the committee react going forward?

This is a huge question.

More intrigued by next week's @CFBPlayoff rankings than tonight's, because we'll get to see how rankings react to top-10 game. — Brian Fremeau (@bcfremeau) October 28, 2014

No.3 and No.4 play one another this weekend. No.5 is definitely better than the loser of that game. - Poll Logic. Not sure about committee. — Brian Fremeau (@bcfremeau) October 29, 2014

The first iteration of this top 25 was good about giving heft to good wins, avoiding giving extra weight to recent losses, et cetera. But does it simply end up reacting to results like a poll would moving forward? It's easy to look at those probabilities above and figure out how things might shake down overall -- Oregon nabbing a top-3 spot, TCU putting itself in excellent position for the top 4, and whatnot. But now we get to see how the committee reacts to specific wins and losses in real time.

Win probabilities by week

Looking at the above list, we see that the 11-1 cutoff comes roughly at No. 16 Ohio State. After that come either teams that are all but guaranteed to lose once or twice more (Utah) or teams that already have two losses. Let's look at the upcoming slate for the top 16 teams and Duke. If you're looking for where a team might trip up, here's where you should start.

Feel afraid

F/+ sees three teams with a very good chance of losing this week: No. 2 Florida State at No. 25 Louisville, No. 3 Auburn at No. 4 Ole Miss, and No. 12 Arizona at No. 22 UCLA. If any or all of these teams survive their tricky road trips, expect their win probabilities to jump rather dramatically next week.

For Auburn, which still faces trips to Georgia in Week 12 and Alabama in Week 14, a win is imperative. One could see a 10-2 SEC West team nabbing that No. 4 spot in certain circumstances, but nobody's reaching the Playoff at 9-3. An Auburn team that beats Ole Miss and goes 1-1 against UGA and Alabama will have an interesting case.

Meanwhile, at 12th, Arizona has no margin for error whatsoever. The Wildcats are taking on an incredibly volatile UCLA team, one that has proven capable of drubbing a good team on the road (ASU), then losing two straight at home. An Arizona win would give the Wildcats two lovely road wins for the résumé (they beat Oregon earlier in the year) and would clear the path for a bit of an elimination game at Arizona State in Week 14.

Feel pretty nervous

Three teams have win probabilities between 50 and 70 percent this week: No. 4 Ole Miss (hosting No. 3 Auburn), No. 7 TCU (traveling to No. 20 West Virginia), and No. 24 Duke (heading to Pittsburgh). All three have games they'd win two of three times, but that basically means if they roll a 5 or 6 on a die, they lose. Those aren't comfortable odds, and there's only about a 29 percent chance that all three win.

Feel okay about looking ahead

The other nine teams with Week 10 games are looking pretty safe. No. 14 Arizona State has a tough game against No. 17 Utah but is still given a three-in-four chance of winning. No. 5 Oregon (Stanford) and No. 10 Notre Dame (at Navy) aren't completely out of the woods, but they're relatively likely to survive.

On deck

Ohio State, Kansas State, Baylor, and Notre Dame all have pretty safe games this week, but Week 11 will be huge for them. The Buckeyes head to East Lansing for an enormous game against Michigan State, Kansas State goes to Fort Worth for an elimination game of sorts with TCU, Baylor plays at Oklahoma, and Notre Dame plays at Arizona State in a well-timed, interesting, non-conference (for ASU) battle. I'd say Week 11 is a big one, but they're all big now.

Title games

There is, of course, a missing piece in the tables above: for teams in the SEC, Pac-12, Big Ten, and ACC, there might also be a conference title game involved. It's still a bit messy to get that involved in the tables, but here are odds for what could be some of the more relevant potential championship games.

SEC

No. 1 Mississippi State vs. No. 11 Georgia: MSU 70 percent.

No. 3 Auburn vs. No. 11 Georgia: Auburn 75 percent.

No. 4 Ole Miss vs. No. 11 Georgia: Ole Miss 76 percent.

No. 6 Alabama vs. No. 11 Georgia: Alabama 74 percent.

Each of the West's four potential 11-1 or 12-0 champions would have about a three-in-four chance of beating a Georgia team that is improving rapidly (and could cut those odds in the coming weeks). And of course, Georgia itself could be in position to nab a Playoff bid come December 6. This could easily become a win-and-you're-in game for both teams.

Pac-12

No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 12 Arizona: Oregon 81 percent.

No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 14 Arizona State: Oregon 75 percent.

No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 17 Utah: Oregon 86 percent.

Yes, Oregon has an 81 percent chance of beating Arizona, a team to which the Ducks have already lost at home this year. Advanced stats care not for previous head-to-heads, and the Ducks have improved their standing quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.

Big Ten

No. 8 Michigan State vs. No. 15 Nebraska: MSU 58 percent.

No. 15 Nebraska vs. No. 16 Ohio State: Ohio State 60 percent.

I don't think I can call Nebraska a legitimate contender here until I see the Huskers leave Madison with a win. But from a statistical standpoint, they're a lot more legitimate than we're giving them credit for being at the moment. They have a very strong chance of winning the Big Ten right now.

ACC

No. 2 Florida State vs. No. 24 Duke: FSU 74 percent.

No. 21 Clemson vs. No. 24 Duke: Clemson 75 percent.

Basically, Duke has a 33.6 percent chance of getting to 11-1 and about an eight percent chance of getting to 12-1.

***

FSU's odds are indeed probably a bit better than what you see above, once you take injuries and suspensions into account. Still, using the ratings as they exist above, you might be able to conclude that the most likely Playoff scenario at this point* might be something like this:

No. 1 SEC Champion (12-1)

No. 2 Oregon (12-1)

No. 3 TCU (11-1)

No. 4 ???

That No. 4 spot could go to a 12-1 Florida State (depending on how far the 'Noles would fall with a loss at Louisville or Miami), a 12-1 Big Ten champion (if Michigan State wins out, the Spartans are probably well-positioned for the spot, but Ohio State and Nebraska might need help), or a second SEC West team, one that is probably 10-2. We'll learn more, both about the teams themselves and the committee's reaction to big games, in the coming weeks.

* Note that the "most likely" scenario isn't particularly likely. There are hundreds of scenarios still on the table.
From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.

Foxy Flavored Cookie

Author(s) Thomas Evans Website Update schedule Updates Mondays and Fridays Launch date June 6, 2010 End Date Ongoing Genre Comedy, Adventure, Romance Rating(s)

Foxy Flavored Cookie is a webcomic created by Thomas Evans (alternatively known as The Baker). The series centers around Pucho, a boy who was turned into an anthromorphic culpeo fox and lost his memory.

All strips are drawn using PaintTool SAI. Because of this, all strips that are drawn are of high quality, clear, and easy to read. The comic is hosted by Comic Fury.

Synopsis [ edit ]

Foxy Flavored Cookie centers around a boy who is bitten by a pure lycan, causing him to become two-thirds lycan, and lose his memory. He is then found by a land scout, by the name Hos (pervy) and an insect biologist named Pituka. However, Pervy forgets to ask his name, so they name him after a box of cigarettes found in his pocket- Pucho. They take Pucho to an underground city named Paws Den, where he has to adapt to his new life.

Cast [ edit ]

Main characters [ edit ]

Pucho: a rather clumsy, but good-natured and outgoing character. He once had a life as a gypsy traveling in a caravan. He is rather talented at playing the violin, and exceptionally good at cooking. These are two skills that transfered over after he lost his memory. Every once in a while, when the need arises, he can spontainously, and impulsively, summon supernatural strength and powers. This is demonstrated in many areas, but it is implied that he has no control over this abillity. Pucho Shows romantic interest in Pituka.

Pituka: Pituka is not far from a female Pucho counterpart. She is rather smart, as she is an insect biologist, however she is just as good-natured and outgoing as Pucho. Her home is filled with many kinds of insects, with her favorite being Huggie, a lycan sized spider. She shows romantic interest in Pucho.

Pervy: Pervy is a lycan that fits his name. He is very risque, but can be very comical at times. His biggest romantic interest is Nelly. Pervy often tries to perve (not intended) on Nelly, but this usually doesn't end well for him. Most of the time, he ends up getting hit with a wrench, thrown out windows, and everything in between.

Nelly: Nelly is a cheetah lycan who can be very harsh. She controls Paws Den's heating and cooling, and often overworks her employees. She cares very much for Pervy, mostly as a brother. Nelly is a very talented engineer. This is demonstrated when she builds a heater to heat up an entire lake.

Luna: Luna is a succubus. This means that she leeches off of peoples life energy. Pucho has too much life energy, which is why he sometimes has outbursts of energy. Luna can sense people's pleasure's, and she sometime takes advantage of this. She tries (and is rather successful) to get Pucho to show interest in Pituka. Luna can also transform herself, so while she is usually seen in her original form, when around her new friends she will take on the form of a pink cat.

Astrid: Astrid is a dream solider, meaning she has an oath at birth to serve the queen of paws den. After she was saved by Pituka, she changed her allegiance to Pituka. Astrid is extremely loyal to whoever she serves, and will follow any order given to her. Astrid very closely resembles an anubis.

Secondary characters [ edit ]

Tammy: Tammy is a crazy witch therapist who constantly tries to seduce Dr. Ulrick. She provides therapy to Pituka and Nelly.

Dr.Ulrick: Ulrick is a doctor that works in Paws Den at a clinic. Because of his shy and cute personality, many of the females find him very attractive.

Notes [ edit ]

"Fillers" are used whenever a comic isn't avaible

Updates are sometimes streamed
Four reasons the updated Uber Dubai app makes us sad By Mike Priest

Double charges, secret surges… Uber, your app is bad.

Late last year, ride-hailing company Uber updated its app in an effort to make it even easier for customers to book one of its cars.

The update added a number of new features, including the ability to schedule rides in advance, as well as providing up-front fare estimates.

However, just like the sickly sweet smell of a newly opened car air freshener, not everything was as rosy as it seemed.

While the app also received a much needed facelift, some of the core functionality that users enjoyed was either buried behind a mess of design-driven decisions, or had been removed entirely.

So, after months of botched bookings and frustration, we can stand it no more!

Here are our top four gripes with the Uber app:

1) You can’t book an open-ended trip

One of the perks of the original Uber app was the ability jump in any of its cars and venture off into the Dubai streets to wherever took your fancy. A super handy feature in a city where roads and landmarks are constantly changing, giving Google Maps a tough time at playing catch up.

The app now requires that you enter a definite end-point to your journey, making it incredibly difficult in those instances when you’re trying to get to your mate’s place and all you have for directions are a vague take the third left after the second Mosque once you hit Al Wasl Rd.

Similarly, if you want to hail an Uber to help you collect something and then return home in the same car it is tricky to do as you can’t specify a round-trip as a destination.

2) The surge pricing indicator is tucked away

Surge prices are the scourge of the avid Uber user, always at their peak during daily prayer times, commuting rush hours or Friday brunches. Either they run the risk of doubling your fare during peak hours, or making you late as you impatiently wait for them to drop below 1.1x so you can avoid paying even a single fil over the going rate.

Uber must clearly have caught on that its users aren’t fans of elevated surge pricing as it now hides away any notice of it in the tiniest font possible, only notifying you when asking you to confirm your booking. We miss the big, bold pop up that told us we were about to be ‘surged’ before we booked.

A little unscrupulous if you ask us, especially for those looking to book in a hurry, or at the end of a night out.

3) Location errors can end up costing big

One Uber user recounted to us a story in which they were looking to travel from their apartment building in Dubai Marina to the Al Qasr hotel in Jumeirah but had, unbeknownst to them, mistakenly set their destination as a restaurant in JBR with the same name (that was 500 metres from their house).

Uber told them the fare would be Dhs30-40 when they booked (seems fair for Marina to Madinat) so they hopped in the cab and then had a confusing conversation about location, during which the driver said he knew it would be Al Qasr the hotel and not the restaurant, so the user asked the driver to take them there.

In the end a 10 minute ride cost them Dhs80 (and they didn’t realise it would cost that much when they booked).

While this is not entirely Uber’s fault (the app relies on Google Maps for its location information), we’ve heard multiple similar accounts to warrant it being noted as an issue. A series of checks certainly wouldn’t go amiss to ensure customers don’t wind up with a fare for the wrong location or, worse yet, end up somewhere else entirely.

4) Being charged double for a ride is no fun

One of the biggest changes that Uber implemented with its app overhaul is how they handle payment.

It used to be that you would book your ride and only be charged the fare (calculated based on the minimum fee and an amount per minute/kilometer) once you reached your destination. Just like a regular cab – nice and simple.

Instead, the new system calculates the fare in advance (using the same maths as before) and gives you an estimated rate for how much the journey should cost.

This is clearly stated in the app along with the caveat that “Uber places a temporary authorization hold on your card, which is converted to a charge for the final fare. You may receive 1 or more SMS messages from your bank notifying you of both the hold and the charge.”

Frustratingly, if your journey deviates from the specified amount charged at the beginning of the trip (due to a detour to pick up a friend or, you know, traffic) you are then charged a second, final amount for what the fare actually is. Sure, the original amount is released back to your credit card, but some banks take upwards of 10 working days to process a card chargeback, meaning if you’re a regular Uber user who gets stuck in traffic often – hello, practically everyone in Dubai – then you could be potentially ponying up around double each time you ride.

We reached out to Uber regarding our grievances with their app and they came back with the most diplomatic of responses:

“At Uber, we are passionate about using technology to help move people around cities, and to recapture the clean and simple aesthetic of the original Uber experience, we rebuilt a faster, smarter rider app completely from the ground up. The new Uber experience is reimagined around a simple question—“Where to?”. And by starting with your destination, we can tailor the journey to you.”

We will say this, Uber does continue to offer a responsive and competent level of customer support whereby, should you raise any of the above issues with your ride (and believe us, we did!), they go above and beyond in helping to resolve things.

It’s just upsetting that the core app is in such a state that we experienced everything we’ve mentioned here on multiple occasions, without so much of a hint as to whether these issues are going to be addressed in the future.

Let’s hope Uber gets its act together. In the meantime, it’s enough to make you want to try that other ride-hailing company’s app from across the street…

– Have you experienced any issues with the Uber app that drive you nuts? Tell us about them on Facebook.

Photos: Uber app
Israel Accused of Suppressing Terror Evidence to Help Out New Pal China

Israel is a country desperate for friends. Isolated in the Middle East and hated in large parts of the Arab world, it struggles to make alliances. The few it has, it guards fiercely. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that for years Israel has been courting China, inking trade deals and fêting one another over champagne. But that process now finds Israel in an awkward bind, one that may lead the country to compromise on its core anti-terror policies.

According to a report in Haaretz, the Israeli government is currently under enormous pressure from Beijing to suppress evidence that the Bank of China laundered money for Islamic Jihad. In 2006, a Jewish-American teenager, Daniel Wultz, was killed in a suicide bombing carried out by Islamic Jihad at a Tel Aviv shawarma restaurant. His parents have now sued for damages — at the initial encouragement of Israel — and allege that the Bank of China laundered funds for the terror group, effectively bankrolling the operation that killed their son. Prior to filing the case, according to Haaretz, Israeli officials told the parents, Yekutiel and Sheryl Wultz, that they would support their case and provide evidence implicating the Bank of China. Now, at Beijing’s urging, they’re having second thoughts. So far, Israel has declined to provide the expert testimony they promised and are currently deliberating over whether to make Uzi Shaya, a former intelligence official, available to a New York City court.

That’s right, under Chinese pressure, Israel may prevent the victims of a Tel Aviv terrorist attack from extracting damages from the people who bankrolled an operation that killed their son. Chalk it up to the cost of a new friendship.

If the burgeoning alliance between Israel and China sounds unlikely, bear in mind that it’s a relationship forged in political and economic calculation. Israel was one of the first countries to recognize China following its Communist revolution, and while it took over 40 years for to China establish diplomatic relations with Israel, the two countries have something off an oddball history of military cooperation. Awash in seized Soviet weapons following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel quietly worked to upgrade China’s military arsenal. That relationship continued into the 1990s when President Bill Clinton furiously vetoed the proposed sale from Israel to China of an advanced radar system.

Now, the relationship between the two countries has become primarily economic, though geopolitical concerns still hover in the background. Trade between the two countries stood at $8 billion in 2012, and when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Beijing in May he was accompanied by a retinue of Israeli businessmen who hope to push that figure above $10 billion over the next five years. While there, Netanyahu signed a series of bilateral agreements and shared a champagne toast with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. And in January of last year, the two countries inked a $300 million line of credit designed to bring Israeli investments to China. Now, a free trade pact is under consideration.

But even as Israel and China draw closer to one another economically, awkward geopolitical concerns threaten to poison their relationship. China habitually obstructs efforts to crack down on Iran’s nuclear program and is all too happy to undermine Western and Israeli interests in the region at times. But for this reason, Israel has little to lose — and a lot to gain — by moving closer to China. "We do hope that if we are able to improve economic ties and connections between Israel and China, it will help us also to explain our positions with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat, with regard to the events in Syria," then-Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinetz said in an interview with Bloomberg prior to signing the $300 million line of credit. Steinetz currently serves as the intelligence minister, and the calculation at play is an obvious one: Through its trade ties Israel hopes to win influence with China and alter its positions on issues critical for Israel.

But that calculation runs both ways, as Israel is currently learning in a New York courtroom. In arguments last Friday, lawyers for the Bank of China tried to convince the judge that Israel’s reluctance to make its intelligence expert available signaled that the Israeli government no longer backed his conclusions about the bank’s involvement with Islamic Jihad. But the judge, Shira Sheindlin, did not buy it. "It’s hard for me to accept that assumption," she said.
A drawing shows a woman having her arm prepared for minor surgery. (Print by Abraham Bosse via National Library of Medicine)

What’s the best way to treat prostate cancer? What are the benefits and risks of different rehabilitation options for survivors of stroke? Unfortunately, the answer to these and similar questions often is: Nobody knows. The United States spends $3 trillion annually on health care — much of it funded by taxpayers through programs such as Medicare — yet only a limited amount of information exists about what treatments work best for which patients. Although estimates vary, some experts think that less than half of all medical care is based on clear scientific evidence.

The good news is that the federal government is now making a significant investment in health services and patient-centered outcomes research to identify waste and improve the safety, effectiveness and quality of care. The bad news is that House Republicans are trying to abolish one of the main agencies carrying out this research, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and cut the funding of another, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The puzzle is why.

One possible reason is that Republicans oppose taxpayer funding of all scientific research as a matter of principle. Yet the same House Appropriations Committee draft bill that targets health services research also provides a $1.1 billion increase in the budget of the National Institutes of Health.

A second possible reason is that Republicans are uninterested in evidence-based policymaking. But both Democrats and Republicans argue that better information is needed to make government more effective. For example, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently introduced the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act of 2015 to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs.

What makes the situation even more perplexing is that evidence-based medicine has a solid Republican pedigree. Perhaps the most important advocate of an increased federal role in paying for research on the clinical effectiveness of treatments has been Gail R. Wilensky, a Republican economist who served as George H.W. Bush’s Medicare director.

In 2008, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) published an op-ed with Billy Beane, the “Moneyball“ general manager of the Oakland A’s, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in which they lamented that “a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures. Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not — be it a test, treatment, drug or technology.”

Republicans have turned against government funding of evidence-based medicine research for five reasons.

Federal investment in this research (although it predated the 2008 election) became closely tied to the Obama administration’s health-care reform agenda, because big funding increases were tucked into the 2009 stimulus legislation and the Affordable Care Act — two measures the GOP strongly opposed. An increased federal role in comparative effectiveness research, together with payments to physicians for voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about end-of-life options and the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (another agency the GOP wishes to kill) contributed to the “death panels” myth, which Republicans have used to frame health-care reform as “rationing.” As University of Maryland political scientist Frances E. Lee argues, partisan conflict over technocratic issues such as medical research is often “opportunistic and focused on electoral advantage.” As she writes, “The politics of good government, ironically, is hardball.” Although evidence-based medicine might seem likely to have bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue among voters. In 2010, Alan Gerber, David Doherty, Conor Dowling and I conducted a national survey to gauge public support for government funding of research on the effectiveness of treatments. Among those who reported not voting in 2008, there was not a large difference in support across Democrats and Republicans, but there were significant partisan differences among voters. Republican voters were much less supportive than Democrats. During the debates over the stimulus bill and health-care reform, the two parties took opposing stands on the federal government’s role in this effort, which led to the significant partisan split among politically engaged citizens. Research on the effectiveness of different treatments is a threat to the incomes of some health industry stakeholders. In 1994, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (the precursor to AHRQ) issued a report concluding that there was little evidence to support back surgery over nonsurgical alternatives for many cases of lower-back pain. Back surgeons went ballistic, and successfully lobbied Republicans in Congress (who associated the agency with the Clinton health-care reform plan) to slash the agency’s budget and curb its authority. Although some health IT companies see the value of AHRQ and PCORI, there are powerful interest groups that wouldn’t mind if the agencies were weakened. The public is not engaged. Although patients, caregivers, and family members would benefit from better information about the effectiveness of treatments, the benefits of a stronger base of medical evidence are too diffuse to mobilize ordinary citizens. AHRQ and PCORI are public-interest agencies that lack a natural constituency. Republicans have attacked government funding of evidence-based medicine research because there is little political penalty to doing so. The penalty would be higher if Republicans feared getting on the wrong side of doctors. In our survey research, we found that when it comes to the role of evidence in patient decisions as well as in the allocation of health-care money, the public believes that “doctors know best.” The public views doctors as trusted agents of their interests; when respondents are told that doctors support government funding of evidence-based medicine research, the argument of opponents that study findings will be used as a pretext for rationing loses its sting.

Clearly most doctors do believe in the need for research on evidence-based medicine (although medical societies frequently protest when studies question the efficacy of treatments used by their members). “Cutting funding to AHRQ would be a huge mistake in our mission to improve the quality & efficiency of healthcare,” tweeted one surgeon. But the physician community has not organized around the issue.

There is a good chance the proposed cuts to evidence-based medicine research won’t be enacted in this appropriations cycle. Nonetheless, the episode is a reminder that information is a powerful resource in government — one that can be destroyed when people aren’t looking.

Eric M. Patashnik is professor of public policy and politics and director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Virginia. He is also nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
After each mass shooting, gun control activists, bereaved parents and lawmakers reissue a call for more restrictive gun control laws. However, eight years after the shooting at Virginia Tech University that killed 32 and two years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary that left 27 dead, Congress has not enacted substantial legislative changes.

The latest mass shooting in Oregon on Thursday again raises the issue of gun control and why efforts to pass gun law reforms have failed.

A simple reason is, perhaps, money. In 2015, the gun rights lobby outspent the gun control lobby about 6 to 1.

Data shows that the gun rights lobby, which includes groups like the National Rife Association and Gun Owners of America, consistently spends significantly more money in lobbying and campaign contributions than gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety.

The Center for Responsive Politics said that in the 2008 election cycle, gun rights organizations spent 34 times more on lobbying in 2008 than gun control groups. In raw numbers, that's $3.9 million versus $115,000.

While that money doesn't directly go to politicians, the money does go to lobbyists with access and who lawmakers often depend on for expert opinions and information.

Thursday's shooting at the Oregon community college is the 45th mass shooting this year, if defined as an event at which four or more people were killed. If defined as an event at which four or more people were shot, it's the 294th.
NES has signed a new contract with Remontowa Shipbuilding, Gdansk for the delivery of two hybrid electric systems for two new ferries. The contract has a value of 25-30 mill NOK. The owner of the new ferries is Transport for London (TfL) and the LMG Marin 60-DEH design includes a propulsion system, which is the newest within green energy.

The ferries shall be operating the link between Woolwich and North Woolwich across the River Thames. The Woolwich Ferry has been operating since 1889 and carries around 20 000 vehicles and 2.6 million passengers a year across the River Thames.

Norwegian Electric Systems package consists of ultralight converters forming a DC-grid system with totally four battery packages, two on each side of the DC-bus breaker for redundancy. In addition, for the main propulsion there are used water-cooled, high efficiency permanent magnet motors and four direct driven propellers.

"We have had a good and close contact with Remontowa and LMG Design during this sales process", says Fridtjof Erichsen, regional sales manager in NES.

NES will, as usual, deliver a complete integrated DC-Grid system consisting of:

Generators

4 complete battery packs

permanent magnet motors for main propulsion

DC switchboards

Low loss Quadro Drive® DC/AC and AC/DC

EMS and IAS

Project Management

Calculations/Engineering

Commissioning and sea trial

"We are proud to have won this contract," says Fridtjof. "It proves once again that NES is in the forefront when it comes to technology".

NES has already installed one of Europe`s largest test facilities for electric propulsion systems including energy storage. The new Energy Management System will also be a great advantage for future projects.

Source and top image: Norwegian Electric Systems
Five Labour grandees, who previously campaigned for Britain to Leave the EU in the 1975 referendum, have penned an open letter explaining why they’ve changed their position.

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, Margaret Beckett, Hilary Benn, David Blunkett and Jack Straw have published a letter in support of the EU in the Sunday Mirror. The four who join Kinnock in signing this letter were ministers under previous Labour governments. Benn is currently shadow Foreign Secretary and is expected to play a big role in Labour’s EU strategy.

Although all five were once Eurosceptics, now they say “It’s clear Britain is stronger, safer and better off than we would or could be if pulled out of the EU.”

The five explain that their previous Euroscepticism was rooted in concerns that “membership would mean a one-way loss of sovereignty and investment.” “This has proved unfounded”, they write. They praise the EU for giving Britain economic partnership with 27 other countries, three million jobs and employment rights.

In a move that’s been interpreted as support for David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, they write: “The conclusion of the current renegotiation will hopefully strengthen this relationship as we make the progressive case for Britain in Europe.”

The Prime Minister is hoping to strike a deal at next week’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels. If this successful it would clear the way for Cameron to put the renegotiated terms of British membership to the public in a referendum in June.

The letter in full:

In the 1975 referendum we all campaigned against remaining in what is now the European Union.

Now, and for a long time past, it has been clear Britain is stronger, safer and better off than we would or could be if we pulled out.

Our concern then was that membership would mean a one-way loss of sovereignty and investment. This has proved unfounded.

We are part of an economic partnership with 27 other democracies, exercising full rights to determine agreed rules in the world’s largest single market.

That has brought three million jobs, it attracts large investment, promotes growth and provides for employment rights that protect British workers.

We also have control of our currency, borders, security, defence, foreign affairs and justice.

Britain’s voice on global matters, whether debt relief, peace-keeping or climate change, is amplified by being part of Europe. Intelligence sharing helps us fight terrorism and other crime.

The conclusion of the renegotiation will hopefully strengthen this relationship as we make the progressive case for Britain in Europe.

Leaving would be a huge risk to prosperity, security and the opportunities of future generations.

The EU is not perfect and improvement is always worth making, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

– Neil Kinnock, Margaret Beckett, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and Hilary Benn
With no let-up in protests over sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in Punjab, 10 companies of the Border Security Force (BSF) have been deployed in four districts of Punjab.

Three companies each of the BSF have been deployed in districts of Amritsar, Ludhiana and Jalandhar, while one has been deployed in Tarn Taran.

Tension has been prevailing in the state since incidents of holy book sacrilege have come to light sparking protests across the state.

Meanwhile, in a fresh incident, pages of the holy book were found torn at Gurusar village in Bathinda district on Tuesday morning leading to tension in the area. As the incident came to light, villagers gathered to protest against the incident.

Heavy police force has been deployed to ensure that the situation doesn’t go out of control.

In Jalandhar, 10 people were rounded up by the police in connection with the clash between the shopkeepers and the Sikh protesters on Monday. The police also conducted flag march. Policemen also kept a close watch at various markets, including Mai Hera Gate and Rainik Bazar.

Traffic also remained suspended on the National Highway 1, only to be cleared by noon on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, protesters lifted blockade from various places in Tarn Taran, a day after two people were detained by the police.

On Monday, a ‘granthi’ of a gurdwara at Nijjapura village in Amritsar district was arrested for allegedly desecrating the holy book while a baptized woman was arrested in Ludhiana in connection with the Ghawaddi village desecration case.

Meanwhile, Sikh outfits continued to stage dharnas at several places in Punjab against incidents of sacrilege and to press for arrest of police officials involved in firing at Behbal Kalan village in which two persons were killed.

First Published: Oct 20, 2015 13:41 IST
SHARE Gov. Scott Walker Friday named Waukesha attorney Daniel Kelly to the state Supreme Court, replacing retiring Justice David Prosser.

By of the

Madison — Gov. Scott Walker on Friday named a little-known Waukesha lawyer with no judicial experience to the state Supreme Court, putting Daniel Kelly on the bench and keeping in place the high court's 5-2 conservative majority.

Kelly — who in his application called affirmative action and slavery the same morally — will replace retiring Justice David Prosser on Aug. 1, the start of the court's new term.

Kelly, 52, initially applied for the appointment in secret, but his name became public in June, when Walker's team narrowed the field of candidates from 11 to five.

Kelly took just one question from reporters after Walker announced the appointment in the state Capitol, but he declined to discuss his writings opposing affirmative action and gay marriage.

"The primary and only job of a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is to apply the law as it is written and the oath that I will take will guarantee to you that my personal political beliefs and political philosophy will have no impact on that whatsoever," Kelly said. "Those things simply have no place inside the courtroom."

In his application, Kelly included a 2014 book chapter in which he wrote same-sex marriage would rob marriage of any meaning and likened affirmative action to slavery.

"Affirmative action and slavery differ, obviously, in significant ways," Kelly wrote. "But it's more a question of degree than principle, for they both spring from the same taproot. Neither can exist without the foundational principle that it is acceptable to force someone into an unwanted economic relationship. Morally, and as a matter of law, they are the same."

Asked to discuss what he meant, Kelly remained in the background and Walker answered on his behalf, saying Kelly would not inject his personal beliefs into his work for the court. Walker declined to yield the podium to Kelly when reporters asked him to specifically answer their questions.

Kelly also did not say whether he would run for a full 10-year term in 2020, but Walker said he expected that he would. Walker said he had not asked him that question when he interviewed him for the job.

In his prepared remarks, Kelly said he's had a lifelong love of the law and was humbled by the appointment.

"To this day, I cannot walk into a courtroom without my heart skipping a beat," he said. "I trust that will never change. I trust that I will always stand humbly before the law."

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack appeared with Walker and Kelly and said she had known Kelly for a long time and was impressed with his scholarship.

"I am very, very pleased with the governor's appointment," she said.

Kelly was with the large Milwaukee law firm Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren for 15 years, but left it in 2013. He spent a year as the vice president and general counsel for the Kern Family Foundation, which was established by the founders of Generac Power Systems. In 2014, Kelly formed a small law firm in Waukesha with attorney Rod Rogahn.

Kelly has been closely involved with conservative legal groups. The president of the Milwaukee chapter of the Federalist Society, he also sits on an advisory panel to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

Throughout his application, he praised two of the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative justices — Antonin Scalia, who died in February, and Clarence Thomas.

Kelly was an adviser to state Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley's campaign this year and served as an attorney on Prosser's campaign during a recount after he narrowly won re-election in 2011.

He also was on the legal team that defended legislative and congressional maps that Republican lawmakers redrew in 2011.

In that litigation, a panel of federal judges made changes to the districts for two Assembly districts on Milwaukee's south side after it found those maps violated the voting rights of Latinos. The other maps — which greatly favor Republicans — were left in place. (A separate challenge to the maps is pending in federal court in Madison; Kelly is not involved in that litigation.)

The appointment to the Supreme Court is the second one Walker has made since he was first elected in 2011. Last year, the GOP governor put Bradley on the bench, six months before she was elected to a full 10-year term.

Walker has the sole say on the appointment. Kelly does not need the confirmation of the state Senate or any other body.

The governor acknowledged Kelly did not have judicial experience, but noted two other members of the high court — Prosser and Justice Shirley Abrahamson — had not served as a judge before they became justices.

To get on the Supreme Court, Kelly beat out 10 others.

He was the only applicant who kept his name secret in the early going, but his name was released once he made the first cut.

The field was later cut from five to three and Kelly beat out the other two finalists, Appeals Court Judges Mark Gundrum and Thomas Hruz.

Gundrum, who served alongside Walker in the Assembly, was the early favorite among observers.

Walker appointed Gundrum to the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha in 2011 — passing over Kelly for that spot.

Under state law, appointees to the state Supreme Court stand for election at the first year in which a Supreme Court election isn't already scheduled, and in this case contests are already planned for 2017, '18 and '19. That means that — should he choose to run — Kelly would be on the ballot in 2020.
Protesters take to the street in Chicago after recent grand jury decisions in police-involved deaths in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Congress reauthorized legislation this week that will require states to report the number of people killed during an arrest or while in police custody.

"You can't begin to improve the situation unless you know what the situation is," Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), one of the bill's sponsors, said in an interview with the Washington Post. "We will now have the data."

The Death in Custody Reporting Act was originally passed in 2000, but expired in 2006. Scott has attempted to reauthorize the bill unsuccessfully four times since then.

The first time the bill was passed, it took years for data to start coming in, and it expired shortly thereafter, Scott said.

"It's the way government works," he said. "You're trying to get local governments to make periodic reports. It just takes some time for this to become routine."

The lack of reliable information about how many people are killed by police annually has come into focus following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. In place of government-provided data, crowd-sourced efforts like Fatal Encounters and one by the Gawker Media-owned sports Web site Deadspin have been created that rely on local media reports and volunteers who input information.

Fatal Encounters, founded in 2012 by Reno News & Review editor and publisher Brian Burghart, has recorded 3,010 deaths, with another 9,000 in its "development queue" where various leads from places like Wikipedia and FBI data are available for users to research. The site sees an increase in traffic whenever a death captures the public attention, and since Sunday, Burghart said, there's been about 600 new records submitted.

But despite the reauthorization of the Death in Custody Reporting Act, Burghart said he'll continue collecting data and keep the site up.

"I don't know that anything changed," he said of the first time the law was passed. But if its second iteration produces meaningful data this time around, he said, then he might consider shuttering the project. "I hope [the law] really means something," he said.

Lawmakers are confident it does. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a sponsor, said the law "will give the information needed to strengthen trust at every level."

"Alarmingly, on an issue this profoundly important and potentially explosive, there is no reliable data on the overall scope of the problem," he said in a statement. "The stark, staggering fact is that the nation has no reliable idea how many Americans die during arrests or police custody each year. This legislation will fix that unacceptable factual gap."

The law requires the head of every federal law enforcement agency to report to the attorney general certain information about individuals who die while detained, under arrest or incarcerated. Among the information that must be reported are the deceased individual's name, age, gender, race, and ethnicity, the date, time, and location of their death, and a brief description of the circumstances involving their death.

Under the bill, the Justice Department has the authority to withhold federal funds from states that don’t comply in sending the information to federal agencies. The funds total $500 million a year and are divvied up among states based on a formula that includes factors such as population and violent crime.

The attorney general would then have two years to determine if the data could be used to reduce deaths and submit a report to Congress.

Scott "wasn't satisfied" with how the information was used when the law was first passed, but is hopeful things will be different now. "I think providing the data should not be a hardship," he said.

"You really can't have an intelligent discussion without good information."
The moose on the now eight-hour loose in Markham is believed to be taking a nap, although Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry staff and police tracking the animal don’t know for sure. But the trackers, themselves, have turned in for the night. The York Regional police and MNRF staff have been following the lost animal by way of drone since around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, with the hopes of tranquilizing it and returning it to the wild.

The moose put in a guest appearance in many surprising places.

But as day turned to night, officials decided to call it a day because they felt attempting to tranquilize the moose in the dark was not a good idea. “It’s too dangerous,” said Jolanta Kowalski, with the MNRF. “We haven’t seen the moose for several hours. I think the last time anyone saw (it) moving was around 3 p.m.” Attempts to locate the moose depend on any sightings through the night, said Kowalski. “In the event that someone sees it running around, we can go in and begin our search again.”

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Kowalski added that she hopes the creature has just fallen asleep, or even better “has found its way back from where it came.” The moose was last seen in the area of Kennedy Rd. and 16th Ave. Since its appearance in the morning, the animal could be seen on CP24 TV as filmed by the station’s helicopter which followed it close above, as the beast barreled over suburban backyards and front lawns. The moose even ventured onto major roadways. Perhaps seeking refuge, the animal made its way to the Rouge River area, said Sgt. Kerry Schmidt of the Ontario Provincial police at around 11:30 a.m. Both the ministry and police asked the public to keep their distance.

“We need people to back off. Let us know if they see it — but stop chasing it,” said Sgt. Scott Hunter at the time. Kowalski said the ministry asked CP24 to stop hovering near the moose with its helicopter because the noise was likely agitating it.

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“It needs the space to calm down and relax.” No injuries were reported, but Hunter said the moose’s run had caused several car accidents, broken windows and smashed fences over the course of the day. Moose can run at speeds of 50 km/h. “It needs to rest or it’s going to die,” Hunter said.

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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Cindy Sui speaks to Taiwanese students holding a rally to demonstrate their support for the protests in Hong Kong

In January, 13 groups from Hong Kong and Taiwan gathered in Taipei for a weekend conference. The meeting attracted little attention, but it marked the first time democracy advocates, including representatives from Hong Kong's political parties and students from both sides, had met in an organised fashion.

Despite their proximity, the two sides previously worked little together. Taiwan has enjoyed full universal suffrage since 1996; but a year later, Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule. It seemed they had different fates.

Growing worries about Beijing have drawn the two sides closer, however, culminating in mutual support for the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong and an Occupy Parliament movement in Taipei earlier this year.

"Taiwan's democracy and Hong Kong's democracy have the same threat - the Beijing government," said Lai Chung-chiang, a Taipei-based lawyer and long-time activist.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Students present John Leung, director of Hong Kong Trade Office in Taipei, with a protest letter on 29 Sep

Now the two sides feel they share similar goals and they are working together more closely, something that will surely worry Beijing.

Hong Kong supported us and now we're supporting them Karen Cheng, Taiwanese activist

After all, Taiwan could be seen as a bad influence - it's had decades, and some would say more than a century, of experience fighting for democracy. Some of its people are deeply anti-China and want independence, and its protesters have been bolder and more defiant than Hong Kong's.

Many believe the success of Taiwan's movement greatly encouraged Hong Kong activists.

Two months after the January meeting, Taiwanese students occupied parliament for 24 days and didn't leave until the legislature agreed to pass a law allowing stringent public supervision of agreements signed with China.

"Because Taiwan's occupy movement was successful, Hong Kong people felt it was also possible for them," said Mr Lai.

Many Hong Kong students came here then to learn, including how to disseminate information online in timely manner and co-ordinate supplies and donations.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Student activists organised a protest at the Hong Kong office in Taipei on Monday

'Support each other'

In recent days, Taiwanese activists have flown to Hong Kong to lend support.

One of them, Karen Cheng, has just returned.

"We strongly care about Hong Kong because we really cherish our freedom and democracy," said Ms Cheng. "We're worried that today's Hong Kong will be tomorrow's Taiwan (if it one day reunifies with the mainland)."

Beijing should have foreseen these fears as it worked in recent years to woo Taiwan - the next on a list of territories China feels were unfairly taken away when it was weak and wants to take back, to unify the "motherland".

Beijing had hoped that allowing Hong Kong to prosper economically after the 1997 handover would convince Taiwan to reunify.

But whether or not it grants Hong Kong democracy will directly affect whether the Taiwanese trust China, much less want to reunify.

Image copyright EPA Image caption The protests in Hong Kong have seen thousands of people take to the streets

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Some protesters slept on the streets overnight to enforce a blockade of key areas

Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent statements that Taiwan should accept the same "One Country, Two Systems" formula under which Beijing rules Hong Kong, following his refusal to allow Hong Kong people to directly elect their leader, indicate he may be clueless about what Taiwanese people care about the most - self rule.

Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou has rejected Mr Xi's suggestion, saying: "We fully understand and support Hong Kong's demand for universal suffrage." Giving Hong Kong people the right to choose their own leader would be a "win-win" situation for Hong Kong and China, he added.

But he's limited in how much more he can say.

Mr Ma hopes to meet Mr Xi at the Apec leaders' summit in Beijing in November and he doesn't want to jeopardise future negotiations with China.

For Beijing, it now has to reckon with two issues it dealt with separately being linked, said Arthur Ding Shu-fan, a research fellow at National Cheng-chi University's Institute of International Relations.

"They will have to figure out how to reassure Taiwan to not to support Hong Kong," said Mr Ding.

It will also likely build a long blacklist of Taiwanese activists to keep out of Hong Kong. Already, student leaders Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting have been denied entry.

But besides them, there are many more people who now feel connected to Hong Kong - no longer seen as just a place for flight transfers or shopping.

"They supported us (back in March and April) and now we're supporting them," said Ms Cheng. "Supporting each other will help both sides."
This morning Salesforce Tower had its ceremonial topping off, which included a press conference with the mayor, several supervisors, the developer, and CEO Marc Benioff, and the hoisting of the "final" steel beam  signed by the construction crew and whoever else wanted to  up to the top story. Local media was given their first opportunity to ride to the top floor on a hardhat tour, and yes, the views do not suck.

At 1,070 feet, the building is still being touted as the tallest office building west of Chicago  which is true, however the title of tallest building west of Chicago now belongs to Los Angeles' Wilshire Grand, which kind of cheated for the title with a spire that brings its height to 1,099 feet.

Benioff announced today that the 61st floor of the building, the highest glass-walled floor of the structure beneath the translucent screened "cap," will not in fact be his personal office suite, but will instead be a gathering space they're calling the Ohana Floor  Benioff is fond of Hawaiian culture, and the word "ohana," which means family, is used at the company to represent the "family" of employees. During the day, the floor will be used as conference and event space for Salesforce employees and customers, and at night and presumably some weekends, the space will be opened up for use by community partners, non-profits, and others, free of charge.

“I am deeply grateful to everyone working on Salesforce Tower as we celebrate this incredible milestone," said Benioff. "My hope for this building is that its meaning goes beyond its beautiful glass and steel structure. May the meaning of Salesforce Tower be the people within it who are deeply committed to making this city a better place for all of its citizens."

Supervisor Jane Kim, in whose district the tower has been rising over the last several years, says that back when she took office in 2011 all she heard from other developers about the project was "it's too big," and she joked, "It was the only time ever that you had developers saying something should be smaller." But after securing Salesforce as an anchor tenant in 2014  the company will be occupying the bottom 30 floors (3 through 30) along with floors 60 and 61  the project was on much more solid financial footing.

Architect Fred Clarke, senior principal of Pelli Clarke Pelli who are also responsible for the Transbay Terminal next door, spoke at the news conference declaring that "Building tall buildings is fundamentally an aspirational act, and an act of optimism," and that this tower that will now dominate the San Francisco skyline for many years to come should be seen as a gesture of faith in the future of the city's economy.

And as they started doing last summer, developer Boston Properties and their partner Hines had reps throwing some shade in the direction of nearby Millennium Tower and its sinking problem, proclaiming "Bedrock, baby," and repeatedly boasting about Salesforce Tower's foundation reaching 300 feet down to solid bedrock.

Glass glazing panels have already reached part of the top floor, but the site remains abuzz with some 700 workers in the building trades. The building is expected to be completed later this year, with the first Salesforce employees moving in by late 2017 or early 2018.

Other major tenants now include Bain & Co., Accenture, and CB Richard Ellis, who is also the building's leasing agent.

Previously: Salesforce Tower Throws Shade At Millennium Tower
By Riot Jynx

Check out the winners of the League-o'-Lantern Halloween contest!

Community-voted Winners:

xcapriccino miisyou Sumino Kairosmith SneakyStyL Heirophant prinnybat Bamfxo Mitko Aseity

Honorable Mentions:

Kolab FuzzyLlamas IRamessesl DedRed7 IMB0reD

Randomly-selected Winners:

AngelicDragon Butters372 Suyuri A Wave o Babies Eosdrake StruckbyThunda A Heath Bar ohn5mindu Ashira Jaganshi Alyaska toxicpot Tero681 Bleufromage Slitheile13 RohesiaCrow Heisman1 Rosencruez Aqua Jet Gengaarr Dark Deception

Halloween is fast approaching, so double up on your Doran’s Blades and celebrate with our pumpkin carving challenge!

We're looking for your most creative, spooky, or adorable League-o’-Lanterns. Send them our way for a shot at a ghastly amount of RP!

How do I enter the contest?

Carve a pumpkin with a League of Legends-related image or theme

Don’t forget to include your summoner name in the design (it should be visible in the picture, so photograph it from as many angles as necessary)

Your entry must be made by you, submitted by you, and made for this contest

Light a candle inside so we can see it glow!

Finally, submit your masterpiece here

Prizes:

10,000 RP - 10 winners chosen by the community

6,000 RP - 5 honorable mentions selected by Riot

2,000 RP - 20 randomly selected entries

The contest submission period starts on October 14th and ends October 31st at 11:59 PM PDT. The following week, we’ll update this page with a link to where you can vote for your favorite entry. On November 7th, we’ll announce the winners!

For more info, check out the official rules and our FAQ. Happy Halloween!
FILE - In this Dec. 17, 2015, file photo, Martin Shkreli, center, the former hedge fund manager under fire for buying a pharmaceutical company and ratcheting up the price of a life-saving drug, is escorted by law enforcement agents in New York after being taken into custody following a securities probe. Jurors heard testimony from the government's last witness on Tuesday, July 25, 2017, a day after Shkreli's lawyer told the court his client won't take the witness stand during his securities fraud trial. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Wealthy investors say former biotech CEO Martin Shkreli told them he was managing tens of millions of dollars’ worth of investments, that they were making double-digit returns and they could withdraw their money at any time.

Prosecutors in closing arguments Thursday at Shkreli’s securities fraud trial said it was all a brazen con. The defense countered that no one should feel sorry for the alleged victims because they were high-rollers who ended up doubling or tripling their money.

Shkreli, 34, is best known for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug and trolling his critics on social media, but his trial in Brooklyn has focused on his time running a pair of hedge funds.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alixandra Smith told jurors Shkreli “lied to investors to get their money into the funds and then lied to them so they wouldn’t take it out.”

The prosecutor recounted testimony by investors who told jurors that Shkreli claimed to be managing up to $40 million in one of his firms at a time when its brokerage account held only a few hundred dollars. When one investor asked for his money back, Shkreli stalled for months until he used a Ponzi-like scheme to secretly raid a second fund to return a portion of the funds, she said.

“The defendant was lying not only about the ability to get a redemption, but also about where that money was coming from,” she said.

As Shkreli was “blowing up” his hedge funds with bad stock picks, he continued to recruit new investors by portraying himself as a Wall Street whiz who graduated from Columbia University, Smith said. He really attended a lesser-known public university, Baruch College.

Claims “that he was some sort of genius in the investing industry were completely untrue,” she said.

The defense has sought to portray the impish Shkreli as a misunderstood eccentric who slept on the floor of his office in a sleeping bag for two years while starting a successful drug company that allowed him to enrich his alleged victims.

“Who does that if you’re committing a fraud and you have millions of dollars in people’s money?” said his attorney, Ben Brafman. “He has no life. He’s the hermit scientist.”

Shkreli is “not a Ponzi guy who’s taking money and buying a Cadillac or a yacht,” the lawyer added at another point.

The lawyer agreed Shkreli could be annoying, saying, “In terms of people skills, he’s impossible.” But he claimed the clients who appeared as government witnesses were still eager to bet on him.

Investors “found him strange. They found him weird. And they gave him money. Why? Because they recognized genius,” Brafman said.

Shkreli didn’t testify, but throughout the trial he has used Facebook to bash prosecutors and news organizations covering his case, despite his lawyer’s efforts to shut him up. In one recent post, he wrote, “This was a bogus case from day one.”

The trial is in its fifth week. Jury deliberations could begin on Friday.
If you're waiting for someone who has to drive in San Francisco, especially around the Moscone Center area, take a deep breath and get comfortable. A giant tech conference is in town and it's causing all sorts of detours and delays. Scott Budman reports. (Published Monday, Nov. 6, 2017)

Codie the bear, Cloudy the ram, Appy and friends — despite the cute, fuzzy animal emojis adorning the giant blue Salesforce sign smack in the middle of Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, Dreamforce is, for the uninitiated, serious business (aka the world’s largest software conference).

The annual tech event by cloud giant Salesforce typically brings in more than 100,000 people to San Francisco every year — 170,000 people are expected to show up this year from all over the world over the course of the next three days shutting down streets, filling up hotels, and injecting millions of dollars into the local economy. One of the only negatives, especially for residents, is traffic. So if you’re driving, bring extra patience.

Eighteen years ago, Salesforce started in a small apartment in San Francisco. Today it is leasing the tallest, most expensive building in the city — the Salesforce Tower, a 1,070-ft-high skyscraper, the tallest on the West Coast.

Salesforce also made news after it decided to close the pay gap for employees. The company’s CEO, billionaire philanthropist Marc Benioff, spent $6 million to close the gender gap, and has promised to evaluate salaries on a regular basis.

On Saturday, Benioff shared a video of a mountain lion walking outside his house in the Presidio. The timing of the mountain lion sighting presents an intriguing coincidence given that one of the designated "Dreamojis," or emoji for Dreamforce, just so happens to be an apparent lynx or other member of the cat family known as "Appy."

Benioff used the hashtag #AppyDF while sharing his mountain lion encounter on social media.

Every year, Salesforce brings in influential speakers — including women like Patricia Arquette and Jessica Alba — to reinforce the importance of women in the workplace.

This year, former first lady, Michelle Obama, will be taking the stage Tuesday. However the event has requested no publicity or cameras from the media.

On Monday, actor and venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher or @aplusk was part of the keynote which focused on “tech innovations as a force for good.” Other keynote speakers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Girl Scouts CEO Sylvia Acevedo, and Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted.

The company announced a new cloud partnership with Google which industry experts say could pose a direct challenge to Microsoft.

It’s not all work at Dreamforce — Tuesday's lineup brings with it a concert at AT&T Park featuring Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz which will benefit UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, and on Thursday night, there’s a benefit concert, “Band Together Bay Area,” to help North Bay wildfire victims and evacuees.

And if this star-studded lineup wasn’t enough, Puerto Rican singer and philanthropist Luis Fonsi will be performing his #1 hit “Despacito” on Wednesday to help raise $1 million toward hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.

If you’re visiting from out-of-town, Dreamforce has put together a list of places to check out in San Francisco, a little R&R for when you’re not busy with keynotes, sessions, networking or just generally being a "trailbrazer" at the Dreamforce Campground.

There's also the PartyForce app, which guides you through more than 150 parties taking place throughout the city from Nov. 6 to Nov. 9.
Two days ago we observed the latest disclosure in the seemingly endless Snowden treasure trove of leaked NSA files, when Spiegel released the broad details of the NSA's Access Network Technology (ANT) catalog explaining how virtually every hardware architecture in the world has been hacked by the US superspies. We followed up with a close up of "Dropout Jeep" - the NSA's project codename for backdoor entry into every iPhone ever handed out to the Apple Borg collective (because it makes you look cool). Today, we step back from Apple and release the full ANT catalog showcasing the blueprints of how the NSA managed to insert a backdoor into virtually every piece of hardware known under the sun.

And so, without further ado, here is the complete slidebook of how the NSA hacked, well, everything.
This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.

The television presenter Keith Chegwin, who made his name presenting the popular children’s shows Cheggers Plays Pop and Saturday Superstore, has died aged 60.

He had a progressive lung condition and died at home surrounded by his family.

The family said in a statement: “We are heartbroken to share the news that Keith Chegwin sadly passed away following a long-term battle with a progressive lung condition, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which rapidly worsened towards the end of this year.”

Chegwin spent his final weeks at Severn Hospice, in Shrewsbury, and his family thanked the staff for their “kindness, support and care”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Keith Chegwin (centre) with Debby Cumming and Gordon Astley on Cheggers Plays Pop in 1979. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Born in Liverpool, Chegwin began his acting career at the age of 10 and had roles in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version of Macbeth, the 1973 movie The Optimists of Nine Elms, alongside Peter Sellers, and the pilot of the TV sitcom Open All Hours.

In the 1970s and 1980s he hosted shows including Cheggers Plays Pop, in which teams of children from rivals schools competed against each other; Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, one of the first TV shows to use phone-ins; and Saturday Superstore, which featured a children’s talent contest.

On Monday, fellow presenters and comedians expressed their sadness at his death. The DJ Tony Blackburn said he was “absolutely devastated” to hear the news. “He was one of the nicest people I have ever known and over the years we did shows together and became great friends.”

The former heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno tweeted: “Saddened to hear this, what a great guy. I worked with him a lot over the years, a great entertainer, you will be missed. RIP Keith Chegwin.”

Keith Chegwin obituary Read more

Chegwin took a break from broadcasting in the late 1980s to deal with an alcohol problem, which he first spoke about publicly in 1992 in a tearful interview with Richard and Judy on ITV’s This Morning.

He returned to TV with the Big Breakfast, It’s a Knockout and Channel 5’s divisive gameshow Naked Jungle, which Chegwin presented naked and wearing a hat. He later regretted doing the show.

“It’s the worst career move I made in my entire life. If I could turn the clock back, I would,” he said in 2008. “When they phoned up and said they were doing this programme to celebrate naturism – everyone’s forgotten that bit – I thought it would be a laugh.”

In more recent projects, Chegwin often made fun of himself, appearing as himself in Ricky Gervais’s Extras and in the comedy horror film Kill Keith, in which both he and his fellow TV presenter Vanessa Feltz meet a grisly end.

He also appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and for seven years ran his own bingo website, cheggersbingo.com.

Chegwin’s ex-wife Maggie Philbin said she had seen him two months ago when, despite being on portable oxygen to help him breathe, “he was still attempting to be life and soul of the party”.

“It is incredibly sad,” she said. “Keith was a one-off – full of life, generous and with a focus on things that mattered – his family.”

About 6,000 people a year are diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Around 85% of those diagnosed are over 70, and men are more at risk.
November 15, 2012 12:58 IST

J ust one week after United States President Barack Obama's convincing re-election, his faithful Vice President Joseph Biden led the White House celebration of Diwali, reflecting on the significance of festival of lights, and also acknowledging the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu American elected to the US Congress, and also Ambassador Nirupama Rao, who like Gabbard, seemed to have that gravitational pull in terms of the guests wanting to pose for pictures with them.

Also present at the celebration that was closed to the press, were Dr Ami Bera, on the brink of becoming the first Indian American physician elected to the US Congress from the 7th District in California, and Kumar Barve, the majority leader in the Maryland House of Delegates, and the most senior Indian American legislator who was elected to the State Assembly nearly two decades ago.

The nearly two-hour celebration, held on November 13 at the Old Executive Office Building -- which lies adjacent to the White House and houses the administrative offices of the White House -- after which the guests moved to the Indian Treaty Room for the reception, was attended by a select cross-section of about 200 members of the Indian American community from across the country, senior Indian American staffers in the administration like Dr Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, and also erstwhile officials, including Aneesh Chopra, the first chief technology officer in the White House and now making a run for lieutenant governor of Virginia, several US lawmakers and one of the priests from the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Lanham, Maryland, Ramesh Babu, who recited a shloka and assisted Biden in the lighting of the diya and then wrapped the ceremonial shawl on the vice president.

After greeting the guests with a Happy Diwali and Saal Mubarak, Biden began with a quip that had the audience in peals of laughter as he said Diwali was all about light over darkness, "and that's what we are all about -- trying to shed some light."

But then getting serious, he said, "It's a very special time for all of us here today and a time which means a great deal to me personally, and it means a lot to see so many good friends as I look out on this audience."

Biden then greeted Rao and also the deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Washington, Ambassador Arun Kumar Singh, and said he had joked with Singh earlier that "if I had his hair, I could have been important."

And, then to sustained applause and raucous whoops, Biden recognised Gabbard, who stood up and greeted the guests with a namaste.

Biden said, "There is a distinction that you come to the Congress as the first Hindu to be elected to the legislature and I am looking forward to working with you," and then reverting to his humorous side, quipped, "As (Congressman) Rush Holt (who was among half-a-dozen lawmakers present) can tell you, that could be a blessing or a curse."

He then reiterated that even though "it's a strange thing to say to this audience that Diwali is the festival of lights and that on this day, we celebrate light over darkness, and equally is important, compassion over hatred and there's such an overwhelming need to have in our world today."

Biden said, "Every year, Diwali reminds us of the fundamental human bonds that unite us, which are much more powerful than those things that divide us. Right now, people of four major faiths are celebrating Diwali -- millions of Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists in India and here in America are lighting lamps in their homes -- and are reflecting on a year gone by and are trying as we all are here for a good year to come."

"But even as we celebrate here today, we also remember the work that is still ahead as we strive together to build a better world," he said, and exhorted everyone "to commit ourselves to bring light to any place that is still facing darkness. And, as we all know, there are tens of millions of people that are still facing darkness around the world."

Biden, then referring to the horrific massacre of Sikh worshippers in the Wisconsin gurdwara on August 5, said, "Earlier this year, we faced that stark reminder of evil that still exists when a gunman walked into a holy place in Oak Creek in Wisconsin and opened fire. It was another shock to the system."

"But as my mother would say -- she always said -- 'Joe we have something terrible, and now good will happen, if you fight these evil forces, the fact is that it did in a way bring various communities together that I don't know that one anticipated would happen and the way in which it would happen."

Biden asserted, "We saw the resilience of a community that refused to consider itself as victims and instead they drew strength from their faith and people across this country of all faiths offered compassion and their support."

"We saw that compassion in the kindness of neighbours and the heroic actions of the first responders on that tragic day," he said.

Earlier, in his Diwali message, President Obama had also referred to the Wisconsin gurdwara tragedy, recalling that "earlier, this year, we were reminded of the evil that exists in the world when a gunman walked into the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and opened fire. (But) In the wake of that horrible tragedy, we saw the resilience of a community that drew strength from their faith and a sense of solidarity with their neighbours, Sikh and non-Sikh alike."

"We also saw compassion and love, in the heroic actions of the first responders and the outpouring of support from people across the country. Out of a day of sadness, we were reminded that the beauty of America remains our diversity, and our right to religious freedom," he said.

Biden in his remarks observed, "Folks, one thing that Diwali reminds us of is that there is a light within all of us -- it's a light of knowledge and compassion, a light that empowers us to do good. To, as Abraham Lincoln said, respond to our better angels."

"And that light that we have to keep, in each of our hearts and we have to spread that faith. So, as I have the great privilege of lighting and illuminating this lamp, I wish you all peace and prosperity and the promise of a new and happy new year."

Biden declared, "May Diwali illuminate your dreams and fresh hopes for all of us and may the light guide us safely home. We have much, much work to do, but I can think of no community I'd rather embark on that journey with than all of you assembled here today."

Barve told rediff.com that "it was such a great honour and pleasure to be at the White House for this particular Diwali, especially since the first Hindu member of Congress was present."

Shalini 'Shelly' Kapoor Collins, founder and chief executive officer, Enscient Corporation, who served on the platform committee at the Democratic National Committee, and raised millions of dollars for Obama's re-election, said, "It was truly a lovely event with senior White House administration personnel explaining Diwali, and talking about the White House's Faith Engagement, a program which was not in place until our president took office."

She told rediff.com, "President Obama's vision of inclusion and respect for all was truly reflected in the Diwali program. It was the perfect coming together of both of my worlds -- Indian and American--and I felt incredibly proud to support this president, for were it not for his efforts, this event would not take place."

Collins said, "I personally was honoured to be included in this event where folks were asking for invitations but only a limited number were distributed. I was fortunate enough to take my mom and dad to the event and flew in from San Francisco. Others flew in from Los Angeles and Chicago to be part of this auspicious kickoff to the new year."

Also present was Arunachala 'Raj' Nagarajan, who came to the US from India by boat on a 22-day journey in September 1962, and earlier in the day to celebrate his 50th anniversary in the US and for his significant contributions to the social fabric of the US through Indian culture and his professional career at IBM, was honoured and felicitated by Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, who created a certificate acknowledging his contributions and the flag flown over the US Capitol on September 9, 2012, was presented to him.

Nagarajan attended his wife, Janaki, son Kamesh and daughter-in-law Dr Ami Shah, and was also greeted and congratulated by Biden.

Also present were Obama's old college roommate and the US Ambassador to Belize, Vinai Thummalapally, Indian American officials at the White House and Department of Labour Nicholas Rathod and Parag Mehta, former principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, Kiran Ahuja, executive director of the White House Initiative for Asian American and Pacific Islanders, ex-Kansas legislator Rajiv Goyle, air force officer Ravi Chaudhary, Gautam Raghavan, associate director, White House Office of Public Engagement, and Democratic activist Reshma Saujani.

There were also speeches about Diwali and community service from Ahuja, Raghavan, Joshua DeBois, Director of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and the only Hindu on its advisory council, Anju Bhargave, and entertainment by a fusion and playing three pieces of Carnatic music.

In her remarks, Bhargave, the founder of Hindu American Seva Charities, said, "In this changing American landscape, we have seen a paradigm shift of inclusion occurring. The faith glass ceiling has cracked in America and is resounding around the globe. The doors for the people of eastern traditions, not only the Hindus but the entire the Dharmic Americans have opened. And we have demonstrated how we strengthen this country we love and call home."

She said, "During the last four years together with the White House we have laid a strategic road map to bring the values of transformative seva, of social justice and karmic empathy to the forefront and connected the community with the federal agencies. We have succeeded in creating a national Dharmic voice where there was none."

Bhargave said, "We are identifying ways to reduce poverty across the country and spur economic development. We appointed our first Hindu American chaplain and honored the Dharmic military. Together we are promoting the values and benefits of yoga, nutrition and Ayurveda."

In November 2009, President Obama created history by becoming the first US President to light a diya and host several Indian Americans at the Diwali celebration in the White House East Room.

The tradition of the White House hosting an annual Diwali celebration was started in the final year of the George W Bush administration and continued throughout the four years of his second term. But President Bush never attended any of the events nor did Vice President Richard Cheney, and it was always a senior aide who did the honors with the first Diwali the White House hosted being graced by Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove. None of the Diwali celebrations the Bush White House hosted were held in the White House proper, but were always in the Old Executive Office Building.

Image: US Vice President Biden lights a diya as priest Ramesh Babu recites shlokas during Diwali celebrations in White House
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It’s finally happening. The long-awaited, oft speculated, seemingly impossible ‘Evil Dead 4’ is actually happening – it’s just coming in the form of a TV series. In the picturesque town of Auckland, New Zealand director Sam Raimi, producer Rob Tapert and star Bruce Campbell are rolling cameras on Ash Vs. Evil Dead, the Starz TV series that has allowed the creative trio to further the demonic misadventures of their cult hero, Ash Williams. Hail to the king, baby.

Yesterday afternoon, I jumped on the phone for a conference call with Raimi, Tapert and Campbell to chat about diving back in to their beloved franchise and get some details on what fans can expect from this new incarnation of the Evil Dead universe. They shared a ton of great info, but before we get into that, check out this first look image at the guys reuinited with ‘The Classic’ – the 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Ash drove in the Evil Dead films (and which has appeared in almost all of Raimi’s films to date).

Without further ado, here are the 23 things you should know about Ash Vs. Evil Dead:

The series takes place in an alternate universe that exists after Evil Dead 2. In Raimi’s words, “ It doesn’t really exist in the exact same universe. It’s a slightly altered universe. It takes place somewhere in an alternate universe after Evil Dead 2.”

In Raimi’s words, “ So does that mean Army of Darkness is stricken from the timeline? Not exactly. Raimi explained (kind of), “ Army of Darkness, does it exist? Well, certainly Ash went through that experience. W e’re not referencing specifics from that, but he certainly has that in his memory.”

Raimi explained (kind of), “ Ash Vs. Evil Dead will feature new Deadite designs, and entirely new entities altogether. According to Tapert, “We certainly will play to what we once did with D eadites , even through the remake, but we’re trying to expand the universe…We will encounter Deadites , which are very different from other forces of nature out there, and then we expose the audience to new entities that were not yet presented in the Evil Dead universe.

According to Tapert, The action takes place in the modern day. Raimi said, “It takes place in the here and now with Ash thirty years later; what he’s become and what he’s going to have to face.”

There’s no time travel…yet. But Tapert says it’s always a possibility, “[Time travel] certainly was an element of the Necronomicon that some of the [spells] not only called for demons, but portals in time and space. Perhaps by the end of this season, because we haven’t really discussed episodes 9 and 10 so much. Or the second season, if the story took us there. We know it’s part of the Evil Dead universe. So it’s always a possibility, but right now it’s not in the work that we’re doing.

But Tapert says it’s always a possibility, “[Time travel] certainly was an element of the Necronomicon that some of the [spells] not only called for demons, but portals in time and space. Perhaps by the end of this season, because we haven’t really discussed episodes 9 and 10 so much. Or the second season, if the story took us there. We know it’s part of the Evil Dead universe. So it’s always a possibility, but right now it’s not in the work that we’re doing. Ash Vs. Evil Dead picks up when the Deadites return from a decades-long period of dormancy. Raimi described the setup, “The Deadites have been fairly dormant over the last 20-30 years and Ash has been living a low life, hiding out. Our story really begins when they come back and someone is needed to stand up against them.” Is it Ash’s fault that they come back? “Of course.”

Tonally, the series is a mix of the visceral horror of Evil Dead and the slapstick comedy of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. Raimi described, “ We have elements of the Evil Dead films, which have always had very hard-edged, intense horror really designed to frighten the audience, and no holds barred there…B ut also, there is a comedic element that is alive in this… . I think what we tried to do is go back to the horror of the first and second Evil Dead, but with the character that Bruce created over the second and third Evil Dead. We’re really a combination; something we haven’t quite seen before.”

Raimi described, “ Ash is a basketcase. He’s traumatized by the horrors he survived in the first three films. Campbell explained, “He is a basketcase. We’re going to find Ash is potentially damaged goods and, god forbid, this is our hero.” Tapert continued, “He’s not a nobler or saner character than when we last saw him. In fact, I think if anything, he’s digressed. He’s kind of sunk to his lowest instincts, and that’s where we find him.”

In the series, a team forms around him. Raimi described the new gang, “ In this incarnation, Ash has a team that forms around him. Pablo (Ray Santiago), a young immigrant who wants to be part of the American fabric, forget his roots, and through his encounters with Ash and the Evil Dead, discovers what’s really important to him. Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo), Pablo’s love interest who first doesn’t believe in Ash and wants nothing to do with him, but becomes a part of the team as they realize there is something greater at play than a series of Evil Dead-like attacks.

And some new enemies too. Raimi continued, “Amanda Fisher ( Jill Marie Jones ) is a police officer who sees something that she doesn’t believe and it causes her great problems in her profession, and she’s on the trail to hunt down Ash because she believes he’s responsible for this series of bodies. Eventually, she teams up with Ruby ( Lucy Lawless ) who knows something about the Evil Dead, and she’s also on the hunt for Ash. That is the core team over the first season. “

Lucy Lawless’ character, Ruby, is on a justified mission against Ash. Tapert explained, “S he’s a woman of mystery, and we don’t want to reveal too much about her real agenda or why she so desperately wants to track Ash down, but she’s had an unpleasant experience that Ash was involved with…she’s completely justified in her actions and she’s going to become a formidable person to have on Ash’s tail.”

Tapert explained, “S Ash is going to give you some sugar, baby. The series will explore romance, but it’s secondary. Campbell spoke to Ash’s ill-fated love life, “There is a bit of arrested development there, so he’s going to have some struggles. Because there are bigger issues! We’re talking life and death. There are some romantic aspects…Ash doesn’t usually have a lot of time for that. There’s usually creatures breaking down his door, trying to tear his head off.” Tapert interjected, “Bruce, give ’em some sugar, baby.” “I will give some sugar. There’s going to be some sugar to give.”

The chainsaw arm will definitely make an appearance, no word on the boomstick though. Tapert confirmed, “ He’s been living in fear of a resurgence of the Evil Dead, of the Deadites , so that old rusted hulk of his, that’s the one thing he’s kept oiled up and in tip-top shape just in case. So I think we will see that sweet baby come back, come roaring to life, slicing and dicing on the D eadites .”

The effects are designed to continue the Evil Dead tradition. Tapert said, “We’re working with a great makeup effects artist down in New Zealand, Roger Murray , we’ve worked with him on various things over the years. That’s one of the expectations from the franchise; makeup effects, gore effects. So absolutely we plan to have those and continue with what the audience expects from the franchise in a new and different way.” Campell agreed, “ This is not going to be a watered down version of Evil Dead. The very first Evil Dead has no rating. The second Evil Dead has no rating. Only Army of Darkness was ever rated. Thankfully by partnering with Starz, the gloves are off and we have no restrictions, almost literally…[The fans] want the hardcore stuff, and they’re going to get it.

Tapert said, Joseph LoDuca will compose the soundtrack. Raimi explained the new approach they’re taking to the music, “We’re also working with something we really haven’t done on the Evil Dead. We’re working with some older classic rock music from the 70s and early 80s, because of course Ash became stunted due to the developments in his life at that time and has never gone past those moments.” Tapert added, “We’ll be taking old sounds, old music and re-bending it and shaping it in a new fashion.”

Sam Raimi will only direct the pilot. They’ve already got their other directors lined up, including Michael Bassett (Silent Hill: Revelation), Michael Hurst (Bitch Slap), and Luke Jacobs .

They’ve already got their other directors lined up, including (Silent Hill: Revelation), (Bitch Slap), and . However, he has and will continue to heavily influence the creative direction of the show. Tapert said, “ Sam and his brother Ivan have been involved in the [writer’s] room every spare second until Sam got down here to start prepping… and we continue to talk through each of the episodes. We’re exactly where we should be at the start of shooting. We’ve got six scripts. We’re all very much involved in the creative process.” Campbell spoke to how Raimi will remain a part of that process, “ I’m going to be in touch with Sam even on the episodes he’s not directing, because I’ve never been directed by anyone else as this character. Thank god he’s doing this pilot so we can get reacquainted with the approach to this character. Because when he’s off doing post on this pilot, we’re going to grope in the dark without him but he will be consulted quite heavily.”

Tapert said, “ They opted for the half-hour format to match the “breakneck” pace of the films. Tapert explained, “One of the reasons we decided we wanted to do a half hour was that we thought that this was – the breakneck pace that the movies often had, that really was the right format in the world of television for this particular project.” Raimi continued, “ I really appreciate that Starz let us keep this half-hour idea. That’s what makes it really cool to me, that we can really fire on all cylinders, and be outrageous and fast paced and non-stop without a lot of secondary character exposition that sometimes you find in these hour shows.”

Tapert explained, “One of the reasons we decided we wanted to do a half hour was that we thought that this was – the breakneck pace that the movies often had, that really was the right format in the world of television for this particular project.” Raimi continued, “ Ash Vs. Evil Dead expands the Evil Dead universe to a bigger story. Campbell said, “Because you’re doing a TV show now and not a feature film, you actually have to structure everything differently. You have to structure the storytelling differently and you have to create a much larger world, because the demands of the audience are much – it’s every week that you’re entertaining them, so you have to have a multiplicity of stories and angles and tangents. It’s going to be a much bigger story.”

The series doesn’t preclude the possibility of a sequel to the Evil Dead remake. In fact, they’re definitely still interested in making one. Raimi said, “I love the Evil Dead remake. I think Fede Alvarez did a brilliant job…I love that movie, and I hope there will be a sequel. After we had made his movie, as much as the fans loved it, they also seemed to want to see Bruce again in this series. So we thought, this is our time. If we’re ever going to do it, we have to set aside that crowd. Now is a good time. And television seems like an interesting format to take it forward in. So we chose to make Bruce’s story right now. I hope we can get Fede back to continue the new Evil Dead series once we’ve established Bruce’s story.

In fact, they’re definitely still interested in making one. Raimi said, “I love the Evil Dead remake. I think Fede Alvarez did a brilliant job…I love that movie, and I hope there will be a sequel. After we had made his movie, as much as the fans loved it, they also seemed to want to see Bruce again in this series. So we thought, this is our time. If we’re ever going to do it, we have to set aside that crowd. Now is a good time. And television seems like an interesting format to take it forward in. So we chose to make Bruce’s story right now. I hope we can get Fede back to continue the new Evil Dead series once we’ve established Bruce’s story. Don’t count out another Ash-centric Evil Dead film either, even if the show doesn’t take off. “ It’s a possibility no matter what happens, because I think we always want to keep that ability in the back of our minds to tell a story on the big ol ‘ screen. Nothing will preclude anything, regardless of what happens.”

“ They’re all willing to come back for a second season. Campbell stated emphatically, “ I’m not going anywhere. This is the sh ow I’m going to devote basically every ounce of my aging energy into. This is something that you don’t take lightly. This was a long road to get here, starting back in ’79.” Tapert seconded, “I t would be a joyless process that the mantle would be passed to anyone else. I just don’t see that as a possible outcome in this. Raimi confirmed, “ I feel the same way. I think we’re really doing this to work together again as a team.”

The series is basically happening because Evil Dead fans are the most devoted, persistent people in the world. Raimi recalled, “Ivan, my brother, and myself, when I would be on promotion for any other movie, the reporters I’d be speaking with would feign interest in that picture I was working on and then they’d say, ‘But when’s the next Evil Dead coming out?'” Campbell had the same experience, “ I go to conventions a lot and I’m driven insane by the fans at conventions. I’ve been doing conventions since 1988 and I hear it at every convention I go to, same as Sam. We were tortured for years, and guess what? Now they’re going to get it.”

See that, folks. Never give up on your dreams. Ash Vs. Evil Dead is set to premiere on Starz this Fall.
As Ann Cabiness stood in the Communion line at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church on Sunday morning, two things were on her mind: connecting with God and getting out of the humid sanctuary before someone mentioned her skimpy tank top and tight, knee-length running pants.

“I know I’m inappropriate, but I’m trying to save time. I know I’m in the wrong. My mother would not approve,” the 30-year-old said sheepishly as she made a beeline from Mass at the Bethesda church to the gym. “But would it be better that I not come?”

Summer in our sweltering region forces a theological question: How does God feel about exposed shoulders in a house of worship? Or toes? Or some glimpse of thigh?

With temperatures in the 80s by 7:30 a.m. services, this is the season for church bulletin items like the one in Our Lady’s: “Dignity & Decorum: Please try not to wear beach shorts, tank tops, and flip-flops to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Thank you.”

In general, casual has pummeled formal everywhere in America, from airplanes to offices. But places of worship — where debates on modesty are not confined to the summer months — may be the final frontier for questions about what constitutes overly risque. And those questions have recently sprung to new life.

A popular campaign aimed at young evangelical women called “Modest is Hottest” has triggered backlash by devout younger women who see the slogan as sexist. When the Bible calls for “modesty,” they argue, it refers to displays of things like wealth and is describing the depth of one’s spirit, not their neckline.Teaching women that their value rises if they have more clothes on is objectifying, a torrent of essays have argued.

“A woman’s breasts and buttocks and thighs all proclaim the glory of the Lord,” said Sharon Hodde Miller, a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School whose critique of “modest is hottest” in the online evangelical magazine Christianity Today was one of the best-read of recent years. “Modesty is an orientation of the heart, first and foremost. It begins with putting God first. To look at an outfit and say if it’s modest or immodest, I’m not sure you can do that.”

Some critics say the drive for looser, longer fabric has political tones, a “modesty nostalgia” for a happier, more fully clothed America that some feel never was. But advocates for less skin in the sanctuary see modest attire as transformational — part of the process of moving into a spiritual head space.

Particularly today as institutional religion bleeds members, many churches — even some theologically conservative ones — advertise that dress is “come as you are.”

“We don’t want clothes to ever be a barrier. That’s one reason we don’t talk about it,” said the Rev. Don Davidson of First Baptist Church of Alexandria.

Some even argue that informal clothing signals not a new lack of respect for institutional religion but a new genuineness and familiarity.

Grass-roots pew patrolling, on the other hand, is as alive as ever.

Charisma Wooten, a singer and actor, had been a parishioner and lay leader at Refreshing Spring Church of God in Christ in Riverdale for more than 30 years when she was told moments before taking the pulpit for a Scripture reading one baking July Sunday a couple of years ago that she couldn’t because she didn’t have on pantyhose. Wooten said she was wearing a dress that nearly hit the floor, but Church of God in Christ is a formal denomination where ushers wear gloves and the handbook says that “dressing in a sensually provocative manner produces inclinations to evil desires.”

Another summer Sunday, Wooten was wearing a sleeveless black-and-white polka-dot dress and “my little matching shoes and hat,” when the pastor’s wife said sweetly: “Honey, aren’t you cold?” It took Wooten three days to realize she was likely being politely asked to cover her shoulders.

Wooten says she generally brushes it off when she’s been scolded for her church clothes, but the pantyhose incident led her to send a mass e-mail decrying the misplaced focus on rules and dogma.

“You can follow all these rules men set up and be on your way to hell,” she said.

Concepts of appropriate dress are, of course, a mix of denominational, regional, racial and ethnic components, and they are sometimes specific in unpredictable ways. Black churches are generally known for formal, modest and elaborate style, even in summer. Catholics stereotypically are dressed simply for Mass — full suits and hats are less common, as are plunging necklines.

Rainey Ray Segars, 26, grew up with a Southern Baptist pastor-father in Tennessee, where shorts were common around church but strapless dresses were not. At 24, she moved with her new youth-pastor-husband to Illinois and found out on the first warm week since their move that jeans and Packers jerseys were fine at church activities but shorts were not.

After coming to a choir practice in shorts, a congregant “sent by a group of offended people” told Segars that she had caused someone to be lustfully distracted — “That it was my fault,” Segars remembered.

“I said, ‘I’m interested to know if that person will seek out help for themselves,’ ’’ Segars said. “I don’t agree that a woman is to blame for lust someone feels towards her. My thought was to start a dialogue.”

Did she?

“It was like: ‘Yeah, that’s all fine, but please don’t wear shorts,’ ” she remembered.

The congregation she’s part of now, Segars said, includes a huge range of dress and cover.

“I think it shows a loveliness and a comfort: ‘I came just as I am, just looking to be known.’ It communicates a safety I think is really beautiful,” she said.

Conversations (and condemnations) on the issue of modest clothing and summer worship seem to focus on women. Monsignor Ed Filardi said he put the notice in the bulletin at Our Lady of Lourdes at the request of women reacting to the clothing of other women. Personally, he said, he doesn’t see a real problem, though after services Sunday morning one usher engaged the priest on the topic.

“You’re coming to see the Lord,” said Len Thompson, 65, recently retired from the Navy, and one of two men out of about 80 wearing a jacket at Mass. “What if I was going to see the Obamas? It seems skewed.”

Foundry United Methodist Church in Dupont has many gay men as members, and last Sunday many men present wore dress shorts and polo shirts.

“I’m not sure if my shins are distracting anyone in here,” one 39-year-old man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said with a smile.

Discussions about possible sins of immodesty inevitably lead to discussions about another sin: judging.

“Jesus is most strong when he speaks about judging people,” said Johnnie Moore, youth pastor at the evangelical Liberty University, noting students have come to his services in pajamas. That said, he feels religious and secular Americans are joining forces over concern about an oversexualized youth culture. “Generally speaking, you shouldn’t come to church as you would to a club,” he said.

Northwest Washington image consultant Ketura Persellin has written about appropriate clothing for worship, down to the size of bag, jangly jewelry and skirt length. This is a woman who cares about clothes. But as her preteen children are getting older, Persellin finds herself less tolerant of clothing chatter at her synagogue, Adas Israel.

“I don’t want people talking about my kids like that,” she said. “I’ve definitely been trying to get down from my high horse.”
No. 1 - Retired for Billy Martin Earle Combs 1929-1935 George Selkirk 1934 Roy Johnson 1936 Frank Crosetti 1937-1944 Tuck Stainback 1944 George Stirnweiss 1945-1950 BILLY MARTIN 1951-1957 Bobby Richardson 1958-1966 Bobby Murcer 1969-1974 No. 2 Mark Koenig 1929-1930 Yats Yuestling 1930 Joe Sewell 1931 Lyn Lary 1931-1934 Red Rolfe 1931, 1934-1942 George Stirnweiss 1943-1944 Frank Crosetti 1945-1966 Jerry Kenny 1969-1972 Matty Alou 1973 Sandy Alomar 1974-1976 Paul Blair 1977-1979 Darryl Jones 1979 Bobby Murcer 1979-1983 Tim Foli 1984 Dale Berra 1985 Wayne Tolleson 1986-1990 Mike Gallego 1992-1994 Derek Jeter 1995-2003 No. 3 - Retired For Babe Ruth BABE RUTH 1920-1934 George Selkirk 1935-1942 Bud Methany 1943-1946 Roy Weatherly 1946 Hal Peck** 1946 Eddie Bockman 1946 Joe Medwick** 1947 Frank Colman 1947 Allie Clark 1947 Cliff Mapes 1948 *With the Yankees for 10 days, never appeared in a game. Obtained 6/20/46

**Only appeared in Spring Training games. Released 4/29/47 No. 4 - Retired For Lou Gehrig LOU GEHRIG 1923-1939 No. 5 - Retired For Joe DiMaggio Bob Meusel 1929 Tony Lazzeri 1930-1931 Frank Crosetti 1932-1936 Nolan Richardson 1935 JOE DI MAGGIO 1937-1942, 1946-1951 Nick Etten 1943-1945 No. 6 Tony Lazzeri 1929, 1934-1937 Dusty Cooke 1930-1931 Ben Chapman 1932-1933 Joe Gordon 1938-1943, 1946 Don Savage 1944-1945 Dr. Bobby Brown 1947-1952 Mickey Mantle 1951 Andy Carey 1953-1960 Deron Johnson 1961 Clete Boyer 1961-1966 Charlie Smith 1967-1968 Roy White 1969-1979 Ken Griffey Sr. 1982 Mike Pagliarulo 1985 Rick Cerone 1987 Jack Clark 1988 Steve Sax 1989-1991 Tony Fernandez 1995 Joe Torre 1996-2007
In May 1997, 8-year-old Kirsten Hatfield disappeared from her bedroom one night, sparking a national search by local police and the FBI. But the case quickly went cold and she was never found.

On Monday, Oklahoma police made a decisive break in the long-dormant case, arresting a man who lives two doors down and was initially identified as a suspect in the case, but is now linked by DNA evidence to the girl’s disappearance.

Police arrested Joseph Palma, a neighbor who had previously told investigators he was at home that night, charging him with first-degree murder and kidnapping after a DNA test linked him to items found in the girl’s bedroom on the night of her disappearance.

Police said that they feared she had been killed just after she was abducted, but family members welcomed Mr. Palma’s arrest as providing some relief in a case that had gone cold more than 18 years ago.

“Oh my goodness,” the victim's mother, Shannon Hazen, told The Oklahoman after first learning of the arrest from the paper on Monday. “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” she said, then began sobbing.

Palma was identified as a suspect in the case after examining blood found on the windowsill of the girl’s bedroom and on her clothing, which was found in the house’s backyard. In June, he agreed to give a DNA sample after investigators began re-examining the case, but maintained that he had been at home during the night of May 13, 1997.

The blood on the windowsill was identified as his after DNA testing, with police saying the match was one in 293 sextillion, The Oklahoman reported.

“It is likely that Palma has been motivated to stay in the same home to conceal evidence of the crime and/or the location of Kirsten's body,” wrote Midwest City Police Detective Darrell Miller in a request for an arrest warrant.

Palma’s story also differed slightly from the account he gave in 1997 to two different investigators, Reuters reports, noting that there is no indication that police searched his home during the original investigation.

Investigators began searching Palma’s home on Monday and will continue searching on Tuesday, local police said. A longtime groundskeeper, Palma reportedly works for the Lake Thunderbird State Park, The Oklahoman reported, saying that it was unclear if he had an attorney.

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“This is a huge case.... It's one of those cases you want to solve before you retire," Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes, who has been police chief for 16 years, told The Oklahoman.

This report contains material from Reuters.
And so, we stagger into an even more uncertain future

Emotions ran high as Hong Kong legislators opened debate on a controversial electoral reform package on Wednesday.

Supporters and opponents made last-ditch efforts after extensive campaigns to influence public opinion.

(In the end, the measure was roundly rejected, with 28 votes against eight in favor of the bill after most of its supporters walked out.)

As if these were not enough drama, police smashed a bomb plot on Monday that recalls conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Treason Plot, a failed assassination attempt on England’s King James in 1605, or the Reichstag Fire, an arson attack on the German parliament building in Berlin in 1933.

One can’t help feeling that worse things are about to happen.

Prosperous metropolis

The British colonial authorities didn’t bother with so-called “desinicization” of Hong Kong.

Rather, they gave way to local customs and did not force people to spurn Chinese history, culture, religion and the like.

Under the British, Hong Kong earned a place on the global map as a prosperous metropolis unequalled in any Chinese society.

China’s rapid rise as a global power and its growing ambitions have had a negative effect on local politicians and the business elite.

They have become Beijing’s lackeys to promote its political agenda in Hong Kong including a controversial roadmap to the 2017 chief executive election.

Young Hong Kong people see such moves by Beijing as a bad omen, especially after it issued a white paper last year in which it asserted full control and authority over Hong Kong in contravention of “one country, two systems”.

Their concerns, dismissed as unrealistic and doomed, remain unanswered by Beijing and their own government.

What’s worse, they are increasingly alienated by a government that is not above questionable tactics.

Their disaffection has been used as an excuse by so-called “localists” to push separatism.

That used to be a pipe dream. Now, the notion of Hong Kong independence has entered the real world.

Secessionists are a minority but in a time of globalization and social networking, their message may be catching on.

Although it might take a long time before they hit world headlines and begin to rattle China, it cannot be completely ignored.

Three-year spiral

It has only been three years into Leung Chun-ying’s administration and we’re already seeing a precipitous decline in social cohesion.

Leung’s style of governance has led to increased public grievances and exacerbated political and social tensions.

And continued bickering over constitutional reform has overshadowed the historic significance of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty.

The government’s response has been to exaggerate issues and stir up disputes, resulting in a crippling polarization of society.

When it became clear in public opinion polls that more people were opposed to the election reform proposal, the government discredited the surveys, saying they had been manipulated.

I wonder if Beijing also thinks that way, so that it simply ignores public sentiment as long as it has a loyalist at the helm.

We have already seen that in Leung.

Irrelevant

The result of the voting on the election bill is no longer relevant to the future of Hong Kong’s democracy.

If it is passed, we will all have our shameful share of the big swindle. If it’s voted down, it merely reaffirms what we’ve been saying all along — we prefer nothing to something fake.

Rejection of the bill won’t lead us back to the right track either, and the Hong Kong government will simply continue with its naked lies about freedom, democracy and universal suffrage.

Life will go on but the years to come may not be the kind of future we want.

The odds of seeing a truly democratic Hong Kong are tremendous. And we may be seeing the last of Hong Kong as we know it — stable and prosperous — as we stagger into an even more uncertain future.

This article appeared in the Hong Kong Economic Journal on June 17. It was written before the Legco vote on the election bill.

Translation by Frank Chen

[Chinese version 中文版]

– Contact us at [email protected]

RA
The Vancouver Canucks, who bombed out at 28th overall and got wrecked by the draft lottery, are now in a position to fight for playoffs. With a game in hand over the eighth-place Calgary Flames and only one point back, all the critics who portrayed the Canucks as a directionless failure are being proved wrong: the Canucks are not a failure.

USA Today projected the team would hit 65 points, while EA predicted even worse with 63 points in their season simulation. If the Canucks were to be truly that bad, they would have the lowest team points since Edmonton and Buffalo in 2014-15.

But no – the Canucks started off the year 4-0-0, and are one of a few teams that have seven players with ten or more goals – Bo Horvat, who in his third season leads the team, has broken out into the next star, with 14 goals and 31 points in 48 games and an All Star Game Selection. Brandon Sutter, who was injured for the majority of last year, has 12, Henrik Sedin (congratulations on 1000 points!) has 11 along with brother Daniel, Sven Baertschi, and Markus Granlund (whose trade from Calgary for Hunter Shinkaruk drew heavy criticism). Summer free agent acquisition Loui Eriksson has 10 after a very slow start to the season. Alex Burrows, who was considered to be an overpaid buyout candidate, has worked himself onto a spot in the top 9 with Horvat and Baertschi and has seven goals.

Ryan Miller has shown why he was signed to his contract. While he’s got a middling-but-decent 2.50 GAA and .919 sv%, he’s played well, stuck up for his team, and been a source of leadership in the dressing room.

Troy Stecher, who played on the North Dakota team with Canuck prospect numero uno Brock Boeser, has shown incredible skill as a rookie defenseman coming straight out of college. His moves have left fans’ jaws agape and his work ethic has fans and management alike falling in love with him. Nikita Tryamkin, brought over from Russia at the end of the season in 2016, has not looked out of place, despite being held out of games early for being reportedly out of shape. He is constantly a source of physicality and solid puck movement (except when he ices the puck). Even Luca Sbisa has looked good this year – which is much-needed, given first pairing Alex Edler and Chris Tanev’s injuries.

You’d think that injuries would stop the Canucks. It didn’t.

Of course, there lies just under half a season left to play, and anything can happen. But despite injuries, doubting fans, and faithless media, they’ve managed to pull through pretty well and will find a way if their efforts toward playoffs are hampered.

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2 Journalists Killed During Live Broadcast In Virginia; Suspect Has Died

Enlarge this image toggle caption DAVID MANNING/Reuters /Landov DAVID MANNING/Reuters /Landov

(This post was last updated at 3:43 p.m. ET.)

Two journalists for Virginia TV news station WDBJ were killed by a gunman Wednesday morning while they were broadcasting live at a waterfront shopping center about an hour southeast of Roanoke, Va.

Reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward were doing a live report from Bridgewater Plaza in Moneta when a gunman opened fire, killing Parker and Ward and injuring Vicki Gardner, the head of a local Chamber of Commerce who was being interviewed. Gardner is now in stable condition, hospital officials say.

A suspect in the shooting was quickly identified — in part because of video taken at the scene — as Vester Lee Flanagan, 41, a former reporter for the station who was also known as Bryce Williams.

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Franklin County Sheriff Bill Overton says Flanagan has died. He had suffered a gunshot wound when he was taken into custody by Virginia State Police after a car chase that came hours after the shooting; authorities earlier said Flanagan was in critical condition.

At a 2:15 p.m. news conference, Overton said that less than an hour earlier, Flanagan had "died at Fairfax Inova Hospital in Northern Virginia, as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

In an earlier statement, Virginia State Police described how the shooting suspect had fled and eventually reached Interstate 66, with police in pursuit.

The suspect refused to stop, ran off the road and crashed. When police approached the vehicle, they found he had suffered a "gunshot wound." The man, police said, was taken to a hospital with "life-threatening injuries."

In an interview with CNN, Jeffrey A. Marks, WDBJ-TV's general manager, said Flanagan was hired as a reporter, but about two years ago he was fired. During a separate broadcast on his network, Marks said Flanagan had filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after he was fired.

The station reports:

"This happened during a live broadcast around 6:45 a.m. ... "Adam was 27-years-old. Alison just turned 24. "Both were from the WDBJ7 viewing area."

Video shows the camera panning to Parker in the middle of an interview as the gunman opens fire. Parker can be heard screaming.

The final image in the video shows the camera falling down and the feet of the presumed gunman walking out of the frame.

Hours after the shooting, a video from the gunman's perspective was posted to Twitter and Facebook under the name Bryce Williams. It shows a gunman quietly walking up on the live broadcast, looking toward the photographer (whose back was turned) and then pointing his gun at Parker before opening fire.

A man claiming to be Flanagan also sent a 23-page fax to ABC News, in which he said he had "been a human powder keg for a while" and took action after the Charleston, S.C., church shootings in June.

In addition to the Franklin County Sheriff's Office, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have sent personnel from Roanoke.

Update at 2:25 p.m. ET: Updates From News Conference

Former WDBJ employee Vester Lee Flanagan was taken into police custody after his car crashed into the median on I-66 in Virginia.

Franklin County Sheriff Bill Overton says Flanagan had switched cars, leaving his Ford Mustang at a Roanoke airport and driving away in a Chevrolet Sonic that he had rented before the attack. But the authorities tracked him as he drove up Interstate 81 and then onto I-66, and a police officer trailed him before activating her cruiser's emergency lights upon the arrival of backup.

Overton says Flanagan died at 1:30 p.m. ET, after being taken to the hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Update at 1:34 p.m. ET. A 'Senseless Tragedy':

In a written statement, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said that he was "heartbroken over this morning's senseless tragedy."

He said that as the state reflects on the shootings, residents should also begin thinking about how to prevent these kinds of things from happening.

"Keeping guns out of the hands of people who would use them to harm our family, friends and loved ones is not a political issue; it is a matter of ensuring that more people can come home safely at the end of the day," McAuliffe said. "We cannot rest until we have done whatever it takes to rid our society of preventable gun violence that results in tragedies like the one we are enduring today."

During his regular press briefing at the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said this was yet another example of gun violence that has become prevalent.

There are things that Congress can do, he said, to have a "tangible impact."

Update at 12:12 p.m. ET. Suspect Injured?:

Earlier today, WDBJ-TV, citing law enforcement officials, said the suspect had killed himself on Interstate 66 in Fauquier County. The station later retracted that report, saying Flanagan was injured but still alive and in critical condition.

Update at 12:07 p.m. ET. Suspect Filed EEOC Complaint:

On the same Twitter account that posted video of the shooting, Flanagan also made it clear that he was angry at the reporter and the photographer.

He said he had filed a report with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Jeffrey A. Marks, WDBJ-TV's general manager, confirmed that Flanagan had filed that EEOC complaint.

Citing confidentiality provisions, the EEOC said it could not comment.

Update at 11:20 a.m. ET. Presumed Suspect Posts Video:

The presumed suspect in the shooting of the two WDBJ journalists posted a video of the attack filmed from his vantage point to Twitter and Facebook.

The video, which has since been taken down, shows the gunman walk up behind cameraman Adam Ward. Ward does not appear to be aware the gunman is there. As the cameraman pans to the left and the camera is pointed at reporter Alison Parker, the gunman raises a handgun and aims it at Parker,who also did not seem aware of the shooter's presence.

The gunman fires at least six rounds.

Parker runs out of the frame before the video goes black.

The Twitter account has also been suspended.

Update at 10:39 a.m. ET. Authorities Identify Suspect:

CNN is reporting law enforcement authorities know the identity of the presumed gunman. And the network is reporting that the woman being interviewed in the video survived.

"The woman being interviewed, Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was shot in the back and is in surgery, said Barb Nocera, the chamber's special projects manager."

The Stauton, Va., area News Leader is reporting:
He was a few blocks from home, waiting for a bus in the cold, checking emails on his phone, when Coun. Matthew Green was stopped and questioned for several minutes by a Hamilton Police officer who seemed not to realize who he was.

"What are you doing there?" was the first thing Green said he heard the officer say, just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

You don't forget being stopped. - Desmond Cole, writer and activist

He felt like a suspect in his own neighbourhood, he said. He felt intimidated, frustrated and angry.

Green's story brings up the emotional and psychological impact that police activity in a diverse city can have on people on the receiving end of that activity.

Activist and journalist Desmond Cole wrote a Toronto Life article about the dozens of times he’s been stopped by police. (CBC) Being asked random questions by police when you're minding your own business – and having it happen more than once – sticks with a person. That's an impact that people who oppose carding and street checks have cited as a reason for reform.

"After years of being stopped by police, I've started to internalize their scrutiny," wrote Desmond Cole, a writer and activist whose story of being stopped and questioned dozens of times by Ontario police officers was published last year in Toronto. "I've doubted myself, wondered if I've actually done something to provoke them."

Green had to stay to wait for the bus, but even the idea of walking away from the officer didn't cross his mind.

"In theory my Charter rights allow me to walk away," he said. "I know in that particular situation it was somewhat of a psychological detainment."

The officer was "obviously in control enough" of the situation that he was content holding up a handful of cars to have the conversation, Green said.

"As an elected official, you know, I wanted to try to cooperate with him and answer the questions as fully as I possibly could, and I think walking away at that time would've escalated the situation," Green said.

Incidents like these may be something an officer quickly forgets as part of his or her day, Cole said in an address to the Ontario Bar Association.

But the person who was questioned? "You don't forget being stopped," Cole said.

'What would it have been if I was younger?'

Green, who has thousands of Twitter followers and a public platform as an elected official, can talk publicly about what happened, get it off his chest, hope for change or at least increased awareness.

Coun. Matthew Green of Ward 3 and Julia Horton, equity vice president of CUPE Local 5167, listen to a police services board discussion about street checks. (Samantha Craggs/CBC) But he wonders what would've happened if an officer had found another black man leaning against the wall on Tuesday afternoon, maybe one who's not as used to talking with police for his job.

"What would it have been if I was younger? I'm not sure how I would've responded to that as a younger man," Green said in an interview on Bill Kelly's CHML talk show.

"It's a dehumanizing process when you have to justify yourself to somebody for being where you are."

'Even if you're innocent'

Raheem Aman is a 23-year-old McMaster student who plans to be a lawyer and ran for the Green Party on the Mountain in last year's federal election.

When he was about 17, he and his two brothers and their father were playing basketball down the street from their home in Brampton.

On their walk home, a police car rolled up and stopped them and asked them where they were going and what they were doing, despite how obvious the answer was, Aman said.

Raheem Aman, 23, ran for the Green Party on the Mountain in the last federal election. They were still sweating from their game on the walk down the street, Aman said. "In basketball clothes. Nothing even in our pockets," he said.

"My dad was angry about the situation – to be disrespected in front of his children," Aman said.

In the heated exchange that followed, the officer drew his gun and threatened his dad, Aman said.

Now, Aman gets nervous every time he sees a police officer.

"Sometimes even if you're innocent you can still get a little nervous based on previous experiences especially if they were negative," he said. "I'll never be the same again."

'Living in Ancaster, water my garden every morning'

Aman said the people who've reacted to what happened to Green with "why didn't he just politely comply with the cops?" missed the point.

"They're talking from a position who've never been asked by the police random questions," he said. "[Police are] trying to incriminate you."

"If I was 45 years old, say, a European woman who's never been asked random questions by police, living in Ancaster, water my garden every morning, it's a totally different context," he said. "To any … black man especially, it's tough."

The incident with Green, whom Aman knows and considers a "brother," angered him, he said.

"Matthew Green, who pours his heart and blood into Hamilton -- he's still treated like any one of us," he said.

"It's not as simple as 'Just answer the questions.'"

kelly.bennett@cbc.ca | @kellyrbennett
The view from Mount Sunflower, Kansas’s highest elevation. (Image: CC0)

Geographer Jerry Dobson had barely started his new job at the University of Kansas when a realization hit. Whenever he told friends and colleagues about his gig, people would smile, congratulate him, the works. But then, almost inevitably, they’d make some crack about his new home state: specifically, how flat it was. Over his years-long tenure, this did not change.

“Everytime you meet someone, they say it—and it’s not true,” he says. “I always looked around and saw hills.”

But Dobson is a geographer, able to translate this frustration into motivation. A few years ago, he and his colleague Joshua Campbell—a born and raised Kansan—undertook a project. They set out to measure the flatness of every state in the union, using an algorithm designed to calculate how flat each one looks from different points in its interior—what Campbell calls “that feeling of total flatness.” When they got the results back, Kansas was in a respectable seventh, behind Delaware, North Dakota, and the clear winner, Florida. Since then, Dobson and Campbell have toured their results around, using them to argue against the flat-Kansas mythology.

Bluff along the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. #gyphills Photo by @flinthillsboy Use #kansasaintflat to be featured A photo posted by Kansas (@kansasaintflat) on May 31, 2016 at 7:25pm PDT

So how did Kansas get this reputation? Andy Stuhl, a musician who recently moved there by car, bets it comes from East Coast road-trippers, who spill out onto the plain after miles and miles of woods. Sam Huneke, a historian who grew up in Lawrence, points to a lack of particularly large hills, but insists that “the day-to-day experience is not one of flatness.” What is clear is that, like Dobson, they don’t much like it. “Of course it affects our reputation,” says Kelli Hilliard of the Kansas Tourism Board, pointing towards efforts to change that, like a set of scenic, rolling byways, and an Instagram account called “kansasaintflat.”

But Branden Rishel, a Washington-based cartographer, has a different, more radical idea: If everyone already thinks Kansas is flat, why not lean in? Why not just make it flat—totally, completely flat?

Rishel is very familiar with the Kansas flatness question. He was a student of Mark Fonstad, a Texas State geographer who, in 2003, set out with some colleagues and a laser microscope to determine which was flatter: Kansas or an IHOP pancake. The resulting study, titled “Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake,” likely added to the public misconceptions that rankle Dobson and Campbell. (They also point out that, if you use the particular mathematical approach of Fonstad et al, “there is no place on Earth that is not flatter than a pancake.”)

Despite his academic parentage, Rishel doesn’t disagree with Dobson and Campbell—“if Kansas is a sloped and hummocky lawn, Florida is a parking lot,” he says. He also agrees that perceived flatness is probably bad for the state’s reputation. He just thinks the best solution involves less fact-checking and more literal digging. “Kansans should reclaim and celebrate flatness,” Rishel says. “Kansas should become more flat than flat.”

Kansas, in Rishel’s ideal future. (Image: Branden Rishel)

About a year ago, Rishel posted a mocked-up map of Totally Flat Kansas on his blog, Cartographers Without Borders, along with a skeleton of his plan. The image, in which a smooth, sleek Kansas sits embedded in the bumpy continent like a tooth in a gum, is immediately appealing. It gives the sense of a state that has taken charge of its own destiny and has ended up several thousand years ahead of the rest of us, in a state of David Bowie-esque aesthetic precision. It makes Kansas look cool.

The plan, which he elaborated for me, goes as follows: Start in the middle of the state and dig west, towards Colorado. Send that excavated dirt due east, and lay it out as you go, filling in all possible nooks, crannies, valleys, etc. By the end, you will have moved 5,501 cubic miles of soil—over 9 billion Olympic swimming pools’ worth, Rishel points out. To even begin to do this, you’d need a whole lot of technology that hasn’t been invented yet (moveable pipelines, huge nuclear-powered mining machines, all that jazz). But the state would end up flat enough to test a level on, separated from its neighbors by enormous cliffs.

Rishel is a great evangelist for this plan. Besides the obvious recreational benefits—interstate cliff diving, endless ice skating in wet winters—total flatness would make Kansas a geographically fascinating spot, he says. There would be new plant life under the giant cliffs, which wouldn’t see the sun until noon. The Arkansas River would plunge down from Colorado, free-falling into the western edge of the state. “Tourists could take an elevator into Kansas and play bocce,” Rishel imagines, his enthusiasm palpable. “The region would turn into a giant puddle after storms… Visitors would discover that flat is never boring.”

A northeast view of Lawrence from the top of Mt. Oread. (Image: New York Public Library/Public Domain)

I’m sold. But I’m not from Kansas—and, like so many aspirational developers, neither is Rishel. Even if flattening is the sincerest form of flattery, Dobson, Campbell, and the other real Kansans I talked to would be sad to lose their hills, which help them take advantage of the good parts of being on the level. From the top of Lawrence’s Mount Oread, for example, “the view reaches far enough to fade away,” says Stuhl. “It’s awe-inspiring to stand on top of one of our hills and see a squall line moving in,” adds Sam Huneke, a history student who grew up in the state.

That is, until the mining machines roll by, bringing the future with them. Then, you’ll just want to get out of the way.
President Trump with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in the Oval Office. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia filed a motion Thursday to intervene in a long-running lawsuit over a core part of the Affordable Care Act.

In their legal filing, the attorneys general say they can't trust the Trump administration to defend their interests, because health insurance for millions of Americans has become “little more than political bargaining chips” for the White House.

The lawsuit is challenging how billions of dollars of federal payments were made to health insurers. Those payments are critical to the stability of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, which are designed to help individuals buy government-subsidized health coverage. The attorneys general want to step in to defend the payments, saying there is a “sharp divide” between the administration's goals and those of states.

For months, health insurance companies have been trying to get a solid answer from Congress and President Trump's White House on the future of the payments, called cost-sharing reductions, that help lower-income Americans afford their deductibles and co-payments. Their calls for certainty have grown increasingly urgent as they face deadlines to decide whether to offer plans in states and how much to charge.

The lawsuit over the payments was originally brought by House Republicans against the Obama administration. House Republicans won the lawsuit, which was appealed. Now, it has been inherited by the Trump administration, which has been unclear about whether it will defend the payments. A status update on the case is due on Monday.

Trump and Congress have sent mixed signals about whether the payments will continue on an almost weekly basis.

[Health insurers asked the Trump administration for reassurance on Obamacare. They didn’t get it.]

The repercussions of discontinuing the payments have been made clear by insurance executives, who warn that if the funding disappears, insurers could leave markets altogether or raise their premiums significantly.

CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest insurer in the Mid-Atlantic, requested rate increases of more than 50 percent in Maryland's marketplaces, and chief executive Chet Burrell warned earlier this month that if cost-sharing reduction payments were to end, rates could increase by another 10 to 15 percentage points.

Anthem chief executive Joseph Swedish said in an April earnings call that the company was filing its preliminary rates with states under the assumption the cost-sharing reductions would be made. If there isn't a commitment to make the payments, Swedish said the company would change its plans.

“Such adjustments could include reducing service area participation, requesting additional rate increases, eliminating certain product offerings or exiting certain individual ACA-compliant market altogether,” Swedish said.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners sent a letter this week to senators and to White House budget director Mick Mulvaney stressing the importance of the payments.

“This is not a theoretical argument — carriers have already left the individual market in several states, and too many counties have only one carrier remaining,” the association wrote to Mulvaney. “The one concern carriers consistently raise as they consider whether to participate and how much to charge in 2018 is the uncertainty surrounding the federal cost-sharing reduction payments.”

The motion to intervene was filed by the attorneys general of New York and California, and was joined by Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia.

“The President has increasingly made clear that he views decisions about providing access to health insurance for millions of Americans — including the decision whether to continue defending this appeal — as little more than political bargaining chips,” the attorneys general wrote in their motion to intervene in the case, saying they could not depend on the White House to represent states' interests.

“The number of uninsured Americans would go back up, hurting vulnerable individuals and directly burdening the States,” they wrote. “The wrong decision could trigger the very systemwide 'death spirals' that central ACA features, such as stable financing, were designed to avoid.”

Read More:

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Free-standing ERs offer care without the wait. But patients can still pay $6,800 to treat a cut.
Less than three months ago, Facebook Live experienced its first verifiable viral hit when more than 800,000 people tuned in to watch two BuzzFeed employees burst a watermelon using only rubber bands. But explosive fruit was just the beginning. Now, Facebook has reportedly inked well over 100 deals with a wide array of partners ranging from digital publishing outfits to celebrities, 17 of which come with million-dollar price tags.

Facebook Live, the live-video service that began rolling out to users in the fall of last year, is the centerpiece of C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of Facebook. (Earlier this month, Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn predicted that within five years, the social network could be “all video.”) And paying high-profile content-creators to make video that people actually want to watch is the crux of that plan. According to a document obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will pay almost 140 parties to create live video for the burgeoning service. The list of partners includes a number of media companies, including CNN, The New York Times, Vox, Tastemade, Mashable, and The Huffington Post. (Condé Nast, Vanity Fair‘s parent company, has ongoing partnerships with Facebook that include a number of different business and revenue models.) Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, Deepak Chopra, and Russell Wilson are among the celebrities that have signed on, the Journal reports.

While the total price tag for the deals tops $50 million, the partnerships differ widely in value. Buzzfeed, which saw early success with its watermelon-exploding video, landed the biggest contract among its publishing competitors with a $3.05 million contract to create live video between March 2016 and March 2017. The New York Times nabbed second place, with a $3.03 million 12-month contract, and CNN rounded out the podium players with a $2.5 million deal, the Journal reports. The outlet did not report how much individual celebrities will pocket by partnering with Facebook for the initiative.

Zuckerberg and friends are reportedly still figuring out how to monetize Facebook Live—pre-roll ads, presumably, are in our future—but by landing high-profile names to create its content, Facebook is undoubtedly one step closer to a sustainable live-video revenue model. During a Facebook town hall at the end of February, Zuckerberg said that live video was one of the things he was “most excited about.” This newest report makes it clear he sees it as a moneymaker, too.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel sentenced an Arab citizen to 30 months’ imprisonment on Monday for endangering national security by briefly joining Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Hikmat Massarwa (R), a member of Israel's Arab minority, attends a remand hearing at the Central District Court in Lod, near Tel Aviv April 25, 2013. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Hikmat Massarwa’s case was unprecedented, and the relatively light penalty handed down to him as part of a plea bargain reflected Israel’s indecision about who - if anyone - to back in its northern neighbor’s civil war.

Massarwa was arrested on March 19 upon returning via Turkey from Syria, where he had spent a week at a rebel base. Israeli prosecutors accused him of undergoing small-arms training by radical Islamists there who asked him to carry out a suicide attack in Israel - although, by all accounts, he declined.

Those charges carried a maximum 15-year jail term. But prosecutors appeared unable, from the outset, to throw the book at Massarwa because of Israeli haziness about the Syria crisis.

“There’s no legal guidance regarding the rebel groups fighting in Syria,” Judge Avraham Yaakov said at a session of the trial at Lod district court, south of Tel Aviv, in May.

Massarwa, a 29-year-old baker, at first denied wrongdoing, saying he had gone to Syria to seek a brother missing since joining the insurgency. He also argued that the Western-backed anti-Assad rebels should not be regarded as a danger to Israel.

But, changing tack on Monday, Massarwa confessed to unlawfully travelling to a hostile state and meeting what prosecutors designated a “foreign agent”. In turn, they dropped the count against him of illicitly receiving military training.

Under the plea bargain, Massarwa acknowledged his actions “had potential to threaten the security of the state of Israel”.

Technically at war with Syria, Israel enjoyed decades of stable ceasefire while the Assad family ruled unchallenged in Syria. It fears that, if Damascus falls to the Islamist-dominated rebels, jihadis among them will have a Syrian springboard for striking at the Jewish state.

Such concern has been stoked in recent months by Syrian gunfire and shelling into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, incidents in which Israel has routinely shot back. Israel took the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population. They seldom take up arms with its enemies.

Yet some Israeli officials privately described Massarwa’s trial as a bid to deter other Arab citizens from going to Syria and possibly acquiring the Islamist agenda and fighting savvy that could drive them to turn to violence once back home.

“The prosecution were definitely looking for a deterrent effect here, and they got it, even though they scaled down the penalty,” Massarwa’s lawyer, Helal Jaber, told Reuters.

But he added that Israeli Arab volunteerism for the Syrian civil war was “hardly a phenomenon. We are talking about two or three people - bad apples. The overwhelming majority of the community are loyal to the state of Israel”.

(This story is refiled to add dropped letter in penultimate paragraph quote)
This article is over 7 years old

Major rights holders claim search engines make it 'difficult' for people to find legal music and films online

Google and Bing accused of directing users to illegal copies of music

Google and other search engines "overwhelmingly" direct music fans to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks online, a coalition of entertainment industry groups has told the government.

In a confidential document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, lobbying groups for the major rights holders claimed Google and Microsoft's Bing are making it "much more difficult" for people to find legal music and films online.

The private document, obtained by the free speech campaigners Open Rights Group and shared with the Guardian, urges the government to introduce a voluntary body that would remove rogue websites from internet search results.

The proposals were made to the culture minister Ed Vaizey as part of a series of consultations on internet piracy between rights holders, search giants and the government in November last year. The nine-page document was submitted on behalf of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK body for the music majors, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Premier League, the Publishers Association and the Pact, the film and TV independent producers' trade body.

Privately, rights holders said there is a "spirit of optimism" between the entertainment groups and search engines as they attempt to usher in more legal media sites, including Google's own fledgling music service.

Google has in the past year stepped up efforts to remove copyright-infringing content, launching a fast-track removal requests form and filtering terms "associated with infringement". However, the rights holders claim in the document that "as time goes on, the situation is getting worse rather than better".

"Consumers rely on search engines to find and access entertainment content and they play a vital role in the UK digital economy," the rights holders state.

"At present, consumer searching for digital copies of copyright entertainment content are directed overwhelmingly to illegal sites and services."

The entertainment groups want Google to "continuously review key search words" and "effectively screen" mobile apps on Android smartphones in an effort to combat illicit sharing.

The document claims that 16 of the first 20 Google search results for chart singles link to "known illegal sites", according to searches by the BPI in September. In an attempt to persuade the government to clamp down on search engines, the groups claim that 41% of Google's first-page results for bestselling books in April last year were "non-legal links" to websites.

"Much of the illegal activity in the digital economy is facilitated and encouraged by money-making rogue sites," the document claimed.

"Intermediaries, unwittingly or by wilfully turning a blind eye (or in some cases, by encouraging such activity), play a key role in enabling content theft and often even profit from it. Only a comprehensive approach can address this issue."

The entertainment bodies call for search engines to:

• Assign lower rankings to sites that "repeatedly" make available copyright-infringing material

• Prioritise sites that "obtain certification as a licensed site" for music and film downloading

• Stop indexing sites that are subject to court orders

• Stop indexing "substantially infringing websites"

• Improve "notice and takedown" system

• Ensure that users are not directed to illicit filesharing sites through suggested search

• Ensure search engines do not advertise around unlawful sites or sell keywords associated with piracy or sell mobile apps "which facilitate infringement"

The chief executive of BPI, Geoff Taylor, said on Thursday: "The vast majority of consumers want search engines to direct them to legal sources of entertainment rather than the online black market.

"As search engines roll out high-quality content services, like Google Music, we want to build a constructive partnership that supports a legal online economy. We hope that Google and other search engines will respond positively."

A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association added: "If you look for film or music via a search engine you usually find websites providing access to pirated films or music at the top of the list of results.

"This is confusing for consumers, damages the legal market and legitimises copyright theft. We are in dialogue with search engines, ISPs [internet service providers], advertising networks and payment processors about a code to deal with the escalating problem of online copyright theft which threatens the growth of the entire creative industries sector. This paper is a result of that dialogue and we appreciate government's continuing efforts to help bring about a more responsible internet".

A spokesman for Google said: "Google takes the fight against online piracy very seriously. Last year, we removed over five million infringing items from Google Search. We have made industry-leading efforts in this field, investing over $50m (£32m) in fighting bad advertisements and over $30m on Content ID software, giving rights holders control over their YouTube content.

"We continue to work in close partnership with rights holders to help them combat piracy and protect their property."

Peter Bradwell, campaigner for the Open Rights Group, said the proposal contained "some dangerous ideas". He said: "It's another plan to take on far too much power over what we're allowed to look at and do online."
Fingerprint riddle leads to new call for Dr David Kelly inquest

Found in woods: Dr David Kelly's possessions did not have any fingerprints on them

Fresh information casting doubt on how weapons inspector Dr David Kelly died has been sent to the Government by campaigners trying to secure an inquest into his death.

Attorney General Dominic Grieve was presented with legal papers on Monday arguing that because there were no fingerprints on five items found with Dr Kelly’s body – including the knife he supposedly used to kill himself – a coroner’s inquest must be held to determine how he died.

The information, covering dozens of legal and scientific points, was submitted by a group of doctors who believe Dr Kelly’s death has never been investigated properly.

Mr Grieve will now consider if there is sufficient fresh evidence for a full examination of what remains one of the most notorious episodes of Tony Blair’s premiership. His decision is expected shortly.

Dr Kelly, a world-renowned weapons inspector, is said to have killed himself after being named as the prime source of a BBC report accusing Blair’s government of lying to take Britain into the Iraq war.

His body was found in woods close to his home in Oxfordshire on July 18, 2003. Uniquely, for an unexpected death such as his, no coroner’s inquest has ever been held.

The public inquiry into his death chaired by Lord Hutton found that he killed himself after slashing his wrist with a blunt pruning knife and overdosing on painkillers.

But Mr Grieve has been told by the doctors that they have established a range of fresh evidence questioning the official finding and highlighting several irregularities.

They state that it has been established, using the Freedom of Information Act, that there were no fingerprints on five items found with Dr Kelly’s body: the knife, a watch, his mobile phone, an open water bottle and blister packs of pills he supposedly swallowed.

In their legal papers, the doctors state: ‘It is submitted that to properly investigate the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death, any coroner would be obliged to make inquiries as to why there were no fingerprints found, including for example seeking evidence on whether any tests were carried out to establish if anything had been used to attempt to erase fingerprint evidence.

Fresh inquiry call: Body of the government scientist was found at Harrowdown Hill, Oxfordshire, on July 18, 2003

‘This is particularly relevant as it was noted no gloves were found on the body or in its vicinity.’

The doctors have also alleged that Dr Kelly’s GP, Dr Malcolm Warner, may have concealed crucial evidence about seeing the weapon inspector’s corpse when he appeared as a witness at the Hutton Inquiry in 2003.

The doctors claim they were ultimately made aware of this by Dr Kelly’s MP, Robert Jackson, who has since retired from Parliament.

They also say conflicting evidence about where Dr Kelly was found leads them to believe his body might have been moved after death.

According to the two volunteer searchers who found him, Dr Kelly’s body was sitting against a tree, but pathologist Nicholas Hunt described him as lying several feet in front of the tree.

The doctors have also raised questions about the fact that Thames Valley Police failed to collect vital evidence offered to them by Dr Kelly’s close friend Nigel Cox.

This evidence suggests that, immediately before his death, Dr Kelly had made social plans for July 23. Mr Cox is understood to still have an answerphone message proving his claim.

The doctors have stipulated that because none of the fingerprint evidence was even mentioned at the Hutton Inquiry, this point on its own ought to satisfy the minimum legal requirement for a coroner’s inquest to be held.

The legal document covers 36 points. It was co-authored by medical doctors Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox, David Halpin and Andrew Rouse.

Dr Michael Powers QC, who has been instructed to represent the doctors in their legal action, said: ‘The circumstances of this case are highly unusual.

‘They have troubled a wide section of public opinion. Given the inadequacy of Lord Hutton’s investigation, it’s essential there should now be a full coroner’s inquest.’
The Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City has decided to cut ties with the Girl Scouts.

Archbishop Joseph F Naumann announced on Monday that he’s asked churches in his archdiocese to transition away from hosting Girl Scout troops, in favor of partnering with the Christian scouting organization, American Heritage Girls.

Parishes in the diocese were given the choice to stop chartering Girl Scout troops immediately, or graduate scouts already in the program to American Heritage Girl troops over the next few years.

Previously, Naumann had told priests to end sales of the Girls Scouts’ famous cookies, according to the Kansas City Star.

“No Girl Scout cookie sales should occur in Catholic Schools or on parish property after the 2016-2017 school year,” he said in a letter sent to priests in his parish in January.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images The archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, Joseph Naumann (left).

The problem with Girl Scouts, according to Naumann, is that their programs and materials can cause children to be “misled and misinformed” by “secular culture.”

“To follow Jesus and his Gospel will often require us to be counter-cultural,” Naumann wrote in his statement. “With the promotion by Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA) of programs and materials reflective of many of the troubling trends in our secular culture, they are no longer a compatible partner in helping us form young women with the virtues and values of the Gospel.”

In particular, Naumann pointed to the fact that Girl Scouts USA pays membership dues to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), which the archbishop claims has ties to International Planned Parenthood. Naumann also referred to how Girls Scouts materials portray birth control activist Margaret Sanger and feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as role models.

“These as well as many other ‘role models’ in the GSUSA’s new manuals and web content not only do not reflect our Catholic worldview but stand in stark opposition to what we believe,” he wrote.

“Our greatest responsibility as a church is to the children and young people in our care,” Naumann wrote in his statement. “We have a limited time and number of opportunities to impact the formation of our young people. It is essential that all youth programs at our parishes affirm virtues and values consistent with our Catholic faith.”

John Moore via Getty Images Girl Scouts sell cookies as a winter storm moves in on February 8, 2013 in New York City.

In a statement to HuffPost, a GSUSA spokesperson said that the organization has worked to create a positive relationship with the Catholic Church over the past 100 years.

“Girl Scouts is always willing to work with any and every person or organization in order to fulfill our mission of building girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.”

On its website, the GSUSA said that it “does not not have a relationship or partnership with Planned Parenthood.” The GSUSA does pay dues to WAGGGS, but claims that it does not always take the same positions as the global organization, and that scouts’ membership dues aren’t used to pay WAGGGS.

GSUSA also said that it is a secular organization and doesn’t take an official position on birth control, abortion, and human sexuality.

The American Catholic bishops and the Girl Scouts USA have had a tense relationship in recent years, much of which centers around the church’s concerns around the culture war issues of contraception, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops held a series of talks with the GSUSA in 2013 and 2014 about these issues. As a result of the dialogue, the committee in charge of the review issued a document saying that it was “morally objectionable” that WAGGGS promoted educating girls about their “sexual and reproductive health/rights.” The committee believed the phrase itself was “problematic.”

Still, the committee didn’t endorse or condemn the GSUSA, leaving decisions about church-hosted scouting to each individual diocesan bishop.

In 2016, the archdiocese of St. Louis officially disbanded its committee on Girl Scouts, and encouraged its priests to choose alternative scouting programs, instead. In a statement about the move, Archbishop Robert Carlson cited concerns about the GSUSA’s “position on and inclusion of transgender and homosexual issues,” among other issues.
Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Chengdu in southern China last Saturday (5.7.2014) with two dozen top managers in tow, including five heads of DAX-listed companies. Since Tuesday, the final day of Merkel's China visit, it's been evident that the large German business contingent made less of an impression on the Chinese than some of the members of the delegation had hoped.

In the end, the Chinese were not quite as open to everything the German business leaders had on their wish list as the Germans would have liked. Accords amounting to 3 billion euros ($4 billion) were signed, which is not bad at all. However, it's a relatively small package if you take into account the fact that China's Prime Minister Li Keqiang spread around more than 21 billion euros on his last trip to Britain three weeks ago.

Only Volkswagen and Airbus had reason to be pleased - and Airbus is half-French. VW and its Chinese partner FAW agreed on two additional plants in China, with investment of a billion euros each. Airbus secured a contract on the shipment of 100 helicopters worth about 300 million euros.

However, there were plenty of disappointments: Siemens failed to close deals with four major Chinese cities that would have brought the group orders into the three-digit million euro range. Germany's stock exchange failed to garner the bid to form a joint enterprise with the Shanghai stock exchange.

Complaints about conditions

Frank Sieren: China makes the rules

Even more important than concrete deals: on the flight to China, Chancellor Merkel had enough time to listen to German business leaders' complaints.

Many feel the framework for business deals in China is unfair. Why, they wonder, can the Chinese buy practically every medium-sized German company they have an appetite for, while German corporations that want to do business in China are forced into joint ventures that flush a good deal of money into Chinese coffers.

VW chief Martin Winterkorn can tell you a thing or two about that. For years, he's been fighting for permission to found a wholly-owned subsidiary in China.

China dictates the pace

Understandably, the Chinese approach has been angering German managers. But it's not likely to change any time soon. Who can force China? Not even Europe's mightiest politician, Angela Merkel, has that power.

Beijing will open its economy at the pace it deems to be correct, and won't let the West dictate the rules. And it's worth noting that in the past, it has sometimes been to Western companies' advantage that Beijing has its own views on the topic.

Just take a look at China's financial sector. Don't bother thinking that the 2008 financial crisis would have ended if Chinese capital flows had been as liberal and linked to the rest of the world as Western bankers had long desired. The Chinese economy, too, would have been entangled in a deep crisis, and would have dropped away as a motor for the global economy - including for German enterprises. But since those companies still managed to reliably sell their goods to China even after the Lehman crash, they got off fairly lightly.

German firms make good money inChina

It's fine to clearly state one's point of view toward China, but it would be inappropriate to complain too much about the conditions there. After all, German firms make good money on the Chinese market. And that is bound to continue. Beijing no longer wants to be the world's workbench, it wants China to be more innovative - and the Germans are expected to help.

In effect, that means China wants to hold on to the German-Sino symbiosis, closely tested over two decades: exchanging Chinese market shares for Western technology. There's no way to prevent the Chinese from slowly turning into competitors for German manufacturers. But as long as the economy continues to grow, German companies will move forward. Over the next few years, Beijing envisions higher wages for the middle classes and plans to pull an additional 200 million people out of poverty in western China.

So, even if the Chinese continue to make the rules, consumption will continue to rise. For German companies, that means more competition - but also more opportunities for growth.

DW correspondent Frank Sieren is considered one of the leading German experts on China. He has lived in Beijing for the past 20 years.
Day two of Government Shutdown 2013 offered America plenty of surreal moments, from the brief and ridiculous re-emergence of the Grand Bargain, to the sight of multiple members of a universally reviled governing body offering to give up their paychecks as if they thought it was a move worthy of a medal. But nowhere did Salvador Dali's clocks warp and melt under the heat of sustained stupidity as badly as they did down at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday, it became pretty obvious that if you wanted to catch the eye of any Beltway reporter to discuss what you were enduring during the shutdown, you had to go on down to this memorial to make your case. Unfortunately, that's where many members of Congress decided to while away their day as well. As Ryan Reilly reported, heroic members of Congress turned out to boldly grandstand at the memorial, pretending just as hard as they could that its temporary closure was the most dire effect of the shutdown ... for which ... they voted. Yes, that was by far the most surreal thing about it. Gawker's Tom Scocca turned the best phrase about the whole mess, describing those lawmakers as committing "an act of civil disobedience against themselves."

But Mark Segraves, reporting for NBC News' Washington affiliate, managed to capture the howler highlight of the Great World War II Memorial Bleat-n-Repeat -- Rep. Randy Neugebauer's (R-Tex.) Wednesday confrontation of a poor park ranger on the scene -- who was doing nothing more than her job -- blaming her for the closure he voted for and telling her that she should be ashamed of herself.

Seriously, this actually happened. Per Segraves:

"How do you look at them and ... deny them access?" said Neugebauer. He, with most House Republicans, had voted early Sunday morning to pass a funding measure that would delay the Affordable Care Act, a vote that set up a showdown with the Senate and President Barack Obama. With the parties unable to agree on how to fund the federal government, non-essential government functions shut down Tuesday. "It's difficult," responded the Park Service employee. "Well, it should be difficult," replied the congressman, who was carrying a small American flag in his breast pocket. "It is difficult," responded the Park Service employee. "I'm sorry, sir." "The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves," the congressman said. "I'm not ashamed," replied the ranger.

From there, Segraves reports, "a crowd of onlookers got involved," and began loudly demanding that Neugebauer lay off the park ranger, pointing out again and again that the reason everyone was in the position they were in was due to the fact that Congress very specifically put them there. Neugebauer countered that it was all really Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) fault, but that failed to impress anyone.

What's really ghastly about this is that the whole "Harry Reid shut down the government" line is a talking point. It's "messaging" -- the mostly disingenuous bilge that politicos spit in order to gain some phantom upper hand in a war of rhetoric that plays itself out in the press. It's not intended to be sincere, it's all posturing -- throwing sub-standard witticisms at a wall in the hopes that something will stick and convince people.

This is all stuff intended for an audience of reporters -- and in that setting, all is fair. But you're not actually supposed to extend "messaging" out into the world of ordinary human Americans in this fashion, and victimize park rangers with it.

What's also inane about this is that, as Segraves takes pains to point out, the park rangers deployed to the World War II Memorial, while enforcing the closure of the memorial to the general public, are also there to make sure that the Honor Flight veterans who come to the memorial get access to the site. So, by impeding her from doing her job, all Neugebauer was doing was impeding access for the Honor Flight veterans. And telling the ranger that she should be ashamed? Man, that's not a good look, and the gathered crowd made sure Neugebauer learned that the hard way.

Got to give credit to the ranger for standing her ground and doing her job with professionalism, in the face of an idiot who really needs to learn his place.
Massive spoilers in this article for Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain

Back in 2013, Metal Gear Solid fans were presented with the barely-dressed character design for female sniper assassin Quiet. The reaction wasn’t entirely positive, but Hideo Kojima stepped forward to assure fans that there was a perfectly reasonable narrative justification for the character’s attire.

“I know there’s people concerning about ‘Quiet’ but don’t worry,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “I created her character as an antithesis to the women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed. ‘Quiet’ who doesn’t have a word will be teased in the story as well. But once you recognise the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.”

So, two years on Phantom Pain has been released. No one has forgotten Kojima’s words and we have the full story behind Quiet’s attire. Are we ashamed? Well, not for ourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HywkFVKGgbQ

It turns out that the reason Quiet wears that bikini outfit is because of a parasitic infection. This infection means that she has to breathe through her skin, using photosynthesis to absorb air, water, and nutrients. So, you see, Quiet doesn’t want to be exposed in the way she is. She has to be. And that’s empowering how exactly? She’s essentially a houseplant. Quiet is actually the second photosynthetic character in the series, the previous character being The End, but for some reason he gets to wear a lot more clothes than Quiet does. Probably his lack of displayable tits.
Porter Airlines confirmed today it plans to buy up to 30 CS100 jets from Montreal-based Bombardier, which would expand the regional carrier's reach from coast to coast, and take direct aim at Air Canada and WestJet.

"We believe it is time to spread our wings," president and CEO Bob Deluce said at a news conference at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, where Porter is based. "And so I present to you our vision for the future of Porter Airlines — a vision with service to destinations across North America, from Calgary and Vancouver, to Los Angeles, Miami and Orlando."

The move pushes Porter into direct competition with Air Canada and WestJet as a national carrier, while setting up a potential political standoff over expansion of the island airport in downtown Toronto.

The conditional deal is to buy 12 Bombardier CS100s, with options on 18 more.

The deal also includes purchase rights for six of Bombardier's Q400 turboprop aircraft, currently the mainstay of the Porter fleet.

The total purchase could reach $2.29 billion US if all the options and purchase rights are exercised.

Delivery of the first jet, which has seating for 107 passengers, is expected in 2016.

The conditional purchase agreement signed on Tuesday is a coup for Bombardier, and ushers in a change in Canadian aviation. That's because the CSeries jets can fly 5,400 km without refuelling, much farther than the current fleet of Q400 turboprop planes that Porter flies to connect 19 cities across Eastern Canada and the U.S.

The airline said the expansion could mean 1,000 new employees, which would bring the total to 2,400.

Potential price war

Joseph D'Cruz, a University of Toronto business professor and aviation expert, said the move could be good news for consumers.

The announcement could lead to a political dispute over the airport, which is near residents on the island and the city's heavily populated downtown. (Marivel Taruc/CBC)

"It's going to be interesting to watch how WestJet and Air Canada react once Porter starts biting into their business," he told CBC News. "They're going to retaliate, and the only way they can retaliate is lower prices."

"This may trigger a vicious price war," D'Cruz said.

Air Canada said that before it takes a position on further investment at the island airport, it wants assurance that takeoff and landing slots will become available for other airlines that have been seeking increased access.

Canada's largest airline currently has only enough landing and takeoff slots to offer service between Montreal and the airport on the Toronto waterfront.

WestJet Airlines did not directly address Porter's plans, but said it remains focused on keeping its own business.

"We expect competition to increase and are preparing accordingly," WestJet spokesman Robert Palmer said in a statement.

Political dispute

The announcement could lead to a political dispute over the airport, which is near residents on the island and the city's heavily populated downtown.

The airline will seek permission to fly the long-range jets out of the island airport, where the runway would need to be extended into what is now water by 168 metres at each end.

Jets are currently not allowed to fly out of the waterfront airport except under special circumstances, and any changes would need to be approved under the airport's three-way agreement between the City of Toronto, the federal government and Toronto Port Authority.

The Toronto Port Authority said it wouldn't take any position on Porter's business plans.

"The TPA will not consider any change of use to the airport until a determination is first made by the elected representatives on Toronto City Council regarding Porter's proposed changes to the 1983 Tripartite Agreement," it said in a news release.

Deluce said Porter expects to have all the needed approvals within six months.

Politicians who represent the area at the municipal and federal level were quick to say before the announcement that any plans to expand Toronto's island airport would be out of the question.

"You can't pave the lake," Toronto Coun. Adam Vaughan told CBC News on Tuesday.

Porter executives went out of their way Wednesday to underline how quiet the new Bombardier jets will be designed to be.

"We knew that operating from a downtown urban airport would require us to be responsible operators and good neighbours, said Deluce, who launched the airline in 2006. "We believe that our track record of nearly seven years has shown that Porter has delivered on the promises we made when we announced plans to operate from this airport."

"We believe the CS100 is the perfect aircraft for the next stage of our growth for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is the quietest commercial jet in production."

Robert Kokonis, co-founder of airline consulting firm AirTrav, noted to CBC News that the thrust reverser required on landing may be louder than Deluce's promise of an engine that is "whisper" quiet.

"The runway's not long enough and to get an agreement to lengthen the runway, they’re going to have to go before … three levels of government, not to mention community opposition, environmental studies, so there’s a fair degree of long shot in Bob Deluce’s plans for Porter today," said Kokonis, who also questioned how the expansion will be financed.

In a separate interview with The Canadian Press, Kokonis noted that Porter's planes have been flying less full while load factors at WestJet and Air Canada have been improving.

"In a zero sum game where they're all sort of chasing the same passenger, it does give one pause for concern that Porter might be struggling in some areas."

Despite the expansion, Deluce said taking the privately held airline public and raising money through an initial public offering is not a priority right now.

The company had planned to issue shares on the public markets in the past, but shelved them for various reasons.

"We've not thought about an IPO in most recent times," Deluce said. "Sometime in the future it's a possibility."
Last month, the Seattle Parks Department ordered the destruction of a play area designed for special needs kids, claiming its four-foot rope ladder, tire swing, and "nest" made of rope and bike tires were "extreme dangers" and "hazardous conditions." That's an odd verdict: In 10 years of existence, no children were ever significantly injured on the play area equipment, according to Liz Bullard, who helped design the space. As she writes in Crosscut.com:

These simple play features may seem ordinary, but...here children with cerebral palsy, autism and developmental delays are encouraged and assisted as needed to climb and swing alongside their typically developing peers. The joy is palpable. We complied with the order, but it has left a bitter taste in our mouths. Our kids have been robbed of the simple pleasure of climbing and swinging under a beautiful tree.

The thing about kids with special needs is that they often have to spend a lot of time in less-than-fun institutions. Hospitals. Therapists' offices. Waiting rooms. The "Wild Zone," as the play area was called, was specifically "designed to provide relief from the highly controlled and often hyper-medicalized world our kids move in," writes Bullard.

One mom of a child with special needs commented on a post about the city's order, "This is a travesty!! How dare they steal the only play space in the Greater Seattle area, let alone the NW that is dedicated to creating a healthy play space for special kids where they aren't judged by their lesser abilities."

Wrote another mom: "The Play Garden is the best! My son attended preschool there for three years and I am so grateful for the Wild Zone. There was nothing dangerous about it. Nothing!"

Ah, but when you're a bureaucrat and you live in the world of what if thinking, danger is everywhere. Just imagine, "what if someone got hurt?" Look at the world that way and no play area wil seem safe enough.

This outlook seems to be sweeping Washington state. Recall that just a few weeks ago the Richland School District decided to phase out all swings because what if a child got hurt on them?

Too bad the bureaucrats never consider the reverse: What if kids never get a chance to climb a ladder, or hang from the monkey bars? What if kids with special needs know that after their doctor's appointment they will have to go straight home, because there's no place left for them to play?

At least they won't be exposed to the "extreme danger" of a tire swing.

Related: "Little Girl's Playset Is in Her Own Backyard, City Wants It Destroyed Anyway"
This is why friends shouldn’t let friends drive drunk.

New Jersey cops scored a drunk-driving hat trick when they busted a motorist for DUI, then pinched her two sloshed friends who separately drove to the police station to pick her up.

It all started when a cop in Readington Township pulled over Carmen Reategui, 34, after he noticed her car swerving on Route 22 early one morning last week.

Charged with DUI, she was taken to the town’s police station, where she called a friend to come and get her.

But the friend wasn’t much help.

Nina Petracca, 23, who drove down to the station, was filling out necessary paperwork when a cop noticed that she, too, seemed a little tipsy.

She failed a sobriety test right in the station lobby and was charged with DUI.

So Petracca, too, was slapped with a DUI charge, as well as a drug charge for Vicodin tablets found in her purse, police said. Both women then reached out to another friend, Ryan Hogan, who, like Petracca before him, raced down to the police station to help his friends out of a jam.

But when he showed up, Police Sgt. Carlos Ferreiro thought he seemed off.

“When I was outside talking to him he displayed signs of intoxication,” he said.

Hogan also failed sobriety tests, police said.

“They finally got a sober adult to come pick up all three of them,” Ferreiro said.

“It’s the first time in nine years I’ve had something like this.”

All three friends are scheduled to appear in court next month.

Reategui vented about the ordeal on Facebook.

“Just getting home,” she posted to her page on Dec. 16. “ABSOLUTELY THE WORST NIGHT OF MY F–KING LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Petracca “liked” her lockup pal’s comment.

Later in the day she was wishing the whole thing had never happened, posting:

“Heavy, heavy heart. Wish there was an undo button in life.”
Recently, education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has been writing about reading in the public schools, two of those pieces appearing here and here. One reason for doing so stems from a report issued by Renaissance Learning, a reading program that helps teachers and parents determine how well children understand the reading they do for homework and on their own.

Because of the popularity of the program, Renaissance Learning has a vast database on the books kids in public schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade actually read voluntarily and for class. The most recent findings, for the 2008-09 school year, are now released in a paper entitled “What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools” (here’s for the link).

The list of most popular titles for Grades 9 through 12 show just how powerful the social element of reading is at that age. The top four spots (!) are held by one author, Stephanie Meyer — Twilight, New Moon, Breaking Dawn, and Eclipse. (At Border’s Books yesterday, I asked for the jigsaw puzzles and the man directed me to a rear wall, adding, “We only have six or seven puzzles, and nearly all of them are New Moon stuff.”)

At No. 5 sits To Kill a Mockingbird, then comes Night (Wiesel), A Child Called “It” (Dave Pelzer), Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Brisingr (Christopher Paolini), Romeo and Juliet, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Giver, and seven more works of literature.

That makes only two nonfiction works in the entire list, prompting Mathews to comment:

“Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read nonfiction and they can’t read nonfiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.”

This dilemma is increasingly discussed in English Language Arts circles as more and more ELA standards are oriented toward abstract reading skills. Those standards will say things like “Students identify the main thesis in a text” and “Students detail the evidence used to support a contention in a text” — essential capacities, to be sure. To a decreasing degree, however, they ask for students to demonstrate specific “domain knowledge” such as “Students characterize, with examples, major periods of English and American literary history.”

As a result, the knowledge deficits proceed, and so does poor achievement in the higher grades. Mathews again:

“Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,” he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. “It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”

Hirsch’s new book may be found here.

Another voice on the issue is cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, who contributes an introductory note to the reading report above. There, Willingham maintains:

“Many people think of intelligence as comprised of mental skills that are independent of knowledge. That is, smart people think logically and analytically about problems, and they do that for pretty much any problem that comes along. If you’re a ‘good thinker’ you can apply those thinking skills quite broadly. This view is inaccurate. Thinking well is intertwined with knowledge.”

Why so? Willingham:

“We tend to think of reading as a skill that can be applied to any text. Indeed, describing a child as a good reader implies that she will be a good reader no matter what the content. That is true only for decoding — the process of turning written letters into sounds. Comprehending what you read depends heavily on what you already know about the topic.

“Here’s why that’s true. We all omit information when we speak. For example, imagine I said to a friend “I ate pasta when I wore my new sweater. Now I’m going to have to throw it out.” I don’t elaborate that I spilled pasta sauce on my sweater, or that stains are hard to remove from some fabrics, or that these fabrics are often used to make sweaters, or that I am the sort of person who would throw out a sweater if it were stained. I assume that my friend knows all this, and can fill in the gaps. If I didn’t omit information that the listener already knows, speech would be very long and very boring.”
Frazer Brown writes,

At London Super Comic Con this weekend I stood in line to get some ‘Swamp Thing‘ stuff signed, to add to the growing pile of plastic and paper things I don’t quite know what to do with in my office (But somehow serve as creative stimuli in my peripheral vision whilst working)*

Naturally my first stop for ‘Swamp Goods’ was Yanick Paquette’s booth.

Whilst chatting with Yanick, young James (aged 6) arrived with his dad and nervously presented the artist with his own crayoned vision of Swamp Thing for Yanick to keep. In return Mr YP drafted a totally gratis Swampie for James to treasure for ever. It was all incredibly sweet.

I then proceeded to walk away from Yanick’s stall without paying for ANY of the stuff I had taken! Like a thieving Toe Rag**.

Contacting him on Twitter the same day to apologise this was the response I got:

I’d like to nominate Yanick Paquette for the ‘Nicest Artist at LSCC Award’***

*watching netflix

** Toe Rag noun, British, Informal /təʊraɡ/ a contemptible or worthless person.

***Award doesn’t actually exist

Frazer Brown is a lifelong fan of the ‘Swamp Creature’ genre of comics. So much so, he’s investing time and money on two projects that involve creatures of the ‘Slime’ or ‘Swamp’ variety in 2016. Funny how life turns out. You can follow him on twitter @frazerbrown

About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.

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Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr released a statement today criticizing the bungled police raid of the mayor’s home in Berwyn Heights, Maryland. He said that no knock raids are unconstitutional, and that law enforcement has become arrogant and less accountable.

The case Barr is referring to involves a bungled raid on Mayor Cheye Calvo ‘s home that resulted in the mayor and his mother in law being hand cuffed and his two dogs killed. The mayor had been victimized by drug smugglers, but law enforcement never bothered to take the time to actually investigate and gather the facts.

“Absent exigent circumstances, not present here, so-called no-knock raids are an affront to the Constitution. So is a shoot first, ask questions later philosophy by the police. Yet the Prince George’s police have done this before—last fall they invaded a house at the wrong address and shot the family dog. All Americans are at risk when the police behave this way. Just ask yourself what might happen if a suspicious package is delivered to your home and the cops bust in,” Barr said.

His bigger point is that law enforcement needs to be able to do their job while protecting people’s liberties, “But there is an even larger point. Law enforcement agencies have become more arrogant and less accountable in cases other than those involving drugs. Most people are aware of well-publicized examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, but similar abuses are common across the country, though they usually receive little or no public notice. We all want police to do their jobs well, but part of doing their job well is respecting the people’s constitutional liberties.”

Barr knows what he is talking about. Before serving in the House of Representatives, he was a U.S. attorney, and before that he worked at the CIA. For lack of a better term, I think that some law enforcement agencies have gotten lazy. We see people getting shot or tasered too often without cause, but seems like if some law enforcement officers don’t want to deal with a situation, they skip right to using force. This attitude comes from the top down. It can be traced to the example set by the Bush administration after 9/11. This anything goes attitude needs to stop which is another reason why the neo-cons have to go.

If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
While it might not have the name recognition of Rupp Arena or Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Thomas & Mack Center is one of college basketball’s most iconic arenas. It’s played host to the 1990 UNLV men’s national championship team, as well as other spectator events most college hoops’ venues could never dream of, from world class concerts, to championship boxing matches and, yes, the annual rodeo.

Yet even by the insane standard that events in Vegas can provide, a recent drive up to Thomas & Mack tells you something else altogether: The arena is preparing for an event the likes of which neither UNLV nor Vegas has ever seen.

On a calm afternoon, weeks before the start of basketball season, security is at an all-time high. Every car is funneled through the same entrance, and every driver is politely asked where they’re headed, who they’re there to see and the purpose of their visit. Parking is at a minimum, if available at all.

Article continues below ...

Clearly, this isn’t your normal protocol on a normal afternoon, and it isn’t until later that you realize this has nothing to do with UNLV hoops or some Rascal Flatts concert tour rolling through town.

This isn’t about questioning visitors in an aggressive manor; instead, it's about protecting the future of the country. Literally.

While the focus at the Thomas & Mack Center is usually on basketball this time of year, politics are taking center stage. The arena will host the third and final presidential debate on Wednesday night. But while the debate will bring the eyes of the world to Las Vegas, it has brought something else to UNLV basketball, the primary tenant of the Thomas & Mack Center: headaches. Lots and lots of headaches.

“The first thing that came to mind was ‘that’s pretty cool,’ the national attention that it will bring to the Thomas & Mack and the university” new UNLV head coach Marvin Menzies said. “But then the second thought was ‘wow, that’s going to be a logistical nightmare.’”

Admittedly, the debate has been a logistical nightmare for just about everyone on UNLV’s campus, and very likely for the entire city of Las Vegas in recent days. However, it’s taken an especially large toll on the UNLV basketball team because its offices are located in the Thomas & Mack and its practice facility is located right next door at the Mendenhall Center.

To prepare for the debate and to make sure the entire surrounding area is completely secure, the Runnin’ Rebels hoops team was forced to leave its offices last Friday and won't be able to return until Thursday morning. Coaches have been put in temporary offices alongside other coaches in other sports, while practices have taken place at an intramural gym across campus.

When players, coaches and administrators left the facility last week, they were forced to bring anything with them they could possibly need for six days, knowing that once they exited they wouldn’t be allowed back in.

“There’s a long list of things,” Menzies said. “We’ll need to bring basketball equipment and pads and balls and things of that nature. And then your files, records, recruiting, things of that nature. [Thankfully] in this day and age, technology is so advanced there’s a lot of things that we will work off of that will be off our laptops that we will be able to access.”

The situation is unique and could be especially troublesome for this particular UNLV squad. Menzies is in his first year as head coach after being hired in late April, and after bringing in nine new players this offseason (and returning just four from last year’s squad), there is a major learning curve for everyone. Players are still not only getting to know the coaches (and vice-versa), but they’re also getting to know each other.

For most coaches, that alone would be a nightmare. But then consider that precious time and effort in the preseason has been dedicated to such trivial matters as “where will practice be today” and “where will my office be for the next six days.”

However, instead of looking at this situation as a negative, Menzies has turned it into a positive. He will be able to see how his young team deals with a tiny bit of adversity. And it will also give them a chance to grow together as a group.

“Getting your kids ready to handle change because change is coming,” Menzies said. “Whether you’re going on the road to travel, whether you’re out because of an electrical outage. It gives your kids an opportunity to handle change. I think it can actually be beneficial depending on how you look at it and how you handle it.”

And when discussing the “big picture” of the debate, Menzies takes things one step further. After all, is it really a bad thing to alter a couple practices when the eyes of an entire nation will be on your school and campus? Could it possibly be a negative to have an event in your home arena that required over 700 media credentials and will bring a reported $85 million in free advertising to your school?

It’s one of the biggest positives any school could ask for.

“Let’s face it, this is a national branding for the university,” Menzies said. “[This is a national branding opportunity for] the Thomas & Mack.”

And most important, it’s a teaching moment for Menzies and his staff.

Being a college basketball coach isn’t just about X’s and O’s, but about helping boys become men. It’s about teaching them that life is bigger than basketball, and that it’s important to look beyond just the stat sheets and box scores to other important things in life.

That’s especially true as we enter one of the most heated and controversial elections ever.

“I think we’ve used it as an observation to talk a little bit about the privilege to be able to vote,” Menzies said. “Being to see all the pomp and circumstance that goes with the debate, it makes it a little more real for the guys.

“It is [bigger than sports],” he said. “The magnitude of this particular debate, along with that it’s just such a dynamic event in and of itself. So to have it at your university, I think that’s a cool thing. It’s a good thing.”

Even if it does force you to move a practice or two.
Fact Buster

Q: Does coffee make you dehydrated?

A: If you drink coffee regularly and don't drink too much it shouldn't dehydrate you.

Our expert: Dietitian Lisa Renn

[Image source: Reuters | Mick Tsikas ]

Have your say Have you found coffee can make you feel dehydrated?

Conditions of Use

Have you been told that you need to drink an extra glass of water for every cup of coffee or tea that you drink?

For some time there has been a belief that drinking coffee and tea can make you dehydrated because the caffeine they contain has a diuretic effect. (A diuretic is a substance that causes your body to produce urine, and it has been suggested caffeine can do this because it increases blood flow through the kidneys.)

But is there any evidence to show that your morning cuppa needs to be offset with a big glass of water?

If you regularly enjoy a few cups of coffee or tea a day, then you can rest assured the moderate amount of caffeine they contain doesn't cause you to lose more fluid than you ingest, says Lisa Renn, accredited practising dietitian and spokesperson for the Dietitians Association of Australia.

Nor will your cuppa be any more likely to send you off to the loo than any other drink.

"There is evidence that caffeine in higher amounts acts as a diuretic in some people, but moderate intake is actually not that significant," Renn says.

A recent UK study of regular male coffee drinkers found no difference in hydration levels between those who drank four 200ml cups of coffee a day and those who drank the same amount of water.

Researchers measured the men's urine output over a 24-hour period and other hydration markers in their blood, and concluded moderate coffee intake provides similar hydrating qualities to water.

While the study focused on the intake of coffee, those who drink tea can also take heart from the results as it contains similar amounts of caffeine to coffee.

It's worth noting, the study involved men who were regular coffee drinkers  and it's been suggested coffee may have more of a diuretic effect on those who do not habitually consume caffeine because they haven't developed a tolerance to caffeine. But so far the evidence on this point isn't completely clear.

How caffeine affects hydration

One of the reasons that drinks containing caffeine, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, cola drinks and energy drinks, have been given such a bad rap over the years is because caffeine is a diuretic when consumed in large doses (more than 500mg).

Diuretics make your body produce more urine, so not only do they have you running to the toilet more often, they also cause you to lose sodium and water. When you lose too much sodium and water you become dehydrated, and this can have an effect on a range of bodily functions  from temperature control to absorption of food.

However, the amount of caffeine you get in a cuppa is unlikely to have these effects and it can actually contribute to your overall daily fluid intake.

"If you have to have more than four cups of coffee a day you may see a diuretic effect from that, but if your intake is less, then from a dehydration view you're going to be okay," says Renn.

Men's bodies need around 2.6 litres and women's around 2.1 litres of water a day, but this can be gleaned from a range of food and drinks other than water, including coffee and tea.

"Certainly you can be interspersing coffees and waters throughout the day, so you might have a bottle of water with you and be sipping on that most of the time, and then you might have a coffee in your break times," Renn says.

The good and bad sides of coffee

It's worth noting there are also other side effects associated with caffeinated drinks, which include:

rapid heart beat (palpitations)

restlessness and excitability

anxiety and irritability

trembling hands

sleeplessness.

And if you are drinking coffees with lots of milk it may affect your weight.

"Lattes and cappuccinos can make an excellent dairy-based or soy-based snack, but if you're having lots of those throughout the day, especially if you're trying to lose weight and having four milk coffees a day, it's going to impact on your calorie intake," Renn says.

However, drinking coffee can also have a range of health benefits, and has been linked to decreased risk of some cancers, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

"Coffee is certainly not the evil we once thought it was, but it's that old adage of everything in moderation," says Renn.

For more on caffeine, it's side effects and benefits see our Caffeine fact file.
Squeeze on consumer spending is the worst in peacetime for a century, new research shows

Households are facing the most savage peacetime squeeze on consumer spending in almost 100 years.

Figures show that only during the Second World War did spending suffer a deeper fall. Even the Great Depression saw nothing on this scale.

Analysis by the independent Centre for Economics and Business Research shows an 8.4 per cent fall in real consumer spending per household between 2007 and the end of this year. The comparable figure for 1939-1945 was 14 per cent.

Consumer spending: Only during the Second World War did it suffer a deeper fall

Chief executive Douglas McWilliams said only in the slump of 1919-1920 was there possibly a peacetime drop on today’s scale.

The extraordinary figures are published today ahead Tuesday’s expected downgrading of economic growth in the third quarter.

The first estimate showed the economy roaring back to health, with growth of one per cent from July to September.

But it is now thought that this may have exaggerated the recovery from recession and that the second estimate is likely to see the rate of expansion cut to 0.9 per cent, or lower.

The psychological impact could be out of proportion to the size of the reduction, according to Howard Archer of independent consultancy IHS Global Insight.

‘The fact of no longer having a “one” in front of the decimal point and having a nought instead may weigh with some people,’ he said. ‘More worrying is the possibility of a flat or negative number in the fourth quarter. Much will hinge on spending over Christmas.’

He said higher than expected inflation may make people more concerned and this, in turn, could make worries about negative growth in the first quarter of next year into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative growth, so shrinkage in this quarter and the next would plunge Britain into a slump for the third time in less than five years.

Trevor Williams, chief economist at Lloyds Bank wholesale markets, said: ‘The second estimate could be lower, perhaps 0.9 per cent instead of one per cent.

‘As for the fourth quarter, I would expect that to be flat, or even slightly negative. But the prospects of a triple-dip recession are more remote. There is no obvious reason why we would get a negative reading in the first quarter of next year.’

Peter Dixon, strategist at Commerzbank, said: ‘There is a possibility of a negative fourth quarter. I am certainly not looking for anything stellar.’
Royal Jordanian Air is making a last-ditch pitch to travelers, telling Middle Easterners to visit the United States before a possible Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE presidency.

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"Just in case he wins... travel to the U.S. while you're still allowed to!" the airline tweeted on Election Day.

The post includes current prices of the Royal Jordanian Air's flights to the U.S.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, originally proposed a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S. but has recently scaled back his rhetoric to focus on "extreme vetting" of those who want to enter the U.S.

Royal Jordanian Air flies from Jordan, a Muslim-majority country, to New York, Chicago and Detroit.

The airline isn't the first to use Trump's rhetoric for an ad campaign. Earlier this year, Air Canada invited Americans to "test drive" the country should Trump win.
Corporations And Governments The Real Threats To Free Speech

Above Photo: This guy is not actually the biggest threat to free speech in the country, despite the New York Times using him to illustrate an op-ed (11/12/15) on “Who Is Entitled to Be Heard?” Daniel Brenner/NYT.

I find this statement in a New York Times oped (11/12/15), coming from Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America, to be absolutely stunning:

Some of the most potent threats to free speech these days come not from our government or corporations, but from our citizenry.

Anyone who can write a sentence like this simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Which is fine, but not fine when the person is the head of an organization dedicated to freedom of expression.

By “our citizenry,” Nossel is referring to the recent round of free speech wars on college campuses. Now, when these issues of free speech arise on campus, you usually see an explosion of conversation about it: on the campus itself, and in the media. Far from dampening down discussion, the controversy over free speech on campus actually ignites discussion. Everyone has an opinion, everyone voices it.

And while I wouldn’t diminish the challenges to free speech that these controversies pose, the notion that they are far more common and threatening than what governments or corporations do is risible. Though given that Nossel is a former State Department flak, perhaps understandable. She is, after all, someone who has said:

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of 20th-century US foreign policy: liberal internationalism…should offer assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military — to advance a broad array of goals.

When there are not just threats but actual abridgments of speech at the workplace—Nossel says “corporations,” referring I guess to firms’ financial lock on the political process, but as I’ve argued many times, it’s in their capacity as employers that firms really do damage to free speech—there is no such explosion as there is on college campuses. Partially because people like Nossel and the media are completely uninterested in the topic, even when the workplace in question is a university: If Nossel wrote an oped in the New York Times when Columbia prohibited its workers from speaking Spanish, I must have missed it.

But more important, there’s no explosion because abridgments of speech at work are so lethally effective. Workers are silenced, that is the end of the story. We never hear about it.

At one point in her op-ed, Nossel does give a nod to the status of speech in the workplace. Here’s what she says:

Who would trade their [universities’ and colleges’] free-range spirit for the dreary sameness of a corporate office, with its federally sanctioned posters on what constitutes unlawful discrimination?

That’s where Nossel sees the threat to freedom of speech at work: in the “dreary sameness” roused by government efforts to inform workers of their rights against discrimination. There’s a suspicion on the left that freedom of speech is little more than a rationalization for racism or indifference to racism. I try to fight that suspicion all the time. But when the head of PEN America writes sentences like these, it makes that job infinitely harder.

Whatever one thinks about the current controversy over free speech at Yale and the University of Missouri, if the head of PEN America is going to leverage her pen on behalf of freedom of speech on the pages of the New York Times, she would well do to consider where the real threats to such speech lie.
Poland will sign ACTA despite massive protests, Global Voices Online reports, citing Polish Minister of Administration and Digitisation Michal Boni.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Polish minister does not shy away from telling his citizens blatant lies, in order to get the controversial ACTA agreement signed.

According to Global Voices, Mr. Boni said in a radio interview in Polish that it was ”impossible not to sign the agreement, because it was too late: Poland joined the negotiation process in 2008 and all the other European countries have already signed it”.

If Mr. Boni did in fact say this (I don’t speak Polish, so I cannot verify independently), it is an outright lie. Not a single one of the 27 EU Member States has signed the agreement yet. Poland is the first country scheduled to do so, tomorrow on January 26.

The European Council of Ministers has taken a decision that it wants the EU to sign the agreement, but that is a completely different thing. ACTA is a so called ”mixed agreement”, that has to be signed by both the EU and each of the member states. On the national level, no member state has taken the formal decision to sign the agreement yet.

Global Voices further reports that Mr. Boni said that Poland ”should attach a clause to the treaty that would show how we interpret these articles”. If it is true that he said this, it is also a direct lie.

There is no way of attaching any further clauses to the ACTA agreement. The negotiations have been concluded, and the only thing left for the EU and the individual member states to do now is to say either ”yes” or ”no”. Being a minister in the Polish government, Mr. Boni would of course know this.

It is apparent that the game of telling EU citizens whatever lies may be necessary to get the ACTA agreement signed has begun. Poland is only the first of 27 EU member states. Do not get surprised if the story repeats itself in your own country in the coming months.
ST. LOUIS — Peter Chiarelli knew this was going to happen. The Team North America co-general manager said as much back in February.

“It’s a cross between pro scouting and amateur scouting,” he said of trying to pick the Under-24 team for this fall’s World Cup of Hockey. “These players change way more than 25- or 26-year-olds. An older player can have a lull in his game, but you know what you’re going to get. These guys, their swings are huge.”

Case in point: Chiarelli politely dismissed Auston Matthews’ chances of making this team back in March. “He’s got an uphill road,” he said then.

Now, how can they not include Matthews, who looked very much at home playing for Team USA at the world championships?

Meanwhile, Jonathan Drouin was on his self-imposed holdout from the Tampa Bay Lightning back when they named the first 16 players for Team North America. Today he has 12 playoff points, the second-most of any player eligible for the U-24 team.

The U-24 player who has the most points? Robby Fabbri, another player who was barely on Chiarelli and Bowman’s radar three months ago.

General managers will flesh out their World Cup rosters on Friday, May 27 adding seven players apiece.

Watch it live on Sportsnet at 6 p.m. ET and world-wide at sportsnet.ca here.

Here’s our projected Team North America roster, by position:

GOAL

Already named: Matt Murray (PIT), Connor Hellebuyck (WPG), John Gibson (ANA).

The three goalies were all named in March, but Murray’s playoff performance has changed everything. Remember, when the format was first devised, Chiarelli and Bowman petitioned organizers for some relief in goal, because they were afraid they wouldn’t have a U-24 goalie that could allow their team to compete.

Now? They’ve got to be feeling mighty good about Murray, who was barely up from the AHL when he was named to the squad in March.

DEFENCE

Already named: Morgan Rielly (TOR), Aaron Ekblad (FLA), Ryan Murray (CBJ), Seth Jones (CBJ).

Rielly and Murray are lefties, while Ekblad and Jones are right-handed shots. Lefty Shayne Gostisbehere became a force for Philadelphia this season, while righty Colton Parayko (St. Louis) will make a perfect partner for him, with his ability to stay at home and defend, as well as unleash a cannon of a one-timer when asked to.

They’ll both be added this week.

“At the beginning of the season my only goal was to make this team (the Blues), then let things unfold,” said Parayko. “It would be extremely exciting. They’re world-class players. It’s going to be a cool tournament.”

We’ll make Winnipeg’s Jacob Trouba the final pick, an all-around defenceman who can adopt whichever role he is asked to play. Honourable mentions to Noah Hanifin (Carolina) and Cody Ceci (Ottawa), who were both in the conversation.

FORWARDS

Already named: Dylan Larkin (DET), Connor McDavid (EDM), Nathan MacKinnon (COL), Johnny Gaudreau (CGY), Sean Monahan (CGY), Jack Eichel (BUF), Brandon Saad (CBJ), Sean Couturier (PHI), J.T. Miller (NYR).

The problem at forward with Team North America is the glut of lefties. This team will likely have only three right-handed shots up front in MacKinnon, Eichel and Winnipeg’s Mark Scheifele, all centres who will be pushed to the wing for this tournament. Saad will also see duty on the right side, a spot he is accustomed to.

If McDavid is the No. 1 centre, Monahan the No. 2 and Couturier the No. 4, that leaves a third-line centre spot. We’ll fill that spot with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who gets the nod here as the only player other than Couturier with 300 NHL games under his belt. Experience is precious here, especially considering McDavid has played just 45 games in the NHL, and Matthews has yet to play his first.

Drouin has played himself onto this team and will play the left side (unless the coaching staff feels he can handle playing on his wrong wing), and Scheifele’s strong world championships puts him on this roster as well. That leaves one final spot for a utility forward, and although Fabbri has likely earned it, we’ll give it to Auston Matthews.

If this team is going to be about young guns and the NHL’s stars of the future, then it would pretty tough to show up at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto having excluded the player we expect the Maple Leafs to draft No. 1 overall in June.

TEAM NORTH AMERICA LINEUP

* Denotes late addition

Line 1: Dylan Larkin Connor McDavid Nathan MacKinnon

Line 2: Johnny Gaudreau Sean Monahan Jack Eichel

Line 3: *Jonathan Drouin *Ryan Nugent-Hopkins Brandon Saad

Line 4: J.T. Miller Sean Couturier *Mark Scheifele

Extra: Auston Matthews (?)

1st Pair: Morgan Rielly Aaron Ekblad

2nd Pair: Ryan Murray Seth Jones

3rd Pair: *Shayne Gostisbehere *Colton Parayko

Extra: Jacob Trouba

Starter: Matt Murray

Backup: John Gibson

Reserve: Connor Hellebuyck
On a third-down in 11-on-11 scrimmage, he zoomed past starting left tackle Jake Matthews and sacked quarterback Matt Ryan. Well, he tagged him down, since they don’t tackle to the ground anymore in NFL practices.

But that’s a practice sack and the Falcons are hoping their first-round pick, who has recovered from offseason shoulder surgery, has plenty of real sacks in his 6-foot, 2-inch and 250-pound frame.

“It feels great,” McKinley said after the morning practice. “I’m back to football, back to what I love doing.”

McKinley was selected 26th overall in the 2017 draft. He had surgery to repair a torn labrum and glenoid socket in his right shoulder on March 6.

He was cleared before training camp, but Falcons coach Dan Quinn wanted to ease him back into practice by letting McKinley participate in individual drills.

“It was our first chance getting some reps for Takk Mckinley,” Quinn said. “He was on the plan that (Adrian) Clayborn did last week. He did the individual and then some team. He worked some team today.”

McKinley won over the fans with a passionate speech on draft night about how he wanted to honor his grand mother who helped to raise him. He was so emotional that he let loose with a few expletives.

McKinley was much more composed after his first practice, i in which he was able to showcase his skills in team and one-on-one drills.

“Just being back on the field,” Quinn said. “For him, it was good to be back with the guys, his teammates and getting in the huddle and playing. He hasn’t done that for awhile.”

After practice, McKinley had a long session with defensive line coach Bryant Young.

“We are just getting started with him,” Quinn said. “We are anxious to put the work in over the next month.”

While out and not allowed to attend OTAs or minicamp because of the NFL academic rules for schools on the quarter system, McKinley picked up the defensive scheme during his Facetime sessions with Young.

“Between him and Bryant Young, they did a good job together,” Quinn said. “They had to put the work in. That was his way to show I’m committed and I’m in….. although there was some frustration about (not) playing , (he) could still do (his) part from a scheme standpoint…I have to commend him for putting in the work over the summer to get ready.”

McKinley admitted that he had some butterflies in his stomach.

“I was nervous,” McKinley said. “It was my first time in pads since November. To be able to go out there and play football again, felt real good.”

It wasn’t a perfect first practice.

“The biggest thing is to play fast,” McKinley said. “I know coming out as a rookie that I’ll make a few mistakes, but as long as I’m playing fast and hustling to the ball, I’ll be good.”

McKinley impressed his teammates.

“He looked good,” linebacker Kemal Ishmael said. “He went out there and did a good job. He went out there and played well.”

McKinley felt well about how he performed.

“Those were my first one-on-ones,” McKinley said. “I was just trying to go with a bull rush and try to show of my strength and stuff like that. To be honest that might be my only rush so far just to kind of help the shoulder feel better.”

McKinley’s knows there will be some adjustments to the NFL game.

“The tackles are bigger, stronger and more athletic,” McKinley said. “They are faster. The game is faster. The quarterbacks …you might have a freshman quarterback who takes his time at the line (in college), but in practice you are going against Matt Ryan and it’s quick. In the NFL you’ve got Cam (Newton) and (Tom) Brady and whoever else. The games will go by much faster. It’s all about knowing your plays, getting lined up and going.”

He said the shoulder felt fine.

“I put in so much effort since I had surgery on March 6 over the past summer and spring to be where I’m at right now,” McKinley said. “My goal was to get one percent better each day. There were no days off, Mondays through Fridays and on Saturdays, I’d come in for treatment, just trying to get right.

“I’ve got the green light, so I’m going out there…whenever they put me out there, I’m just going as hard as I can.”

McKinley played the past two seasons at UCLA with the injured shoulder.

“So, now that it’ fit I feel like I can just throw it all over the place,” McKinley said. “Before it wasn’t fit, I was being real careful and real hesitate. Now, that it’s fit, that’s the doctor’s job to worry about my shoulder. My job is to go out here and go as hard as I can.”
On August 22, 2015, at approximately 07:13 a.m., the Coos Bay Police Department dispatch center received a 911 call pertaining to a reckless driver within the Empire District of the City of Coos Bay. An Oregon State Police Senior Trooper overheard the criminal call and responded to assist. The Trooper located the suspect vehicle unoccupied and parked on N. Morrison Street in the City of Coos Bay. The Trooper attempted to contact the registered owner of the vehicle at an adjacent residence to further the investigation into the Reckless Driving complaint.

The Trooper attempted contact at the residence and was unable to contact the registered owner of the vehicle in question. The Trooper walked away from the residence and was conducting further follow up investigation and documenting suspect vehicle descriptions and identifiers as the vehicle was parked on the side of N. Morrison Street.

As the Trooper was conducting the follow up investigation, an adult male identified as Michael SCOTT, age 25, from North Bend, came out of the residence from which the Trooper had previously attempted to contact the registered owner. SCOTT approached the suspect vehicle and the Trooper with a digital recording device in hand. SCOTT proceeded to climb up onto the hood of the car and then sit on the roof of the car with his legs positioned over the windshield, facing the Trooper who was positioned near the front of the suspect vehicle.

The Trooper disengaged contact with SCOTT and walked back towards his patrol vehicle and ultimately re-entered the patrol vehicle. SCOTT dismounted from the suspect vehicle and followed the Trooper. SCOTT continued to advance towards the police vehicle, walking in front of it, on the passenger side, across the rear and then advancing towards the driver side. The Trooper exited his vehicle as SCOTT was approaching him from the rear. The Trooper was attempting to stop SCOTT from further interfering with his investigation of the original Reckless Driving Complaint.

Coos Bay Police Department responded and arrived to assist with the investigation and further continuing the investigation into the Reckless Driving Complaint.

The Oregon State Police is continuing the investigation into the incident with SCOTT and will be referring the completed criminal report to the Coos County District Attorney’s Office for consideration of the charges of: Interfering with a Police Officer and Disorderly Conduct II. Other criminal charges may be considered upon the review of the Coos County District Attorney.
Ultra-loved Steve Harvey’s career may be in ultra-trouble. The famous TV host has been accused of some very ugly behavior.

A two-month investigation into the Family Feud host has apparently uncovered evidence of some racist ranting that, if true, cannot be ignored. “Spit on white people,” Harvey allegedly said, as per Freedom Daily.

A former employee of Harvey’s, Joseph Cooper, claims to be in possession of tapes of several racial rants and has filed a $20 million lawsuit against Harvey. Cooper says these types of outbursts were commonplace from Harvey.

According to Cooper, Harvey isn’t just anti-white—he is anti-American. “I don’t give a s**t about America,” Cooper accuses Harvey of saying.

Cooper says that he has 120 hours of recordings from a 20-year span of Harvey’s career, going back to 1993 and his early stand-up days. He alleges that this was a pattern of behavior rather than mere isolated incidents.

Harvey is arguably one of the greatest African-American stars in both radio and television. The Steve Harvey Show, Family Feud, and Little Big Shots draw tens of millions of loyal listeners and viewers on a daily basis. So, with an empire valued at some $100 million, he has much to lose.

Harvey is not taking this news lying down and has issued a counter-suit against Cooper. The suit claims that Cooper is seeking to extort and coerce money from Harvey. Harvey is asking for $5 million in damages.

On this matter, Harvey’s lawyer has said, “Virtually every time Harvey was hired for a television show, [Cooper] would contact the owners or principals to inform them of potentially embarrassing material and/or tapes and attempt to have them influence Harvey to pay for the tapes.”

Interestingly, court documents appear to show that Harvey admits to the rants, saying that at times he was edgier than others. “I didn’t have to concern myself with branding or imaging or anything. You could just say — I thought I was funnier,” Harvey said.

Cooper alleges that on one tape, Harvey says it would take an hour and a half to explain how badly he hates white people. He says that Harvey regularly called white people “honkeys.” Special grace is often offered to comedians over these kinds of matters. Indeed, the edgy nature of their work is often what makes them funny.

However, racism is unacceptable. Imagine if a white comedian was saying he hates black people, calling them the N-word and calling on folks to spit on them. Can you imagine the backlash?

What do you think about Harvey’s alleged behavior? Please share this story on Facebook and tell us because we want to hear YOUR voice!
It’s a well-kept secret, but 95% of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO₂ emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error. It’s not surprising. – Maurice Newman, AC, Chair of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, writing in The Australian newspaper, May 8, 2015.

As the Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, Mr Newman is a person of influence in Australia so his public statements should be held up to scrutiny.

In a recent newspaper column, Mr Newman said discrepancies between climate model forecasts and recorded temperatures begged the question: “Why then, with such little evidence, does the UN insist the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on futile climate change policies?”

All scientists would agree with Mr Newman that critical analysis of mathematical modelling is a crucial part of science. But it is a logical fallacy to leap from that valuable topic to describing climate change policies as futile.

Climate models: what they can and can’t do

There is a saying in science that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”. In simulating any complex system, any model will fail to reproduce all facets of the system perfectly.

Mathematical models may be imperfect but they are extremely helpful to predict the weather, design aeroplanes and even test new vaccines. They are essential to modern life. A major part of scientific research is not only developing models, but determining how they are best employed.

When asked for a data source to substantiate his 95% claim, Mr Newman referred The Conversation to research by a range of scientists including Professor Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Professor John Christy from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Mr Newman said these researchers had identified errors in climate modelling.

Mr Newman also quoted former NASA scientist and University of Alabama in Huntsville research scientist, Dr Roy Spencer as saying:

… the climate models that governments base policy decisions on have failed miserably. I’ve updated our comparison of 90 climate models versus observations for global average surface temperatures through 2013, and we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH).“

It’s true that over the last two decades modelled surface temperatures have generally risen faster than temperatures recorded in real life. But there are good reasons for that and it doesn’t mean we should take the prospect of climate change any less seriously.

Why don’t the models match observed temperatures?

What Mr Newman described as a "well-kept secret” has actually been the subject of numerous scientific papers

These papers show that the recent discrepancy between projections and recorded temperatures is very likely due to random fluctuations in the climate system. The “problem” is clearly seen in this graph showing that modelled surface temperatures have generally tracked above observed temperatures over recent years.

This graph depicts two well known global surface temperature observational datasets, the UK’s HadCRUT and the US’ NASA GISS.

To understand what’s happening, it is critical to realise that the climate changes for a number of reasons in addition to CO₂. These include solar variations, volcanic eruptions and human aerosol emissions.

The influence of all these “climate drivers” are included in modern climate models. On top of this, our climate also changes as a result of natural and largely random fluctuations – like the El Nino Southern Oscillation, ENSO and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, [IPO] – that can redistribute heat to the deep ocean (thereby masking surface warming).

Such fluctuations are unpredictable beyond a few months (or possibly years), being triggered by atmospheric and oceanic weather systems. So while models do generate fluctuations like ENSO and IPO, in centennial scale simulations they don’t (and wouldn’t be expected to) occur at the same time as they do in observations.

Indeed, if some advanced civilisation were to make an exact copy of Earth, the copy would also fail to reproduce the fluctuation associated with the recent slowdown in temperatures. This is not a modelling failure, this is just a fact of life in dealing with complex systems.

So, yes, as the figure shows there are multiple decadal periods in the past where the models either overestimate or underestimate the observed warming. Despite this, its clear that the overall modelled surface warming over the course of more than a century is only off by a very small margin.

Ocean temperatures more reliable

Rather than relying on surface temperature to keep track of global warming, it is far more reliable to look at total ocean heat content or its twin, ocean sea level (which reflects ocean heat content plus land ice melt).

These metrics are far less sensitive to random fluctuations as they don’t suffer from the complications of heat redistribution. Moreover, over 90% of the additional heat from anthropogenic warming goes into the ocean, with only a small fraction going to raising surface temperatures.

Based on these more representative metrics, there is no “pause” in either the observations or in the climate models. Indeed, both indicate increasing rates of change over time.

No secrets here

We have known of the link between CO₂ and warming since the experiments of John Tyndall in the mid 19th century. It’s certainly not a revelation from climate models.

Indeed, by the end of that century, Swedish Nobel Prize laureate Svante Arrhenius had already predicted that large CO₂ emissions would cause substantial global warming.

Modern climate models add considerable value to the well-tested empirical relationships. They resolve the land, ocean and atmosphere and explicitly include the impact of all known drivers of climate change without simply assuming that all change is due to CO₂ (as Mr Newman’s statement would imply).

Critically, this means that we can use the unique fingerprints of each driver to disentangle and attribute the changes in historical temperature to these complex mix of drivers. The planet has clearly warmed over the last 100 years, and climate models demonstrate that natural drivers like the sun are unable to explain this warming. Conversely, the warming is consistent in both magnitude and spatial pattern with our emissions of greenhouse gases.

Verdict

Mr Newman’s implication that discrepancies resulting from the recent climate fluctuation somehow invalidates climate models is incorrect.

Climate models have been thoroughly and critically tested against observations and are able to simulate with fair accuracy the component of climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols as well as natural factors like solar variations and volcanic eruptions.

However, long-term climate simulations do not and likely never will reproduce the timing of shorter-term random fluctuations, like the recent slowdown in surface temperatures. In the long run, this fluctuation, like many before, will just be noise on a gradually increasing temperature signal.

That the discrepancy is a “well-kept secret” is demonstrably false given the large number of scientific papers discussing and trying to explain exactly this issue.

Review

This is a sound analysis that effectively explains the appropriate way to assess the reliability of models. Scientists can glean much scientific insight from comparing observations to model predictions, especially when there are discrepancies between the two. In contrast, the critique of models employed by Maurice Newman does not increase scientific understanding. – John Cook

Have you ever seen a “fact” that doesn’t look quite right? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.
Two of the three investigations into the actions of Salt Lake City Police officers Detective Jeff Payne and Lt. James Tracy following Payne’s arrest of University of Utah Health nurse Alex Wubbels have finished.

The first — the police department’s internal affairs investigation — concluded that Tracy violated five departmental policies. It found that he acted with conduct unbecoming of an officer. Other rules broken include behaving with courtesy in public contacts, a policy favoring misdemeanor citations over arrests ”whenever possible,” the code of ethics and a standards of conduct policy.

It also found that Payne violated all five of those same policies, plus an additional policy which required him to report his use of physical force while arresting Wubbels — which he did not do.

Of Payne’s actions, the department wrote, “You demonstrated extremely poor professional judgment (especially for an officer with 27 years of experience), which calls into question your ability to effectively serve the public and the Department in a manner that inspires the requisite trust, respect, and confidence.”

To both employees, letters said, “disciplinary action, which may include termination of your employment, is being considered in response to actions on your part which appear to be a violation of policy and/or expectations related to the performance of your job duties.”

Payne’s lawyer, Greg Skordas, responded to the internal investigation’s results. He complimented their accounting of the facts but took issue with some of the results. He said he feels the report wouldn’t have been so harsh if the body camera footage hadn’t been publicly released and believes the report will be used to “justify major discipline … when it’s not warranted here.”

“He made a terrible mistake … But let’s not overstate it because it’s become a YouTube sensation,” Skordas said.

The second investigation — an independent review by the Civilian Review Board — concluded with findings that Tracy did not meet the responsibilities of his position as a watch commander, that both officers should have contacted the department’s legal adviser and that both officers did not understand the laws in question. It also found that Payne violated three department policies — public courtesy, blood draw procedures and his obligation to follow policy and orders.

The Civilian Review Board’s report also noted that no other police officer or security personnel present at the time of the incident intervened. These officers were from both SLCPD and the University of Utah’s campus police department. The security there was employed by the hospital.

Wubbels and her lawyer have named the inaction of those individuals as one of their primary concerns.

Their actions are also under ongoing criminal investigation by the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office, in coordination with the Unified Police Department and the FBI.

Wubbels had called hospital security when Payne became agitated. They came, but did not intervene in any way, telling her it was a “police matter” in which they couldn’t “get involved.” When she asked a U police officer to protect her from Payne, who was threatening her with arrest at the time, he told her that he would not prevent Payne from arresting her if she interfered with his work because her actions were obstruction of justice.

One U officer, Steven Worona, appears to assist in Payne’s arrest of Wubbels by placing his hand on her shoulder to hold her still. After she was arrested, he approached Payne and Tracy, offering to help them get the blood they wanted.

In a video released online, U police Chief Dale Brophy said, “Having seen the video and firsthand what she went through, and what she tried to do to de-escalate and solve the problem, I think that somebody else — [university] security and/or police — could have stepped up and taken that role from her and been the advocate for her like they should’ve been.”

Brophy said he’s met with the department and instituted more de-escalation training “to make sure it never happens again.”

On July 26, Payne went to the U’s hospital in search of a patient’s blood on behalf of the Logan Police Department. When Wubbels refused to give him a sample under policy agreed to by the hospital and SLCPD, Payne arrested her and pulled her out of the hospital while she screamed for help. Tracy, Payne’s supervisor that day, arrived shortly after the arrest. He had ordered her arrest.

Payne and Tracy have both worked as police officers for decades. Payne has won multiple awards for his work, including a Purple Heart award from the Utah Peace Officer’s Association after being shot during a traffic stop. Tracy has held several leadership positions in the force.

Both have been reprimanded in the past. In 2013, then-Chief Chris Burbank gave a written reprimand to Payne over allegations that he had sexually harassed a female coworker over a long period of time, including unwanted physical contact. He had also been suspended in 1995 after a police chase in which he violated several department policies. Tracy’s only formal reprimand was in 1997 after he arrested two people, then released them on the other side of the city, never documenting what happened.

Payne and Tracy now have until Oct. 3 to respond to the results of the internal affairs investigation. After that time period, SLCPD Chief Mike Brown will make a decision about the consequences the two officers will face.

e.vandersteen@dailyutahchronicle.com

@EliseAbril
People travelling to the Czech Republic have been warned to avoid consuming locally produced spirits following a spate of deaths linked to methanol-laced alcohol.

To date, 19 people have died and 36 people have been admitted to hospital after drinking illegally-produced liquor that contains high levels of methanol.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) today reminded people the Czech government has banned all products with alcohol content of 20 per cent or greater. It said Czech authorities have confirmed that it is confined to the Czech Republic only.

The tainted alcohol was sold in bottles under fake labels from at least two Czech liquor makers and the bottles weren't properly sealed, according to police. The poisonous drink was offered at discounts in bottles labelled as vodka or tuzemak, a local rum-like alcoholic beverage. Several people went blind or fell into coma after consuming it.

Police have uncovered a chain of producers and distributors who supplied tainted drinks to retail outlets, bars and kiosks.

Police have charged 23 people with various crimes related to making and spreading poisonous substances after raiding 40 premises, deputy interior minister Jaroslav Hruska said today.

While the ban locked about 20 million bottles of spirits in warehouses and hurt liquor makers and hospitality businesses, the government is not considering easing it for now, health minister Leos Heger told reporters in Prague. "Declining profits, in the context of 19 and potentially more deaths, are a lower priority at this moment," Mr Heger said. Easing the ban "won't be a matter for consideration in the next few days."

As many as 35 people have been hospitalised, with five new cases of poisoning occurring in the past 24 hours, Mr Heger said.

Two people in Slovakia were hospitalised with cases of "lighter poisoning" after drinking plum brandy bought over the internet in the Czech Republic, Mr Heger said.

Slovakia today joined Poland in banning the sale of liquor imported from the Czech Republic. Both countries border the Czech Republic.
DigitalGlobe is enlisting the crowd to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean for any visible evidence that could help locate the Malaysia Airlines 777 aircraft that went missing this weekend.

The Longmont-based earth-imagery company deployed its FirstLook service on Sunday, directing two of its five satellites to snap photos of the area in the Gulf of Thailand, where investigators suspected the plane may have crashed, and then activated its crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod, on Monday afternoon.

Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, lost communication while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The missing plane continued to perplex investigators from around the globe three days later.

“If there is something to see on the surface (of the water), we will see it. But the question is if we are looking in the right area,” said Luke Barrington, DigitalGlobe’s senior manager of geospatial big data.

As each new theory led to a new dead end, the company recalibrated its action plan based on the Malaysian government’s new area of focus, north and east of oil slicks reported soon after the plane went missing.

DigitalGlobe activates FirstLook — used by emergency-response agencies in natural disasters, manmade crises and human interest scenarios — about twice a week, while Tomnod is used more selectively and for different reasons, Barrington said.

“We try to use the crowd wisely and not tire them out,” he said. “The story here is much more about the search than it is about the response. This whole feeling of not knowing, the lack of information or ability to do anything, we have seen time and again, is why people want to get involved.”

Within the first hour Monday afternoon, the Tomnod map had 60,000 page views with more than a thousand tags. Ten minutes later, that was up to nearly 2,000.

Barrington said that the crowd actually directed the company on this particular crisis, asking for them to deploy Tomnod.

“The people who come to Tomnod are very motivated to solve problems,” Barrington said. “I would say we will have up to 10,000 contributors on this one.”

DigitalGlobe is not the only earth-imagery company capable of delivering high-resolution images, but is arguably the U.S. industry leader.

“There are an awful lot of assets up in orbit,” said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at The Teal Group. “There’s dozens of earth observation satellites and all of them are very, very capable. If they are taking images, then there’s no lack of imagery. And if you haven’t been able to spot something by now, then I don’t know. It has been three days.”

Kristen Leigh Painter: 303-954-1638, kpainter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kristenpainter
The head of the Colorado Department of Revenue has written a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration asking that federal controls on marijuana be loosened slightly to account for its “potential medicinal value.”

Colorado is the third state with a medical-marijuana program to ask the DEA to reschedule marijuana.

Revenue Department executive director Barbara Brohl’s letter, written Dec. 22, does not come as a surprise. A law passed last year in the legislature required the state to ask for rescheduling by the end of this year.

In the letter, Brohl details briefly Colorado’s regulations for medical-marijuana sellers and argues that current federal law, under which all marijuana possession and distribution is illegal, make it difficult for her to administer Colorado’s laws.

“As long as there is divergence in state and federal law, there is a lack of certainty necessary to provide safe access for patients with serious medical conditions,” Brohl wrote.

The letter asks that the DEA consider moving marijuana from schedule I — a category that includes such drugs as heroin and LSD that are not considered to have medicinal value — to schedule II. Drugs in that category, such as methadone and cocaine, are considered to have some medicinal value but also can be highly addictive.

Schedule II substances are able to be prescribed by doctors but are still subject to strict controls. It is unclear whether Colorado’s medical-marijuana laws — which allow doctors to authorize marijuana use through recommendation and allow patients to grow their own cannabis plants — would clash with those controls.

Earlier this year, the governors of Rhode Island and Washington also asked the DEA to reschedule marijuana. The DEA has in the past rejected similar requests to reclassify the substance.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Rapidly spreading lawlessness as Somalia collapses in the worst fighting for two nearly decades is fuelling a wave of piracy that increasingly threatens one of the world’s most important waterways.

South Korean ship Maputo 9 (L), which was hijacked by Somali pirates, is escorted by a Yemeni coast guard boat at Aden November 13, 2007. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Although shipping costs have not been affected so far, it is forcing Western navies to take action to protect shipping. Some suspect that ransom payments to pirates could be helping Islamist insurgents fight the weak interim government.

The piracy is also hampering aid shipments to Somalia and thereby worsening a humanitarian crisis that encourages the anarchy.

Heavily-armed pirates from Somalia have hijacked at least 30 ships so far this year in the Gulf of Aden — last week seizing a record four vessels in 48 hours.

“All the shipping companies are taking this very seriously and are very concerned. This is an unprecedented rise in attacks,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau, a global piracy watchdog.

The waters between Somalia and Yemen are a major artery used by nearly 20,000 vessels a year heading to and from the Suez Canal. The 700 million tons passing through the canal in 2007 was over 9 percent of an estimated 7.7 billion tons carried by global shipping. Merchant shipping carries more than 90 percent of the world’s traded goods by volume.

In May, the advisory Joint War Committee of Lloyd’s Market Association designated the strategic channel at high risk of “war, strikes, terrorism and related perils”.

“But it’s just a recommendation, and some underwriters may not follow it for their very important clients,” Mukundan told Reuters. “Costs have not gone up. Of course, if you are hijacked they go up quite significantly. But there is no contingent cost to piracy.”

Somali pirates are currently holding about 130 crew members hostage on at least seven vessels, including huge chemical tankers and bulk-carriers. Gunmen are holding vessels from Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Nigeria, Germany and Iran.

REBELS BEHIND ATTACKS?

Attacks at sea have boomed as lawlessness increased in Somalia, where there has not been a working government since warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

Since the start of last year, more than 8,000 civilians have been killed in fighting between allied Somali government and Ethiopian soldiers and Islamist rebels. Another 1 million have been driven from their homes.

There are many theories about who exactly is behind the latest spate of hijackings. Most captured ships bring ransoms of more than $10,000, and in a few cases much more.

Some security experts say there are signs insurgents may receive some of the ransoms and use them to fund attacks on the government. Last week, the rebels seized the key southern port of Kismayu. The United States says they have links to al Qaeda.

Other experts point to ties forged between Somali pirates, most of whom are based in the northern Puntland region, and criminal networks in Yemen during years of people-smuggling.

The Islamists deny masterminding the recent attacks at sea, and other analysts say the insurgents get most of their money from wealthy Somalis abroad, as well as backers in Arab nations.

Analysts say some members of the interim government, many of whom are former warlords, may also profit from piracy. All agree that the inability of Puntland’s administration to crush organized crime has fed the chaos offshore.

When the mineral-rich region declared itself semi-autonomous in 1998, it hoped to provide a model for a future, stable Somalia — clan-based federal governance with free elections and an effective parliament.

“Now we are seeing Puntland essentially breaking down as an entity,” said Rashid Abdi, Somalia expert at the International Crisis Group thinktank. “You’re seeing a gradual takeover of the state by criminal gangs.”

COALITION TASK FORCE

Puntland officials have been powerless in the face of sophisticated pirates equipped with speed boats and heavy weapons. Onshore, the authorities have also failed to stop money counterfeiters and kidnapping gangs.

That has created a climate where the pirates’ new homes, lavish weddings and flashy cars attract more and more young men desperate for work in the one of the poorest countries on Earth.

Locals say recruitment is also fed by resentment at European fishing fleets harvesting tuna from Somali waters, and what they say is regular dumping of toxic waste on their shores.

“The problem of piracy has to be looked at in the broader context of the failure of Puntland,” the ICG’s Abdi said. “It cannot be dealt with separately”

The insecurity has also put a choke on the ability of the United Nations to get food aid to the fast-growing numbers of needy. That figure has leapt 77 percent this year to more than 3.2 million — more than a third of Somalia’s population.

Canadian naval ships are escorting World Food Program shipments to Mogadishu until September, and U.N. officials say it is hoped that French and then German forces will take over.

Further north in the Gulf of Aden, the recent attacks have also stung the anti-terrorist Combined Task Force 150 into action. The multinational unit, part of Washington’s Operation Enduring Freedom, is based in neighboring Djibouti and has come to the aid of many ships attacked by pirates.

This week, it announced a string of waypoints marking a Maritime Security Patrol Area or safe corridor, which navy warships will patrol while coalition aircraft fly overhead.

“It focuses our longer-term efforts to improve security and counter destabilizing activity in the region,” Lieutenant Stephanie Murdock, spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, told Reuters by telephone from Bahrain.
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Pocatello, ID — There is a saying among law enforcement when they are questioned for writing asinine tickets for non-crimes and arresting well-meaning people who may be in possession of a plant to treat their child — ‘Just doing my job.’ This phrase is uttered countless times a day as police officers write tickets for everything from window tint to license plate lights — as they somehow think it justifies this level of extortion.

The most recent case of extortion for non-crimes is getting a lot of attention in Idaho because police extorted a man who was actually providing a community service.

When it snows in his community, Mitch Fisher is ready to help.

“I take care of the neighbors. They’re all elderly and I like to help them out,” Fisher said.

Fisher’s community service of plowing streets and sidewalks — for free — is so highly regarded that he was featured in a segment on a local news station in December.

“I try to clean my spot and all the neighbors around me so we have a nice area to park and pull in,” Fisher said las month. “Also, hopefully, so no one gets stuck in front of my house.”

But his good deed did not go unnoticed by the revenue collectors. On Wednesday, a Pocatello police officer came prowling and issued Fisher a citation for ‘depositing material on a public right of way.’ Fisher will now be extorted for over $200 for helping the city clean the roadways.

Naturally, according to Local 8 News, Fisher was baffled.

“I tried to talk (the officer) out of it and tell him what I was doing, that I was trying to get it out of the street because (the street) hasn’t been plowed since the beginning of snow season,” he said. “Of course, he was doing his job, wrote the citation and went on his way.”

The law used to extort Fisher was Chapter 9 of Pocatello’s city code which states, “It is unlawful for any person to deposit, place or allow to remain in or upon any public right of way any material or substance injurious to persons or property.”

Obviously depositing trash, debris, or anything else that would obstruct the street is a dangerous practice. However, Fisher was doing the opposite of this as he moved the snow into a pile right next to his curb.

“I didn’t want it in front of (my neighbors’) houses because they can’t park. I don’t care if it’s in front of mine,” Fisher explained of his community service.

Fisher’s ticket received heavy backlash after he posted it on Facebook in the group “You know you grew up in Pocatello when…” However, the administrator took it down after the conversation apparently got too heated.

To highlight how caring of a man he is, Fisher posted to the group yesterday — apologizing for sharing his ticket in it and didn’t mean for it to start any controversy. Within that post, Fisher was praised by his neighbors and community for providing the service and the overwhelming majority of people are on his side.

“Sounds like they should fire a cop with too much time on his hands and use that money to hire a snowplow contractor,” said one neighbor.

“Inept city hacks hate competition. I saw a neighbor with a plow accomplish more in our neighborhood in 1/2 an hour than the city has all year,” said Facebook user Brad.

“The city refuses to clear the street, but punishes a good citizen for doing their jobs for them? Proof that in a police state, it is about collecting revenue. And NOT about protecting public safety,” said Scott.

Also, there is good news to this story as Fisher says he will not back down. “I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. I don’t care about the city,” he said.

According to Local 8, Fisher plans on fighting the ticket. However, even if he loses — he will continue to help.

“If it cost me 206 dollars a year so be it, I’ll have peace of mind knowing it helps them out,” Fisher said in the Facebook group.

It is quite heartening to hear of such resistance to petty tyranny. Unjust laws will remain unjust until they are disobeyed by good people like Fisher. Had brave individuals throughout history not risked imprisonment or worse to challenge tyrannical, racist, and immoral laws, society today, would be much less free.

Thank you, Mitch Fisher, for standing up for what is right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbP28sImWfQ
Carlos Tevez says he will snub Chelsea interest to stay at Boca

Carlos Tevez won Premier League titles with Manchester United and Manchester City

Carlos Tevez claims he will snub interest from Chelsea this summer to see out his career with Boca Juniors.

The Argentina forward says Chelsea and Italian side Napoli want to bring him back to Europe, where he spent nine years with West Ham, both Manchester clubs and Antonio Conte's Juventus.

Tevez returned to Buenos Aires and first club Boca in 2015, and the message to interested European clubs is clear: 'I'm not coming back'.

"I'm fine at Boca," said the 32, year-old, quoted in Italy's Corriere dello Sport. "Indeed my idea, my dream is to finish my career as a player in this wonderful club.

"Europe? Yes, it's true Napoli and Chelsea seek me, but I repeat what I said before. My desire is to stay at Boca until I retire."

West Ham co-chairman David Sullivan revealed earlier this month he had explored the possibility of re-signing Tevez, claiming the deal broke down over the player's wage demands.

Tevez became a cult hero in east London when he helped save the club from relegation in 2007, and Premier League successes with United and City followed.

He left for Juve in 2013 when new Chelsea boss Conte was in charge and went on to win back-to-back Serie A titles.
Posted 6 years ago on Sept. 23, 2012, 4:08 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Tags: police, s17, bloomberg, nyc

The first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was a joyous affair for the 99%.

Yet regrettably, it was also a day that illustrated how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ‘private army’ has been increasingly unleashed to beat, arrest, imprison, and broadly suppress OWS.

Please post your videos, photos, and stories about how your rights were infringed on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

Occupy is a nonviolent movement, but this has not prevented Bloomberg’s Army from engaging in targeted arrests of specific organizers as well as random street ‘snatch and release’ intimidation tactics.

On September 17th not even the constant drone of helicopters overhead could drown out the screams of ‘I’m a journalist’ from the reporters who were arrested merely for practicing their and our right to freedom of the press.

And not even a cry of ‘I’m a City Councilmember’ was enough to staunch the established policy of brutality within the Mayor of Wall Street’s Police Department.

The message being sent by Bloomberg’s Army is being heard loud and clear. In Bloomberg’s New York: anyone who supports Occupy Wall Street in any fashion is being made an example of.

Were you one of these people extra-legally arrested or assaulted, or have you witnessed someone who was?

Post your videos, photos, and stories on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

We will not be stymied by the over 180 arrests on our anniversary, nor intimidated by the unprovoked and random nature of so many of them.

We will fight for our right to protest Wall Street while we protest Wall Street itself.

All Roads Lead To Wall Street

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team (click here to subscribe)
ONE man is dead and fourteen others have been hospitalised with suspected drug overdoses at a music festival in Penrith, Sydney yesterday.

The 23-year-old deceased reveller travelled to the Defqon.1 festival by car with several friends.

Just before midday he was taken in to the festival's medical tent, where his condition quickly deteriorated and he suffered several seizures, police say.

An ambulance was then called and took the man to Nepean Hospital where he was resuscitated numerous times after multiple cardiac arrests.

He died at 10.30pm last night.

A police spokesman told The Daily Telegraph they were unsure what substance the man had consumed.

"That information is being prepared for the coroner," he said.

"It is certainly a warning to others out there if it was an overdose, which is what it is looking like."

Over 18,000 people descended on the Sydney International Regatta Centre yesterday to listen to a range of hardstyle dance music.

A police operation with drug dogs nabbed 87 partygoers, three for public order offences and the remainder for drug offences.

An attendee took to Twitter saying the death may have been associated with a bad batch of ecstasy pills. Police have not confirmed this allegation.

Defqon. 1 Festival is an annual music festival held in the Netherlands and Australia. It was founded in 2003 by festival organiser Q-dance and plays mostly hardstyle and related genres such as hardcore techno, jumpstyle and hard trance. Many prominent hardstyle and dubstyle artists perform there annually.

Police have announced a media conference regarding the man's death and the large number of arrests made at the event for this afternoon.

They also warned users of illegal drugs to be aware that while they may believe they are purchasing one drug they may get something completely different.

"People who attend dance parties and music festivals need to act with caution when considering taking an illicit drug. The effects of some of the more popular drugs at these venues such as MDMA (ecstasy) can cause overheating and dehydration with sometimes fatal consequences," Penrith Local Area Command Crime Manager Detective Inspector Grant Healey warned.

It was the fifth year for the event described as being for "hard dance enthusiasts" with tickets for the Sydney International Regatta Centre event costing as much as $235.

On its website organisers stress "This festival is produced to give everyone a positive and safe experience. Q-dance maintains a zero tolerance drug policy. There will be a strong police presence at the event."

Headline acts include Coone, Gunz for Hire, Frontliner and Brennan Heart.
There aren’t many places in Seattle that haven’t changed at all in my lifetime. But walking into Tai Tung restaurant in the Chinatown-International District is like stepping out of a time machine.

There’s the wood paneling, mauve upholstery and thick laminate menu I remember from special dinners out with my family as a child. But the restaurant’s history runs much deeper than that.

“The door that you just walked through, that swinging door? That door is 80 some years old,” says Siang Hui Tay, who adds that the restaurant opened in 1935 and is the oldest remaining Chinese restaurant in neighborhood .

Tay would know. Inspired by the history of Tai Tung, she and her partner Val Tan have co-produced “A Taste Of Home,” a documentary showcasing local Chinese-American culinary history, which will play opening night of the Seattle Asian American Film Festival next week.

But it wasn’t the restaurant’s door, historic lunch counter or Bruce Lee’s favorite table (he was a regular) that first attracted the filmmaking duo, who work under the brand “Tay & Val.” It was the food — specifically Chinese comfort food from their home country of Singapore.

“We were looking for a taste of home,” says Tan, who was hoping for a taste of her grandmother’s egg foo young and “Yelped” her way to Tai Tung, which is famous for the dish.

What she found there wasn’t the recipe she grew up with. She says the Singaporean version she knows is more of a shrimp scramble than a gravy-topped omelet. But the experience sparked an interest in the history of Chinese-American food of our region and introduced her to Harry Chan.

Chan is a third generation owner of Tai Tung. He’s worked at the restaurant since 1968. In addition to being the devoted boss (he boasts that he keeps a sleeping bag at the ready so he can be sure to open even on snow days), he’s also an expert on the evolution of food in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

“They ate pig feet and pig tails, ox tails, salmon head, peashoot vegetables steamed with pork, preserved pimento,” says Chan listing off some of the popular dishes once served by his grandfather.

You won’t find all of those items on the menu today, but there are a few dishes that have remained unchanged since the restaurant’s opening day.

“It’s all going to, at some point, disappear.”

I ordered “Combination #1” as featured in “A Taste Of Home.” The spareribs were sweet and tender, the pork chow mien fresh and savory and the egg foo young pillowing light and deeply satisfying.

What’s more, every bite felt like it brought me closer to the increasingly elusive history of my city.

For more of that edible history, Val & Tay’s film — which is funded in part by 4Culture and City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture — showcases five of the oldest Chinese-American establishments in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District including: Tai Tung, the Tsue Chong Noodle Factory (you’ve eaten their fortune cookies), Fortuna Café and the now-closed Mon Hei Bakery and Yick Fung Grocery Store .

“We just started it as a passion project,” says Tay who feels an urgency to document this history before it’s gone. “It’s all going to, at some point, disappear.”

But Harry Chan and Tai Tung have no plans of disappearing, at least not anytime soon.

When I asked him if he thinks the restaurant will make it to 100 he just smiles and answers, “We’ll see.”

I’d bet they do.

“A Taste Of Home” is playing Thursday, February 23rd at 7:30PM at The SIFF Cinema Egyptian on Capitol Hill as part of the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. You can find tickets at: seattleaaff.org/2017/films/taste-of-home/

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EU politics: renewing the wedding vows 19/01/2015

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Jean-Claude Juncker says he is prepared to examine the UK's demands on how the EU should change – or so we are told by caveat: he will not allow certain "red lines", including on immigration issues, to be crossed.

But what grabs the headline is the Commission President comparing EU-UK relations to a love affair. "It's easy to fall in love and more difficult to stay together", Juncker says, also observing that, "people shouldn't stay together if the conditions aren't the same as when things started".

That, of course, is horse manure: conditions always change, so the test is whether people can adapt to them. In the case of the EU though, which – at best – was a loveless, arranged marriage, there never was a situation when we should have stayed together.

Nevertheless, while Juncker still feels that, "it's in the interest of both the UK and the EU to stay together", he reaffirms that he won't weaken the EU's fundamental principles.

"When one mentions the end of the free circulation of workers, there can be no debate, dialogue or compromise", he says. "We can fight against abuses - and national lawmakers can do that - but the EU lawmakers won't change the treaties to satisfy the will of certain politicians".

So, it seems, Juncker is still playing the "bad cop" against Merkel's "good cop", although he's not saying anything very new.

Interestingly, though, Mr Cameron could be acquiring another ally, in

This is Viktor Orban, who says he believes the EU's laws on asylum should be tightened, just a week after he said in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris that immigration into Europe should stop – with not an EU flag in sight (pictured).

"This is a Christian country", he said on a Sunday radio talk show. "We can help those who are indeed chased out of their countries, but we have to make it clear we don’t want to be the destination for immigrants seeking to make a living here".

The number seeking asylum last year in Hungary was 43,000 last year, double the figure in 2013, Mr. Orban says, a large number in relation to Hungary's total population of a little below ten million.

"If Europe continues to bury its head in the sand, these trends won't change. It now seems like Brussels won't shield us from this issue; we have to protect ourselves", Orban adds, then saying that the Dublin Regulation should be upheld, so that those immigrants who manage to escape farther westward within the EU can be transported back to the country where they entered the EU.

Hungary is perhaps not the best of allies though. It gets asylum seekers routed through its territory from Greece and Bulgaria, most often via Serbia, where there were 19,951 illegal crossings in 2013, up 212 percent on the previous year. But in Hungary, though – as the German broadcaster

The few existing facilities are overflowing, so that many refugees are housed in former military barracks or community buildings converted into prisons for migrants. In April 2014, more than 40 percent of all male asylum seekers were being housed in a prison. The reasons for arrest were arbitrary and unclear. As a rule, migrants were held for a month without having committed a crime.

The UNHCR

Detainees remained behind bars typically for four to five months, while some for the entire length of their asylum procedure. They were locked in their cells much of the day, suffered verbal and physical abuse by the security guards, and were escorted in handcuffs and on leashes to the court hearings or even to doctors, treated like a criminal.

Hungarian authorities often automatically started the aliens police procedure and ordered detention of asylum-seekers. Courts tended to review detention orders in group hearings, dealing with the case of 5-10 people in 30 minutes that was not enough time properly to consider the facts of each individual case.

According to UNHCR, asylum-seekers were also routinely deported to Serbia, considered by Hungary as a safe third country. In Serbia, however, asylum-seekers faced chain deportations to Macedonia and Greece, countries with no adequate asylum systems in place, and where asylum-seekers faced the risk of refoulement to countries where they may have fled danger or persecution.

However, resistance to the flow of asylum seekers is also manifest in the Czech Republic where, on Friday, hundreds showed up for a rally in which protesters objected to allowing Muslims to settle in Central Europe (even after this Monday's

The centre-left Czech government has so far been reluctant to offer asylum to refugees from the Middle East because of concerns that potential terrorists might be among them. It eventually agreed to take in 70 Syrian refugees under EU pressure, against thousands presenting themselves to the rest of the EU.

But that also makes the Czech government a potential ally for Mr Cameron, who is not looking quite so isolated on this issue as some might aver. Softly, softly, "Europe" is going his way. He may well confound Juncker, and bring home his treaty, sufficient for him to call upon the British to renew their wedding vows. Jean-Claude Juncker says he is prepared to examine the UK's demands on how the EU should change – or so we are told by Bloomberg . but there is a: he will not allow certain "red lines", including on immigration issues, to be crossed.But what grabs the headline is the Commission President comparing EU-UK relations to a love affair. "It's easy to fall in love and more difficult to stay together", Juncker says, also observing that, "people shouldn't stay together if the conditions aren't the same as when things started".That, of course, is horse manure: conditions always change, so the test is whether people can adapt to them. In the case of the EU though, which – at best – was a loveless, arranged marriage, there never was a situation when we should have stayed together.Nevertheless, while Juncker still feels that, "it's in the interest of both the UK and the EU to stay together", he reaffirms that he won't weaken the EU's fundamental principles."When one mentions the end of the free circulation of workers, there can be no debate, dialogue or compromise", he says. "We can fight against abuses - and national lawmakers can do that - but the EU lawmakers won't change the treaties to satisfy the will of certain politicians".So, it seems, Juncker is still playing the "bad cop" against Merkel's "good cop", although he's not saying anything very new.Interestingly, though, Mr Cameron could be acquiring another ally, in Hungary's prime minister . Yesterday, he was urging the EU to limit immigration, saying that some people were abusing the asylum rules, when they were actually seeking employment.This is Viktor Orban, who says he believes the EU's laws on asylum should be tightened, just a week after he said in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris that immigration into Europe should stop – with not an EU flag in sight (pictured)."This is a Christian country", he said on a Sunday radio talk show. "We can help those who are indeed chased out of their countries, but we have to make it clear we don’t want to be the destination for immigrants seeking to make a living here".The number seeking asylum last year in Hungary was 43,000 last year, double the figure in 2013, Mr. Orban says, a large number in relation to Hungary's total population of a little below ten million."If Europe continues to bury its head in the sand, these trends won't change. It now seems like Brussels won't shield us from this issue; we have to protect ourselves", Orban adds, then saying that the Dublin Regulation should be upheld, so that those immigrants who manage to escape farther westward within the EU can be transported back to the country where they entered the EU.Hungary is perhaps not the best of allies though. It gets asylum seekers routed through its territory from Greece and Bulgaria, most often via Serbia, where there were 19,951 illegal crossings in 2013, up 212 percent on the previous year. But in Hungary, though – as the German broadcaster Spiegel reported in September 2014, there is no functioning asylum system. Illegal detention is routine and guards use drugs to sedate migrants.The few existing facilities are overflowing, so that many refugees are housed in former military barracks or community buildings converted into prisons for migrants. In April 2014, more than 40 percent of all male asylum seekers were being housed in a prison. The reasons for arrest were arbitrary and unclear. As a rule, migrants were held for a month without having committed a crime.The UNHCR has been critical of conditions in the asylum prisons, calling them "inhumane and demeaning".Detainees remained behind bars typically for four to five months, while some for the entire length of their asylum procedure. They were locked in their cells much of the day, suffered verbal and physical abuse by the security guards, and were escorted in handcuffs and on leashes to the court hearings or even to doctors, treated like a criminal.Hungarian authorities often automatically started the aliens police procedure and ordered detention of asylum-seekers. Courts tended to review detention orders in group hearings, dealing with the case of 5-10 people in 30 minutes that was not enough time properly to consider the facts of each individual case.According to UNHCR, asylum-seekers were also routinely deported to Serbia, considered by Hungary as a safe third country. In Serbia, however, asylum-seekers faced chain deportations to Macedonia and Greece, countries with no adequate asylum systems in place, and where asylum-seekers faced the risk ofto countries where they may have fled danger or persecution.However, resistance to the flow of asylum seekers is also manifest in the Czech Republic where, on Friday, hundreds showed up for a rally in which protesters objected to allowing Muslims to settle in Central Europe (even after this Monday's Pegida rally had been cancelled.The centre-left Czech government has so far been reluctant to offer asylum to refugees from the Middle East because of concerns that potential terrorists might be among them. It eventually agreed to take in 70 Syrian refugees under EU pressure, against thousands presenting themselves to the rest of the EU.But that also makes the Czech government a potential ally for Mr Cameron, who is not looking quite so isolated on this issue as some might aver. Softly, softly, "Europe" is going his way. He may well confound Juncker, and bring home his treaty, sufficient for him to call upon the British to renew their wedding vows.
× PHOTOS: Tornado damage in Tupelo, Mississippi

Forecasters declared a tornado emergency for three counties around Tupelo, Mississippi, on Monday afternoon as a line of severe thunderstorms swept through the area, the National Weather Service reported.

“It’s going to be wave after wave of these storms, from what the forecasters tell us,” Mississippi Emergency Management spokesman Greg Flynn said.

Another twister was reported near Yazoo City, Mississippi, north of Jackson, but there was no immediate report of damage or injuries. Monday’s storms hit four years after an April 2010 tornado that killed four people in Yazoo City and 10 across the state, said Joey Ward, the city’s emergency management director.

MORE: Storm chaser video of Tupelo tornado | Tupelo meteorologist yells for staff to take shelter on live TV during tornado

PHOTOS:

Utility pole & crushed utility truck on hwy 45 in tupelo pic.twitter.com/2UxFEUfCyz — Tish Clark (@local24tish) April 28, 2014

Tupelo apts damaged by tornadoes. pic.twitter.com/IZ00brtzt2 — Tish Clark (@local24tish) April 28, 2014

Tornado damage here in Tupelo pic.twitter.com/e2zNEIdX5c — Earl Brown (@cosine55) April 28, 2014

Some stuff hitting us in tupelo, ms #TheWeatherChannel pic.twitter.com/IywvoR8WSL — Nicholas Massey ✌ (@AThinkingMind) April 28, 2014

https://twitter.com/1ChrisForrester/status/460901413623566336

A rare before and after tornado shot from Tupelo pic.twitter.com/EB6tlnlPI9 — Jimmy Carter (@askjimmycarter) April 28, 2014

One of my best high school memories, gone. pic.twitter.com/9rPy032rGv — Kyle Holliman (@thekholly11) April 28, 2014

Another photo from what looks to be from Tupelo area. RT @jayward11: pic.twitter.com/XiZ5EniK4H — Kennan Oliphant (@TVNewsGuru) April 28, 2014

RT @WiscoWX: Car rolled by tornado in tupelo pic.twitter.com/jxLFTzs8iI — The Daily Rapid (@earththreats) April 28, 2014

Major tornado damage in Tupelo area! pic.twitter.com/OMRf1gVh7V — Rock104 (@Rock104FM) April 28, 2014

From @DanielShawAU live stream- flipped semi in Tupelo, MS after tornado pic.twitter.com/OvynGycVPh — SevereStudios (@severestudios) April 28, 2014

This is Vanellis in Tupelo where I work. Everyone is safe. Praising God for His hand of mercy over my coworkers. pic.twitter.com/2iyDneDy9O — Brandy Davis (@brandydavis01) April 28, 2014

Just arrived on scene in Mayflower AR. It's a mess out here. With @edlavaCNN pic.twitter.com/KLvQ7Bm9Sd — Josh Rubin (@jrubin) April 28, 2014
At the sacred convocation of Concordia Lutheran Seminary, Edmonton (25 May), and the Call Service of Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Catharines (27 May), the following placements were announced. More news and photos will follow later.

Pastoral Candidate Placements

Andrew Cottrill (CLTS): Zion Lutheran Church, Yorkton, Saskatchewan

Kirk Radford (CLTS): Christ Lutheran Church, Sarnia, Ontario

William Rose (CLS): Redeemer/Zion/Christ/St. Paul’s Lutheran Churches, Portage la Prairie/Plumas/Neepawa/McCreary, Manitoba

Paul Schulz (CLTS): Trinity Lutheran Church, Mallard, Iowa; Zion Lutheran Church, Ayrshire, Iowa

Vicarage Placements

Matthew Fenn (CLTS): Our Saviour Lutheran Church and Parish, Dryden, Ontario

Michael Mayer (CLS): Redeemer Lutheran Church, Didsbury, Alberta

Christopher McLean (CLS): Redeemer Lutheran Church, Kitimat, BC

Shiekh Lief Mauricio (CLS): Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, Winkler, Manitoba

Kenneth Stadnick (CLS): Advent Lutheran Church, Evansburg, Alberta

Diaconal Intern Placements

Lenora Wallden, DPS (CUE): Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Kitchener, Ontario

CLS = Concordia Lutheran Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta

CLTS = Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Catharines, Ontario

CUE = Concordia University Edmonton, Edmonton, Alberta
Ed Miliband’s pledge to lower the voting age to 16 has been mostly overlooked, thanks to the furore over energy prices. Aside from the principle of the issue, what impact might it have on election results?

As I’ve covered previously (see here and here) there is mounting evidence that today’s young people are more right wing than their parents’ generation – certainly on issues of welfare, taxation, the deficit and individual responsibility. Being so doesn’t automatically make them Conservative voters, of course, but even that measure shows some increases. YouGov regularly find that 18-24-year-olds are the second most likely age group to vote Tory after the over 60s, and Wednesday’s poll produced the remarkable result among young people of both Labour and the Conservatives at level-pegging on 40 per cent.

Yet another example of this cropped up on Newsnight earlier in the week in a package exploring how 16- and 17-year-old voters might use their newfound power if Labour were to be elected (you can watch it below in full).

The programme asked a focus group of teenagers in the age bracket to choose where cuts should fall and where more spending should be allocated. Their first choice for the axe was the welfare bill, as a near-unanimous decision. They were even divided on whether to make savings from the pension bill.

Sure, it’s an unscientific exercise but it was remarkably in keeping with the polling evidence which shows the young becoming remarkable hawkish when it comes to the welfare state. It’s a BBC programme, so needless to say this went entirely unremarked – it’s something we should watch closely, all the same.

(video clip courtesy of liarpoliticians)
Amanda Clarke and Victoria Grayson will go one final round in the Revenge series finale. The ABC soap is ending after a sure-to-be-epic showdown in the season 4 finale, and Us Weekly has a sneak peek at the women facing off in the episode.

"For you, death is my only true revenge," Amanda (Emily VanCamp) hisses at Victoria Grayson (Madeline Stowe) while aiming a gun at her sworn enemy. The elder Hamptonite was presumed dead after framing Amanda for her murder, but is, in fact, very much alive — and unafraid of death.

PHOTOS: TV shows gone too soon

"I died long before you were born. This is just a formality," Victoria says. "Are you ready now?"

Amanda ominously responds, "More than you know. Goodbye, Victoria."

Dun dun dun! Things aren't looking good for the two rivals, and executive producer Sunil Nayar told Us Weekly ahead of the finale that nothing will be the same for either woman if they make it out alive.

"Is this a woman that is able to shake off the shackle of what her mission has been? Should she survive, what is that survival going to look like? Because I think there’s no way to get out of this untainted," the showrunner dished of Amanda/Emily's potential fate.

PHOTOS: The most shocking TV deaths ever

The finale will focus on "the idea that each character, in some form or another, gets their moment of redemption and destruction," he continued. "What is the collateral of what’s happened to all those people? I think we’ve answered those questions very elegantly and in a lot of times very surprisingly in the finale."

PHOTOS: Emily VanCamp and Josh Bowman's real-life love story

Of course, the Grayson/Clarke rivalry will take center stage. "The show is Victoria and Emily," Nayar said. And as for Victoria, "[the Victoria vs. Emily] dynamic is the lifeblood of the show, and I think the work [Stowe] did this year was exceptional. You’ll see where Victoria’s story ends up next week but it is the right ending."

The Revenge series finale airs Sunday, May 10 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox!

Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now!
ABC chairman Jim Spigelman has strongly criticised the federal government's proposed anti-discrimination law, saying it poses risks to freedom of speech.

Mr Spigelman, former New South Wales chief justice, said there was no justification for including the notion of ''offending'' in the definition of discrimination.

The legislation consolidates several anti-discrimination laws, including that on racial discrimination, which refers to treatment that offends. The proposed law extends ''offending'' into the definition of discrimination for all purposes.

Delivering an oration on Human Rights Day, Mr Spigelman pointed out that none of the other existing Commonwealth acts - covering sex, disability and age discrimination - included conduct that only offended.

The freedom to offend was an integral component of freedom of speech. ''There is no right not to be offended. I am not aware of any international human rights instrument, or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy, that extends to conduct which is merely offensive,'' he said.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Lebanese army found a surface-to-air missile (SAM) in a weapons cache left by Nusra Front militants after it took over some of the jihadists’ positions in northeast Lebanon, a Lebanese security source said on Friday.

The cache also included U.S.-made so-called TOW anti-tank missiles, the source said. Photographs of the cache sent by the security source showed large numbers of shells and rockets.

There have been sporadic reports throughout Syria’s six-year-old civil war of rebel groups gaining access to SAMs. Last year the Syrian government said rebels had used one to shoot down a jet, but insurgents said they had downed it with anti-aircraft guns.

The Nusra Front was the official branch of al Qaeda in Syria until it changed its name a year ago and broke formal allegiance to the global jihadist network.

It held a pocket of territory straddling the border between Syria and Lebanon until a Hezbollah offensive last month that forced it to accept evacuation to a rebel-held part of Syria.

Lebanon’s army has taken over the positions that Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shi’ite group allied to the Syrian government, took from the Nusra fighters last month.

The Lebanese army is also preparing for an offensive against the last militant presence in the mountainous border area, an Islamic State pocket near to the one previously held by Nusra.
FOR a politician whose party leader called a General Election because the opinion polls told her that she’d get a whopping majority, only to discover once the votes were in that she’d lost the slender majority that she had, you’d think that Ruth Davidson would be a bit more circumspect about demanding that parties in power make decisions based on opinion polls.

But no, Ruth Davidson wants the Scottish Government to drop the bill that’s already been passed by the Scottish Parliament, and she wants them to drop it on the basis of an opinion poll. You’d have thought a Tory would have learned their lesson about relying on opinion polls, but not Ruth.

It’s not even as though the opinion poll in question, which purportedly showed that 60 per cent of people oppose another independence referendum, was unbiased and neutral. It asked a ridiculously leading question, a question phrased in such a way as to positively beg people to say “no”.

The truth is that asking people whether they want another independence referendum is a meaningless exercise, in whatever way the question is phrased, and the reason it’s meaningless is because it takes no account of circumstances or motives.

I’m hugely keen on the idea of independence, you may have noticed, but if I was asked in an opinion poll if I wanted a referendum tomorrow, I’d say no. I want another referendum when the circumstances are right for one. I want another referendum when we’re going to win it. So, despite the fact that I spend much of my time travelling the length and breadth of Scotland talking about independence and encouraging the formation of grass roots Yes groups, Ruth Davidson would still take my opinion and include it in whatever she’s citing at FMQs as “proof” that Scotland doesn’t want another independence referendum.

The best time for another independence referendum is at the time that the Scottish Government originally proposed to have it – when the Brexit negotiations have played out and we know what sort of deal the UK has struck with the EU. The people of Scotland have a right to vote on that. Ruth doesn’t want us to have that right. She wants us to take whatever it is that the UK chucks at us and to be grateful for it. What Ruth Davidson is demanding is that the people of Scotland surrender now and for all time the right to have a view on what British governments impose on us. The Tories want Scotland to make a pinkie promise to accept whatever Brexit deal Westminster comes up with.

Still, it’s not like we should listen to Ruth’s opinion on anything much; her boss certainly doesn’t. Theresa May doesn’t listen to Ruth on the topic of LGBTI rights nor, indeed, on anything much else.

Despite the entreaties that Ruth made to Theresa May after the latter announced her intention to make a deal with the arch-homophobes of the DUP and the assurances that she reportedly received that LGBTI rights wouldn’t be affected, Theresa went and appointed David Lidington as Justice Secretary, a man who has consistently voted against every single piece of legislation improving LGBTI rights.

Mind you, getting assurances from Ruth Davidson on LGBTI rights wouldn’t inspire much in the way of confidence at the best of times, as she seems to believe that the entire point of the campaign for LGBTI equality was “please don’t be nasty to gay people so that we can be Daily Mail readers too.”

What we’ve been witnessing this past week is a shameless attempt by a politician who lost an election to act as though she’d won it. Since her boss in London is attempting much the same trick it’s not like we should be surprised. It’s the most brazen attempt at a power grab since one of the contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race hogged all the electrical sockets with his hair drier.

The Tories are doing deals with the orange-sashed DUP, they’re stirring up sectarianism in Scotland, and their media friends are silent all of a sudden about the Ulsterisation of our politics. An elderly relative of mine is your archetypal west of Scotland Catholic, and he voted No in the referendum because, he said, he didn’t want to be “ruled by Presbyterians”. So how’s that working out now, eh?

The facts are, however, that despite all the dirty deals, despite all the electoral spending, Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives (TM) won just 13 seats out of 59. They fought the election on the single issue of opposition to another independence referendum, and they still lost.

Improving on the number of seats you achieved still doesn’t make you a winner, any more than improving your results in an arithmetic exam from an F to a D means that you’re now top of the class. Scotland looked at Ruth Davidson’s party and still gave them a failing grade – all the Tory triumphalism in the world won’t change that simple arithmetical reality.
Federal employees should be fairly compensated and their benefits protected, according to the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said as president that she would ensure feds are paid fairly through “appropriate pay raises” and would “oppose across-the-board arbitrary pay freezes, retirement cuts, or cuts to other employee benefits.” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was a little more specific, saying the federal workforce deserves a pay raise “of at least 3.8 percent to keep up with cost-of-living increases” and pledged his “strong” support for the FAIR Act, pending legislation in both chambers that would give feds a 5.3 percent pay boost in 2017.

Clinton and Sanders were responding to a written questionnaire submitted to the 12 Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns still in operation in December by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. As of March 24, only the Clinton and Sanders campaigns had responded to the questions, which covered a range of issues, including federal employee pay, union rights, and the privatization of government jobs.

“For far too long, the extreme right wing has demonized, belittled, and sought to destroy the federal workforce. That is wrong, that is unconscionable, and that has got to change,” wrote Sanders in response to IFPTE questions asking the candidates if they would work to ensure pay raises for feds and protect their pensions. “The fact of the matter is that no other worker has been asked to sacrifice more on the altar of deficit reduction than our federal workers.”

Federal workers endured a three-year pay freeze between 2011 and 2013. They’ve received across-the-board pay raises of 1.3 percent in 2016, and 1 percent each in 2015 and 2014. All those boosts were below the percentage mandated by the formula in the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act. President Obama has proposed a 1.6 percent pay bump for 2017.

Clinton noted that her experience as secretary of State, New York senator, and First Lady have enabled her to witness “first-hand” federal employees’ contributions to the country. “I was serving as Secretary of State when federal salaries were frozen in 2011, and I saw how difficult it was for employees to be told that even though they were working hard and their living costs were going up, their paychecks were not,” Clinton wrote in response to the IFPTE questionnaire. “The government is not going to be able to recruit and retain the high-caliber employees it needs if it does not pay federal employees fairly for their work.”

She also said that it’s “unfair to require additional increases in retirement contributions as a backdoor pay-cut for federal workers,” and pledged her continued support for veterans’ preference in federal hiring, in response to a specific IFPTE question. As part of the 2013 budget deal, federal employees hired on or after Jan. 1, 2014, with less than five years of service have to pay 4.4 percent toward their pensions -- 1.3 percent more than employees hired after 2012 contribute to their defined retirement benefit, and 3.6 percent more than most workers hired in or before 2012 contribute. Republican lawmakers since then have offered other proposals -- so far, unsuccessful -- to further increase the amount all federal workers contribute to their pensions.

Both Democratic candidates, unsurprisingly, also vowed to preserve the right of workers to collectively bargain, and to renew Obama’s 2009 executive order establishing a national labor-management partnership.

Clinton and Sanders also expressed similar opinions on privatizing federal jobs, arguing that contractors are often more expensive than federal workers. Clinton said she opposed “numerous Bush administration proposals” to privatize the federal workforce while she was in the Senate. “As president, I will oppose efforts to contract out work unless doing so is necessary, in the best interest of the federal government and is clearly cost effective.” Sanders said “we must do everything we can to make sure that federal workers are given the opportunity to provide the services that the American people need, and when we do hire contractors that they are held to the same high standards we expect of our federal workforce.”

IFPTE’s questionnaire asked the candidates for their views on several other issues, including the minimum wage, trans-Pacific partnership, and guest-worker programs.

Click here to read Clinton’s responses to IFPTE’s questionnaire, and here to read Sanders’ answers.
On this episode of the Pony Bits Podcast, in case you couldn’t tell from the episode title, Jon and Colton tackle the subject of what exactly makes “Best Pony”. Jon sets up his own diagram to go over important factors to consider such as design, type of pony and personality. While they go over their own individual specifics of what they look for in their ideal “Best Pony”, Jon and Colton also talk about how realistic each of the Mane 6’s characters are, while juxtaposing that with how illogical the world they live in really is.

The podcast will be on hiatus until after October 19th when the duo will be back from Texas and can produce another episode, until then, enjoy the episode and send us some emails about your “Best Pony” requirements, the television show or the comics to read on the podcast at ponybitspodcast@gmail.com.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Jon’s Diagram (http://i.imgur.com/xdV37QZ.png)

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The chance that intelligent life might ever encounter this interstellar mixtape—let alone listen to it—has always been infinitesimal. Still, argued astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who helped select the tracks, "the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." There is indeed something lovely about sharing humanity with the universe in this way, as Megan Garber wrote last year:

The Golden Records ... carry the transcendent aspects of human existence: the art, the beauty, the ache, the joy. They offer what we have, and what we are, up to the cosmos.

But what if the improbable were to happen? Here on Earth, 10-year-old CDs are puttering out. What about a pair of 40-year-old records careening through outer space? Even if extraterrestrials found and figured out how to work the Golden Record, would it play anymore?

Actually, yes, experts say.

"The gold records that were launched into space were specially constructed discs for the purposes of space travel," said Peter Alyea, a digital conservation specialist at the Library of Congress who specializes in audio recordings. "I believe they were designed to last for a very, very long time and so should still be playable. This kind of disc is not something you could buy commercially at a record store."

And besides, Voyager's Golden Record has thus far been kept safe from the elements—high temperatures, oxygen, water—known to deteriorate Earthly records. (Voyager is now operating at about negative 110 degrees Fahrenheit.)

“If I had to guess, I'd say it's as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft," said David Doody, an engineer on the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an email. "It's been stored in a vacuum more perfect than any attainable on Earth, and protected from dust and cosmic rays by an aluminum metal case."

That protective aluminum case has had quite the adventure—it got a dose of radiation near Jupiter and was blasted with space dust in Saturn's ring plane—but Doody says it has been "basically always shielded" at least enough to protect the record's functionality. "In all, it might have lost a little luster at worst, in my humble opinion," he said. "I'd also venture to guess that it would be in playable condition for many hundreds of millennia.”

Which raises a theoretical question about what version of Earth the rest of the universe might first encounter, and what songs or sounds we might include today that didn't exist in 1977. The Golden Record, after all, is more of a time capsule than a broadcast. (It doesn't even include any hip-hop, which was still in its cultural nascence the year the Voyagers were launched.) Of course many of the record's sounds have retained the timeless quality they must have had four decades ago—like this greeting from Kurt Waldheim, then the secretary general of the United Nations:

We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship—to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

NASA has since moved on to new projects to share music with other galaxies, and humanity has graduated beyond the record as the go-to audio format. In 2008, for instance, scientists beamed a song directly into deep space, aiming for the North Star 431 light years away from Earth. That tune, a Beatles classic from the decade before Voyager launched, was "Across the Universe."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
2015 brought record passenger traffic to Bush, Hobby

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 lands at Hobby Airport in March 2015. A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 lands at Hobby Airport in March 2015. Photo: Bill Montgomery, HC Staff Photo: Bill Montgomery, HC Staff Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close 2015 brought record passenger traffic to Bush, Hobby 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Houston's two major airports both set records for passenger traffic in 2015, the Houston Airport System reported Wednesday.

Hobby Airport had 145,202 international passengers between opening its international concourse in October - the first time Hobby has seen international flights since 1969 - and the end of the year, the Airport System said.

Hobby, overall, had 12.2 million passengers, up 1.8 percent from 2014.

Bush Intercontinental Airport saw its overall passenger count rise 4.2 percent to about 43 million. The number of international passengers at Bush increased 8 percent to 10.6 million.

Combined, the Houston Airport System saw a 3.7 percent increase to 55.1 million passengers.
White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon told a group of House conservatives they had no choice but to back the GOP's ObamaCare repeal bill days before the bill was pulled, according to a new report.

Bannon confronted members of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this week during the White House's push for the American Health Care Act, Axios's Mike Allen reported Saturday in his newsletter.

"Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill,” Bannon reportedly said.

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A Freedom Caucus member reportedly replied: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either."

The conservative group met with President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE at the White House on Thursday, but the president reportedly did not want to discuss policy specifics of the healthcare legislation.

Freedom Caucus members were calling for additional changes to the GOP plan to further dismantle ObamaCare.

Trump singled out the caucus in a Friday morning tweet, arguing funding for Planned Parenthood would remain intact should members vote against the GOP plan.

“The irony is that the Freedom Caucus, which is very pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue if they stop this plan!” the president wrote.
A survey of jihadis in Austria reveal 21 percent of people who have either traveled to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq or planned on doing it are women.

The study from the Austrian Green Party and the Ministry of the Interior reveals 59 out of 280 prospective ISIS members are women. Close to half of responders who have been prevented from leaving Austria to join ISIS, 22 out of 50, were women.

“The number is unpleasant,” Berivan Aslan, a Green Party member of parliament, told The Local. “I did not expect the percentage of female IS-sympathizers to be as high as 21 percent.”

The figure in Austria is significantly higher than in Belgium, where just 17 percent of participants in a similar study were women.

Aslan said the idea of being the wife of a “hero” is appealing to young Muslim women in Europe.

“Disoriented young women in Western Europe feel attracted to IS-fighters and imagine that being on the side of a fighter building their own ‘state’ would afford oneself stability and meaning,” Aslan told The Local. “In the Islamic Statement, women are given the role not only of the wife of a ‘hero’, but are also used as fighters and suicide bombers.”

All-female ISIS cells have recently emerged in France, where a group of women were arrested after a car full of gas cylinders were found outside the Notre Dame church in September.

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Image caption Zack Davies attacked Dr Sarandev Bhambra on 14 January

A man has been found of guilty of attempted murder after attacking a dentist with a machete and a hammer in north Wales.

Zack Davies, 26, targeted Dr Sarandev Bhambra at a Tesco store in Mold, Flintshire, in a racially motivated revenge assault for the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

Davies, of Mold, admitted wounding with intent but denied attempted murder.

He was convicted at Mold Crown Court on Thursday.

He will be sentenced on 11 September.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "We are in no doubt that had the racial disposition of this case been reversed this would be reported as an act of terror" - Dr Tarlochan Singh Bhambra, Sarandev's brother

Dr Bhambra was walking down an aisle in the store on 14 January when he felt a "huge blow" to the back of his head from the 30cm (12in) machete.

During the trial, shopper Leanne Jones said she heard the words "white power" and said Davies was acting "like a lunatic" as he hacked Dr Bhambra with the machete.

Another witness heard Davies say: "Come here, this is for Lee Rigby".

Image copyright PA Image caption Fusilier Lee Rigby, from Middleton in Greater Manchester, was murdered outside Woolwich Barracks

Dr Bhambra suffered two cuts to his scalp which went down to the bone and a cut to his back which went down to the muscle.

The injury to his left hand caused major nerve, artery and tendon damage and he was in surgery for five hours.

Dr Bhambra told the jury that former soldier Peter Fuller saved his life when he intervened during the attack.

Image copyright North Wales Police Image caption Davies attacked Dr Bhambra in Tesco using a machete and a hammer

The court heard items associated with white supremacy and Nazism were found at Davies's home, including banners, swastika badges and Combat 18 stickers.

He also said he was "absolutely fascinated" with Islamic State and described the British man known as Jihadi John as his inspiration.

Gareth Preston, senior prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service Wales, described Davies as a "dangerous young man whose distorted and racist views led him to commit a terrifying act of violence".

He added: "Such was the level of violence involved that, were it not for the extremely courageous actions of ex-serviceman Peter Fuller, this offence could have become an act of murder."

Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were jailed for life in February 2014 for hacking Fusilier Rigby to death.

Image copyright cascadenews.co.uk Image caption Dr Bhambra said he would have been 'hacked to death' if he had lost consciousness

Image copyright YouTube Image caption Davies told police he was a member of a far-right organisation, but had acted alone at the supermarket

Image copyright CPS Image caption Davies almost chopped Dr Bhambra's hand off in the attack
Hello there,

We’re back earlier than expected, with some unfortunate news that we feel we need share with you.

On the weekend, there was a serious medical emergency with one of our team’s close family members. The situation is severe enough that they won’t be able to complete their work in time for Need to Know’s alpha release. As a result, we most likely cannot make the September 26th release date without severely compromising the alpha’s quality and the mental health of one of our team. Their work is almost finished, but given the gravity of the situation, they will need a little extra time to complete it. Our thoughts are with them and their family at this tough time.

This news will no doubt come as a great disappointment to many of you, and no one more than ourselves. We’ve pushed ourselves hard to get the alpha ready in time, and development was on schedule before this emergency struck. Delaying this release again is the absolute last thing we want to do. However, a short interruption is probably unavoidable, and we felt you needed to know as soon as possible. As the pending assets can be dropped right into the game, the wait won’t be longer than a week or two.

The other parts of development will continue at full speed, and the additional time may give us the opportunity to add an extra feature to the alpha that we thought we wouldn’t have time to include. It’s only fair that you get more to play, given your incredible patience and support.

When we’ve solidified a new date, we’ll post it on social media a couple of days in advance. Our next Kickstarter update will announce the release of the alpha, and you’ll be able to download it right away.

We can’t tell you how dispiriting this delay is for us all, but at the same time we also want to express how grateful we are for your excitement and encouragement over the last few months. When hit by setbacks like this, your support makes it that much easier to remain focused and motivated.

Until next time,

Tristram and Quincy

[P.S. A reminder for backers at Clearance Level 8 and higher: The backer survey will still close on the 30th of September, so make sure you have your responses in soon! Please let us know if you have any questions or issues with it.]
If you live abroad and are requesting an ITIN for a foreign child who has been adopted or legally placed in your home pending adoption, remember to include a copy of the legal documents evidencing your relationship to the child.

If you live abroad and are requesting an ITIN for a foreign child who has been adopted or legally placed in your home pending adoption, remember to include a copy of the legal documents evidencing your relationship to the child.

When it comes to ITINs for dependents only IRS employees serving as certifying acceptance agents are empowered to evaluate your dependent's passport on the spot and immediately return the passport.

When it comes to ITINs for dependents only IRS employees serving as certifying acceptance agents are empowered to evaluate your dependent's passport on the spot and immediately return the passport.
This is the full 4-1-13 episode of the Labor Express Radio program.

In Pilsen, a working class, Mexican immigrant on Chicago’s Southside, Metro Bank has been foreclosing on several apartment buildings and has been attempting to evict the building’s tenants. But little did Metro Bank know that at least two of their tenants were seasoned activists and members of the IWW (The Industrial Workers of the World). And like good Wobblies, these tenants didn’t simple mourn the banks attempts to evict them - they organized! They communicated with friends and neighbors at several buildings in the community that were taken over by Metro Bank and are fighting back. On Friday about two dozen tenants and their supporters held a rally outside Metro Bank in east Pilsen. We will hear what they had to say on today’s program.

And we have a very special in studio guest this morning. Oscar Chacon- Executive Director of the National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities (NALACC), is here to talk about developments in the debates over immigration reform in the U.S. and about an exciting event being held next Saturday here in Chicago called Latino Nation.

Labor Express Radio is Chicago's only English language labor news and current affairs radio program. News for working people, by working people. Labor Express Radio airs every Monday morning at 10:00 AM on Chicago's Sound Alliance, WLUW, 88.7 FM. For more information, see our website at: www.laborexpress.org or our Facebook page... facebook.laborexpress.org

and our homepage on Archive.org at:

http://www.archive.org/details/LaborExpressRadio
A four-year old Texas boy found wandering across the border in Mexico this winter finally returned to the United States. Authorities believe his mother traveled from El Paso to Juarez to purposely abandon the child.

Over the weekend, the El Paso Police Department announced that the youngster found in the Mexican state of Chihuahua returned to the United States on Friday night. The four-year-old remained in the custody of social services in Juarez for more than four months.

The police department tweeted they placed the little boy into the care of Child Protective Services (CPS). Since then, though, it appears authorities reunited the child with his father in El Paso.

CAP – 4 year old boy found in Juarez was returned to the United States & CPS Friday evening. dp — EL PASO POLICE DEPT (@EPPOLICE) July 1, 2017

Breitbart Texas reported that Mexican police found the boy wandering alone on the streets of Juarez on February 22. They suspected the child, purportedly named “Luis,” was American because of his command of the English language. Months later the El Paso Police Department identified the four-year-old as a U.S. citizen.

In fact, detectives in the south Texas border city only first learned about the boy in late May when an El Paso police supervisor in the Crimes Against Persons unit attended an Amber Alert seminar in Mexico City and heard about the child’s situation. Subsequently, on June 3, El Paso police issued a media alert about the unidentified boy. His mother, Ruby Esmeralda Gonzalez, 25 viewed photographs of her son on El Paso TV news broadcasts and then contacted police to report her child as a kidnapping victim.

An ensuing police investigation revealed Gonzalez crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border and into the city of Juarez on February 22 where, allegedly, she left her child in a dilapidated and deserted building. Gonzalez then returned to El Paso on the same day.

According to KVIA, a Juarez cab driver actually found the boy who was alone, scared, and hungry. The cabbie contacted local police who then took the child into custody. When investigators examined “Luis,” they noticed bruises on his head, legs, and buttocks.

Current El Paso jail records show that police arrested Gonzales on June 5 on one count of child abandonment with imminent danger and booked her into the El Paso County Detention Facility on a $10,000 bond.

On June 13, law enforcement officials charged her with filing a false report to a peace officer, federal special investigator, or law enforcement employee. This carries a $10,000 bond. On top of that, they charged Gonzalez with injury to a child with the intent of bodily injury which has a $25,000 bond. She remains incarcerated in the county jail.

Reportedly, before releasing “Luis,” Chihuahua police said the unidentified adult male had to take a DNA test in Juarez to prove he was the biological father. Investigators with the Mexican Attorney General’s office, officials from the United States Consulate in Juarez, and CPS authorities worked to bring the boy to home to his father, according to local Juarez newspaper El Diario de Juarez.

Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter.
Police across Kansas feel they are targets of “built-in” bias and say they are wrongly accused of racial profiling.

Those sentiments underlie findings of a new study by a Wichita State University professor for the Kansas Department of Transportation.

Specifically, 39 of 61 officers interviewed for the research said they had been accused of racial profiling at least once during a traffic stop. Yet none said they were the subject of a formal complaint following the traffic stop.

One Hispanic officer “said he has been accused of racial profiling at least fifty times,” says a 59-page analysis compiled by Michael Birzer, a professor of criminal justice and director of WSU’s School of Community Affairs. The officers were from 15 agencies, including the Wichita Police Department.

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Last year, Birzer completed a study for the city of Wichita finding that Wichita police ticketed black motorists at disproportionately higher rates than white motorists. While African-Americans made up only 11 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 22 percent of the people given traffic citations from November 2012 through April 2013. That report said the results don’t prove that racial profiling exists because a number of factors may influence who gets ticketed by police. For example, if police are deployed more heavily in minority neighborhoods, it might explain why more minorities are being stopped. It can “present the perception of racial profiling even though it may not be occurring,” the report said.

The latest Birzer study, commissioned by the state, was designed to get officers’ perspectives. Birzer interviewed or spoke with the officers multiple times and met with them in focus groups.

Besides the Wichita department, the officers were from the Andover, Arkansas City, Derby, Dodge City, Eastborough, Kansas City, Lenexa, Newton, Pittsburg, Topeka and Wichita State University police departments and the Reno, Shawnee and Sumner County sheriff’s departments.

Many of the interviews were taking place as the tense situation in Ferguson, Mo., where a black teen was fatally shot by a white officer, was unfolding, Birzer said.

“We have an opportunity to look at both sides of this issue,” Birzer said. One sound approach to police-community relations, he said, seems to be “good, old-fashioned interaction, communication, just the little things that don’t cost a lot of money.”

“If every officer treated their beat like Andy Taylor” – the sheriff in the small town of Mayberry on “The Andy Griffith Show” on TV in the 1960s – “that can go a long, long ways,” Birzer said.

On being accused

The officers said that when they were accused of stopping motorists because of their race, usually it was an African-American accusing them.

Asked how they responded to the accusation, officers said they tried to explain the specific reason – speeding or a defective brake light – but they thought motorists accepted the explanation only part of the time.

One white officer told a black driver that he couldn’t see his race until he walked up to his car.

One officer shared this: “Some officers don’t care and won’t take a few extra minutes to explain to the citizen why they are being stopped and that’s a problem.”

The officers, two-thirds of whom are white, are not identified by name or agency.

Another theme: Officers suspected that minority drivers accusing them of racial profiling were trying to intimidate the officers. They suspected it was a way to evade a ticket or to try to distract the officer because the motorist had a suspended license or something to hide.

“Only a very few officers indicated that racial minority citizens allege racial profiling because they genuinely believe they were stopped because of their race,” the report said.

Officers said minorities had a bias against them that has been taught. One black officer said: “African Americans learn not to trust the police from a young age. … Older generations of African Americans had bad experiences with the police and so that leaves a bad impression of the police which is passed down generationally in families.”

A white officer said that when he said “Hi” to children in a car during a traffic stop, the adults “will tell the kids don’t talk to the police.”

Media blamed

Officers blame the news media for part of the negative image, saying that media skew their reporting against police when it comes to the issue of racial profiling, and that media “over-report” on cases like the shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

“So I really think the media are like weather chasers,” one officer said. “They are going to report anything, and objectivity doesn’t really matter.”

What people don’t understand, officers said, is that they are targeting crime, not minorities. Police call it “proactive policing.” The problem is, the same neighborhoods where they go after gangs and drug trafficking often are home to many low-income minorities. The officers said they learn from experience to look for certain clothing, gestures and behavior for crime indicators – not race.

“So when you’re driving along and these indicators start popping up you’re like wow,” one officer said.

Police also defend their use of “pretext” stops, where they are stopping someone for a minor traffic violation because they suspect the person of something more serious. For example, an officer might stop a driver for not signaling soon enough after the car leaves a drug house. The report notes that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld pretext stops.

“My biggest case came from using a pretext stop for a defective headlight,” an officer said.

A black officer from eastern Kansas said he once wondered about a fellow officer who always seemed to be pulling over black men.

“But getting to know him over the years,” the officer said, “I realized that he is not like that at all, he just has this photographic memory for criminals regardless if they are white, purple, black or red and when he passes you he’s on it.”

Training criticized

Police say their racial-profiling training is “boring,” “bland” and “mind numbing” and should be more interactive. Some officers proposed bringing in minorities during the training so the citizens would understand the officers’ view.

It goes both ways. Birzer noted in an interview about his latest study that when he talked with minorities for his Wichita racial profiling study, they said they wanted to see officer training “so police could have a better understanding of them and their culture.”

Part of the problem is that minorities don’t have enough positive contact with police, a white officer said in the latest study.

Another sentiment is that officers have to be smart and realistic about their public relations effort. “I mean, holding a feed or a barbeque in the middle of the hood with a bunch of cops is not going to do it,” one officer said.

The media also need to be invited to officer training so they can be better educated about police work, officers said.

A white female officer said about the media: “Maybe if they gave as much attention to the positive things that we do that would be a start. It takes one bad incident to wipe out all good things that go on.”
President Trump made his debut at the United Nations on Tuesday, addressing the U.N. General Assembly at its annual opening. Afterward, media headlines and news coverage of the speech focused on Trump’s absurd (but admittedly amusing) new nickname for Kim Jong Un, “Rocket Man,” and his threat that the United States is willing to “totally destroy” North Korea to protect itself and its allies.

The mainstream media, liberal elites, and the international community have been doing a lot of handwringing about Trump’s rhetoric and his talk of going it alone. They also had a lot to say about his comments concerning the Iran nuclear deal, whose dissolution the president has long desired.

Although the focus was on Trump’s supposedly dangerous isolationism and nationalism, what’s really upsetting them is that he dared to say what no one is supposed to say: that the U.N. is broken and that it is unrealistic and dangerous to have a world without borders and without national sovereignty. In other words, Trump violated the Emperor Has No Clothes rule.

The Importance of Governments Serving Their People

One of the major themes of Trump’s U.N. speech was national sovereignty, both of the United States and of foreign countries: “Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens, to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. As president of the United States, I will always put America first. Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always and should always put your countries first.”

Although the international community gives lip service to the idea of national sovereignty and the U.N.’s role in defending it, this concept fundamentally conflicts with the liberal belief that the world should be progressing toward a kind of borderless global nationalism, in which no one country can claim superiority over another. That’s the real reason Trump was so roundly criticized for saying that he’s willing to go it alone on North Korea.

Trump also dared to praise America for its enduring legacy as a free democracy. His speech was devoid of the kind of America-bashing that President Obama was fond of, especially in front of international audiences. Instead, Trump asserted that the United States should “shine as an example for everyone to watch,” which indeed it should. He also praised the 230th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution as the “foundation of peace, prosperity, and freedom” for Americans and millions around the world who have embraced it as a model of good government.

No doubt, this kind of talk disturbs the American Left and international bureaucracies, both of which have grown comfortable with the idea that American exceptionalism is a myth based on an ugly and misguided sense of supremacy and pseudo-colonialism. This goes hand-in-hand with “nationalism” becoming a dirty word that can only be interpreted as a form of fascism. Thus it has become bigoted to desire defensible borders, whether here in the United States or in Europe, and the idea of loving one’s country is now a touchy and uncomfortable subject, something Trump specifically brought up at the end of his speech.

The international community has believed in a sort of fictional world since the end of World War II, in which national sovereignty was to be ceded in exchange for peace on earth. Except no one really defined whose peace. Neither did they consider that different countries have different ambitions, not to mention different values that are sometimes irreconcilable. There can never be a utopic one-world order because countries are made up of people, and people have ambition, vice, and self-interest. The best that any world order can do is contain these impulses; it can never eradicate them.

Since the U.N.’s founding in 1945, we’ve seen that China and Russia, as permanent members on the U.N. Security Council, have repeatedly and consistently vetoed efforts by the council to take action against rogue members or intervene effectively in genocidal conflicts (like the Syrian civil war). Everyone knows this, yet no one dares to say it for fear it will expose the U.N. for the failure that it is.

In light of these problems, Trump stated that he would work outside the U.N. if it became necessary, if the United States and its allies continue to be threatened by North Korea and the body doesn’t do more to prevent that. That makes sense. It’s absurd to defer to an international body that, with the exception of the first Gulf War, has never resolved a foreign conflict and is not now taking the necessary steps to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Trump called out the rogue regimes represented at the U.N. and “have hijacked the very systems that are supposed to advance them.” He pointed specifically to the countries that sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council that have terrible human rights records themselves, like Cuba and Saudi Arabia. He also criticized the U.N. for delays and stagnation in resolving conflicts as a result of “bureaucracy and process.”

Trump Also Condoned International Cooperation

Although his speech promoted American values and interests, and contained a healthy dose of criticism for the U.N., Trump’s speech wasn’t a total rejection of the U.N. or the international community.

Trump called for member states to work together to help protect the sovereignty of other nations, like Ukraine, and protect the international shipping lanes in the South China Sea. He praised the mission of the U.N., urging that we “must work together and confront together those who threatens us with chaos, turmoil, and terror,” and calling for “all nations to work together to isolate the Kim regime.” He said that although the United States is ready to act unilaterally, he hoped that wouldn’t become necessary because he held out hope that the U.N. would step up and function as it was intended.

Rather than slamming the very existence of the U.N. or threatening to leave (as he has done with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), Trump praised the founding of the international body, calling it a pillar of “peace, security, and prosperity.” He urged the U.N. to make a collective effort to improve, in the hope that one day it would more accountable and be able to effectively advocate for “human dignity and freedom around the world.” That doesn’t sound like the words of an isolationist to me.

Trump’s message was not a black and white case of promoting isolationism and denigrating internationalism. After all, he said plainly, “As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else, but in fulfilling our obligations to our nations, we also realize that it’s in everyone’s interests to seek the future where all nations can be sovereign, prosperous, and secure.” He sees the need for both, or so it seems.

Despite Trump’s efforts to make a generous nod to the U.N., notwithstanding all the failings he pointed out, half the country (and much of the world) only heard what it wanted to hear—the speech of a dangerous isolationist who threatened to attack North Korea. That way, they don’t have to talk about the real meat of the speech, which shined a spotlight on the manifest and longstanding failures of the U.N.
“Retired” actress Amanda Bynes is quickly gaining on Lindsay Lohan for the coveted title of most troubled former child star.

While Lohan has your run-of-the-mill substance abuse issues, the former Nickelodeon star has been reportedly been wreaking havoc in New York City during a spree of bizarre behavior.

Over the weekend, Bynes reportedly went to an adult gymnastics class in New York City and “showed up in fishnets and a leotard that looked like lingerie,” Page Six reports.

Bynes was allegedly “muttering to herself” and then “burst into tears when she attempted a cartwheel and her dark-colored wig fell off.”

“She immediately started acting strangely,” a “source” told Page Six. “She lined up with the other gymnasts, and each took their turn to perform a roll. But Amanda just walked out on the mat, was spinning around in circles and mumbling to herself.”

Bynes was then asked to leave the class and was reportedly escorted out.

The incident is similar to the time she was allegedly asked to leave a spinning class after she took off her shirt — revealing nothing but a black bra — and began applying make-up in the gym mirror.

Bynes tweeted last week that she was planning on suing some gossip sites and magazines for claiming she had mental health issues.

She cleared that up by posting that she doesn’t have mental health issues, but that she just “has an eating disorder.”

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If sports columns were posted on bulletin boards in town squares instead of the internet, folks would be gathered around Ailene Voisin's Bee column with jaws slung low and "what the Frahms" ringing out regularly. It's a gem. Holy cow, it's a gem.

First, Voisin's sources -- which on first glance look like either the Maloofs or close confidants of the Maloofs -- say that the family will accept a matched bid from Sacramento. In fact,

On Thursday, sources close to the Maloofs said that if the Sacramento group submits a matching offer that satisfies the league's other owners, they will embrace an outcome that keeps the Kings in Sacramento.

And

"We're giving Sacramento every opportunity to keep the team," one source said Thursday, "but they keep blowing every deadline. We haven't seen anything in writing."

That's good news, I guess? But here's the really fun news.

The Maloofs have met with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and have for months looked into buying a hockey franchise, with Las Vegas among the possible destinations. Their interests also have expanded and included opportunities in Major League Baseball.

I can envision David Stern running over to Gary Bettman during the annual Sports Commissioners Summit (totally a real thing don't try to convince me otherwise) and saying, "Tag, you're it." (And lord, can you imagine if the Maloofs sold the Kings to the Sacramento group and then successfully bought the Coyotes and moved them to Vegas, blocking Seattle's bid for an NHL team!)

MALOOFED, indeed.

This whole saga has entered the Twilight Zone. Thanks for sending us there, Ailene.
BY: Follow @LizWFB

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a system that can predict the "psychological status" of users with smartphones and hope to private companies to bring the invention to the market.

The technology appeared on a list of NIH inventions published in the Federal Register that are now available to be licensed by private companies. The government allows companies to license inventions resulting from federal research in order to expedite their arrival on the marketplace.

The system uses smartphones to ask people how they are doing mentally during the day and based on the results can "deliver an automated intervention" if necessary.

"The NIH inventors have developed a mobile health technology to monitor and predict a user's psychological status and to deliver an automated intervention when needed," according to the notice published Wednesday. "The technology uses smartphones to monitor the user's location and ask questions about psychological status throughout the day."

"Continuously collected ambulatory psychological data are fused with data on location and responses to questions," the NIH said. "The mobile data are combined with geospatial risk maps to quantify exposure to risk and predict a future psychological state. The future predictions are used to warn the user when he or she is at especially high risk of experiencing a negative event that might lead to an unwanted outcome (e.g., lapse to drug use in a recovering addict)."

The NIH said the technology has potential commercial applications for "real-time behavior monitoring" and "therapeutic delivery of an intervention via a mobile device."

Researchers developed the system from a project that tracked the mood and cravings of drug users in Baltimore. The $8.9 million federal study sought to develop algorithms that could "automatically detect behavioral events (such as episodes of drug use or stress) without requiring self-report."

The NIH said the app is currently being used for drug addiction interventions, but that the "inventors are also seeking to test the technology for other health applications."

Request for comment from the NIH was not returned by press time.
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A nationwide warrant has been issued for a Minnesota couple who allegedly received more than $167,000 worth of public assistance from Minnesota while living in Florida on a $1.2 million yacht.

“I’ve never ridden on a yacht that nice, and I bet most of us haven’t, but they were living on it while they were collecting public assistance,” said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman.

Colin Chisholm III and Andrea Chisholm are charged with a one count of wrongfully obtaining public assistance more than $35,000, a felony charge.

According to Hennepin County Attorney’s office, between Jan. 1, 2005, and May 31, 2012, Colin Chisholm III, 62, and Andrea Chisholm, 54, received the public assistance illegally from several government programs designed to help the poor.

According to the criminal complaints, over the years, the Chisholms received medical assistance, welfare payments and food stamp benefits. They also lied about where they were living, who they were living with and their source of income on more than a dozen forms they filled out for the state of Minnesota and Hennepin County in order to get the assistance.

During an investigation by the Hennepin County Human Services & Public Health Department (HSPHD) Fraud Unit, it was discovered that Colin Chisholm owned a business and Andrea Chisholm owned a dog kennel which bred and sold championship dogs. The criminal complaints show that hundreds of thousands of dollars came through the business accounts Colin Chisholm III controlled as chief executive officer of the TCN Network, which claims to provide satellite TV and broadband service for countries in the Caribbean.

“He created all sorts of false companies, claimed he was a Scottish heir,” Freeman said. “It’s outrageous.”

When they first applied for welfare benefits, the couple listed their residence as Andrea’s mother’s home in Minneapolis. However, shortly after getting approved, they moved to Florida. They remained in that state for at least 28 months, first on their $1.2 million yacht, and then moving to a house, officials said. They collected welfare from Florida, as well as Minnesota during that time, which people are prohibited from receiving simultaneously.

Furthermore, in depositions for a civil suit over the ownership of the yacht, Colin and Andrea testified that they lived in Connecticut and Florida, and never mentioned Minnesota. During this time, neither the yacht or residences in Florida were reported to Minnesota officials.

In 2006 and January 2007, Andrea’s prenatal care was paid for by the state and their welfare benefits increased.

According to the Hennepin County Attorney’s office, the Chisholms returned to Minnesota in April 2007 and applied for more welfare benefits.

The couple continued to receive assistance when they moved into a luxury home in Deephaven, Minn., with Andrea’s grandparents, Eloise and Francis Heidecker, in March 2008. They moved into another home in Deephaven on Lake Minnetonka after being evicted from the first home when Francis died, officials said.

During this time, the Chisholms hid the fact that they lived with Eloise Heidecker, as Andrea controlled the bank accounts of her elderly grandmother.

“It astonishes me, I had no idea this could ever really happen,” said Calleigh King, a neighbor of the Chisholms. “They’ve just been the kindest people ever.”

After the HSPHD fraud unit received a report that the Chisholms were employed and they failed to provide tax documents when asked, Hennepin County terminated all welfare benefits to the Chisholms at the end of March 2012. Medical assistance was cut off at the end of May 2012.

“It is truly outrageous when persons of considerable means steal from the government and all of us taxpayers through abusing the social welfare system,” Freeman said.

Prosecutors will ask that the judge be allowed to impose a longer sentence than the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines call for because the Chisholms committed a major economic offense.
The connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century. There remains some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores reflect environmental factors as opposed to genetic ones, as well as to the definitions of what "race" and "intelligence" are, and whether they can be objectively defined. Currently, there is no non-circumstantial evidence that these differences in test scores have a genetic component, although some researchers believe that the existing circumstantial evidence makes it at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found.

The first test showing differences in IQ test results between different population groups in the US was the tests of United States Army recruits in World War I. In the 1920s groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that this demonstrated that African-Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon whites due to innate biological differences, using this as an argument for policies of racial segregation. Soon, other studies appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing instead that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for the environmental factors such as socio-economic and educational inequality between blacks and whites.

The debate reemerged again in 1969, when Arthur Jensen championed the view that for genetic reasons Africans were less intelligent than whites and that compensatory education for African-American children was therefore doomed to be ineffective. In 1994, the book The Bell Curve argued that social inequality in the United States could largely be explained as a result of IQ differences between races and individuals, and rekindled the public and scholarly debate with renewed force. During the debates following the book's publication, the American Anthropological Association and the American Psychological Association (APA) published official statements regarding the issue, both highly skeptical of some of the book's claims, although the APA report called for more empirical research on the issue.

History of the debate

Claims of races having different intelligence were used to justify colonialism, slavery, racism, social Darwinism, and racial eugenics. Racial thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau relied crucially on the assumption that black people were innately inferior to whites in developing their ideologies of white supremacy. Even enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, believed blacks to be innately inferior to whites in physique and intellect.

Early IQ testing

The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children. Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently. Binet's test was translated into English and revised in 1916 by Lewis Terman (who introduced IQ scoring for the test results) and published under the name the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales. As Terman's test was published, there was great concern in the United States about the abilities and skills of recent immigrants. Different immigrant nationalities were sometimes thought to belong to different races, such as Slavs. A different set of tests developed by Robert Yerkes were used to evaluate draftees for World War I, and researchers found that people from southern and eastern Europe scored lower than native-born Americans, that Americans from northern states had higher scores than Americans from southern states, and that black Americans scored lower than white Americans. The results were widely publicized by a lobby of anti-immigration activists, including the New York patrician and conservationist Madison Grant, who considered the Nordic race to be superior, but under threat of immigration by inferior breeds. In his influential work A Study of American Intelligence psychologist Carl Brigham used the results of the Army tests to argue for a stricter immigration policy, limiting immigration to countries considered to belong to the "nordic race".

In the 1920s, states like Virginia enacted eugenic laws, such as its 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which established the one-drop rule as law. On the other hand, many scientists reacted to eugenicist claims linking abilities and moral character to racial or genetic ancestry. They pointed to the contribution of environment to test results (such as speaking English as a second language). By the mid-1930s, many United States psychologists adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role in IQ test results, among them Carl Brigham who repudiated his own previous arguments, on the grounds that he realized that the tests were not a measure of innate intelligence. Discussion of the issue in the United States also influenced German Nazi claims of the "nordics" being a "master race", influenced by Grant's writings. As the American public sentiment shifted against the Germans, claims of racial differences in intelligence increasingly came to be regarded as problematic.[7] Anthropologists such as Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, did much to demonstrate the unscientific status of many of the claims about racial hierarchies of intelligence. Nonetheless a powerful eugenics and segregation lobby funded largely by textile-magnate Wickliffe Draper, continued to publicize studies using intelligence studies as an argument for eugenics, segregation, and anti-immigration legislation.

The Jensenism debates

As the de-segregation of the American South was begun in the 1950s the debate about black intelligence resurfaced. Audrey Shuey, funded by Draper's Pioneer Fund, published a new analysis of Yerkes' tests, concluding that blacks really were of inferior intellect to whites. This study was used by segregationists as an argument that it was to the advantage of black children to be educated separately from the superior white children. In the 1960s, the debate was further revived when William Shockley publicly defended the argument that black children were innately unable to learn as well as white children. Arthur Jensen stimulated scholarly discussion of the issue with his Harvard Educational Review article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"[14] Jensen's article questioned remedial education for African-American children; he suggested their poor educational performance reflected an underlying genetic cause rather than lack of stimulation at home. Jensen continued to publish on the issue until his death in 2012.

The Bell Curve debate

Another revival of public debate followed the appearance of The Bell Curve (1994), a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who strongly emphasized the societal effects of low IQ (focusing in most chapters strictly on the non-Hispanic white population of the United States). In 1994, a group of 52 researchers (mostly psychologists) signed an editorial statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" in response to the book. The Bell Curve also led to a 1995 report from the American Psychological Association, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", acknowledging a difference between mean IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic. The Bell Curve prompted the publication of several multiple-author books responding from a variety of points of view.[17][18] They include The Bell Curve Debate (1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996) and a second edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996) by Stephen Jay Gould.[18] Jensen's last book-length publication, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability was published a few years later in 1998.

The review article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" by Rushton and Jensen was published in 2005. The article was followed by a series of responses, some in support, some critical.[7][20] Richard Nisbett, another psychologist who had also commented at the time, later included an amplified version of his critique as part of the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009).[21] Rushton and Jensen in 2010 made a point-by-point reply to this thereafter.[22] A comprehensive review article on the issue was published in the journal American Psychologist in 2012.

Some of the authors proposing genetic explanations for group differences have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, which was headed by Rushton until his death in 2012.[18][26] The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals. Other researchers have criticized the Pioneer Fund for promoting scientific racism, eugenics and white supremacy.[28][29][30]

Validity of race and IQ

Intelligence, IQ, g and IQ tests

The concept of intelligence and the degree to which intelligence is measurable is a matter of debate. While there is some consensus about how to define intelligence, it is not universally accepted that it is something that can be unequivocally measured by a single figure.[31] A recurring criticism is that different societies value and promote different kinds of skills and that the concept of intelligence is therefore culturally variable and cannot be measured by the same criteria in different societies.[31] Consequently, some critics argue that proposed relationships to other variables are necessarily tentative.[32]

In relation to the study of racial differences in IQ test scores it becomes a crucial question what exactly it is that IQ tests measure. Arthur Jensen was a proponent of the view that there is a correlation between scores on all the known types of IQ tests and that this correlation points to an underlying factor of general intelligence, or g. In most conceptions of g it is considered to be fairly fixed in a given individual and unresponsive to training or other environmental influences. In this view test score differences, especially in those tasks considered to be particularly "g-loaded" reflect the test takers innate capability. Other psychometricians argue that, while there may or may not be a general intelligence factor, performance on tests rely crucially on knowledge acquired through prior exposure to the types of tasks that such tests contain. This view would mean that tests cannot be expected to reflect only the innate abilities of a given individual, because the expression of potential will always be mediated by experience and cognitive habits. It also means that comparison of test scores from persons with widely different life experiences and cognitive habits is not an expression of their relative innate potentials.

Race

The majority of anthropologists today consider race to be a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one, a view supported by considerable genetics research.[36] The current mainstream view in the social sciences and biology is that race is a social construction based on folk ideologies that construct groups based on social disparities and superficial physical characteristics.[37] Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) state, "Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It derives from people's desire to classify."[32] The concept of human "races" as natural and separate divisions within the human species has also been rejected by the American Anthropological Association. The official position of the AAA, adopted in 1998, is that advances in scientific knowledge have made it "clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups" and that "any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective."[38]

Race in studies of human intelligence is almost always determined using self-reports, rather than based on analyses of the genetic characteristics of the tested individuals. According to psychologist David Rowe, self-report is the preferred method for racial classification in studies of racial differences because classification based on genetic markers alone ignore the "cultural, behavioral, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological variables" that distinguish racial groups.[39] Hunt and Carlson write that "Nevertheless, self-identification is a surprisingly reliable guide to genetic composition. Tang et al. (2005) applied mathematical clustering techniques to sort genomic markers for over 3,600 people in the United States and Taiwan into four groups. There was almost perfect agreement between cluster assignment and individuals' self-reports of racial/ethnic identification as white, black, East Asian, or Latino."[40] Sternberg and Grigorenko disagree with Hunt and Carlson's interpretation of Tang, "Tang et al.'s point was that ancient geographic ancestry rather than current residence is associated with self-identification and not that such self-identification provides evidence for the existence of biological race."[41]

Anthropologist C. Loring Brace[42] and geneticist Joseph Graves disagree with the idea that cluster analysis and the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry support biological race.[43] They argue that while it is possible to find biological and genetic variation corresponding roughly to the groupings normally defined as races, this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental; if one had chosen other sampling patterns, the clusters would be different. Kaplan 2011 therefore concludes that, while differences in particular allele frequencies can be used to identify populations that loosely correspond to the racial categories common in Western social discourse, the differences are of no more biological significance than the differences found between any human populations (e.g., the Spanish and Portuguese).

Earl B. Hunt agrees that racial categories are defined by social conventions, though he points out that they also correlate with clusters of both genetic traits and cultural traits. Hunt explains that, due to this, racial IQ differences are caused by these variables that correlate with race, and race itself is rarely a causal variable. Researchers who study racial disparities in test scores are studying the relationship between the scores and the many race-related factors which could potentially affect performance. These factors include health, wealth, biological differences, and education.[44]

Group differences

The study of human intelligence is one of the most controversial topics in psychology. It remains unclear whether group differences in intelligence test scores are caused by heritable factors or by "other correlated demographic variables such as socioeconomic status, education level, and motivation."[45] Hunt and Carlson outlined four contemporary positions on differences in IQ based on race or ethnicity. The first is that these reflect real differences in average group intelligence, which is caused by a combination of environmental factors and heritable differences in brain function. A second position is that differences in average cognitive ability between races are caused entirely by social and/or environmental factors. A third position holds that differences in average cognitive ability between races do not exist, and that the differences in average test scores are the result of inappropriate use of the tests themselves. Finally, a fourth position is that either or both of the concepts of race and general intelligence are poorly constructed and therefore any comparisons between races are meaningless.[40]

United States test scores

In the United States, individuals identifying themselves as East Asian tend to have higher average IQ scores than do Caucasians, who, in turn, have higher average IQs than African Americans. Nevertheless, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them.[46]

Rushton & Jensen (2005) wrote that, in the United States, self-identified blacks and whites have been the subjects of the greatest number of studies. They stated that the black-white IQ difference is about 15 to 18 points or 1 to 1.1 standard deviations (SDs), which implies that between 11 and 16 percent of the black population have an IQ above 100 (the general population median). According to Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton the black-white IQ difference is largest on those components of IQ tests that are claimed best to represent the general intelligence factor g.[47] The 1996 APA report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" and the 1994 editorial statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" gave more or less similar estimates.[48][49] Roth et al. (2001), in a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).[50]

East Asians have tended to score relatively higher on visuospatial subtests with lower scores in verbal subtests while Ashkenazi Jews score higher in verbal subtests with lower scores in visuospatial subtests. The few Amerindian populations who have been systematically tested, including Arctic Natives, tend to score worse on average than white populations but better on average than black populations.[50]

The racial groups studied in the United States and Europe are not necessarily representative samples for populations in other parts of the world. Cultural differences may also factor in IQ test performance and outcomes. Therefore, results in the United States and Europe do not necessarily correlate to results in other populations.[51]

Global variation of IQ scores

A number of studies have compared average IQ scores between the world's nations, finding patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their genetic composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries. Lynn and Vanhanen's studies have been severely criticized for relying on low quality data and for choosing sources in ways that seem to be biased severely towards underestimating the average IQ potential of developing nations, particularly in Africa.[55] Nonetheless there is a general consensus that the average IQ in developing countries is lower than in developed countries, but subsequent research has favored environmental explanations for this fact, such as lack of basic infrastructure related to health and education.

In the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and IQ and Global Inequality in 2006, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen created estimates of average IQs for 113 nations. They estimated IQs of 79 other nations based on neighboring nations or via other means. They saw a consistent correlation between national development and national IQ averages. They found the highest national IQs among Western and East Asian developed nations and the lowest national IQs in the world's least developed nations among the indigenous peoples in the regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.[56] In a meta-analysis of studies of IQ estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa, Wicherts, Dolan & van der Maas (2009, p. 10) concluded that Lynn and Vanhanen had relied on unsystematic methodology by failing to publish their criteria for including or excluding studies. They found that Lynn and Vanhanen's exclusion of studies had depressed their IQ estimate for sub-Saharan Africa, and that including studies excluded in "IQ and Global Inequality" resulted in average IQ of 82 for sub-Saharan Africa, lower than the average in Western countries, but higher than Lynn and Vanhanen's estimate of 67. Wicherts at al. conclude that this difference is likely due to sub-Saharan Africa having limited access to modern advances in education, nutrition and health care.

A 2010 systematic review by the same research team, along with Jerry S. Carlson, found that compared to American norms, the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans was about 80. The same review concluded that the Flynn effect had not yet taken hold in sub-Saharan Africa.

A 2007 meta-analysis by Rindermann found many of the same groupings and correlations found by Lynn and Vanhanen, with the lowest scores in sub-Saharan Africa, and a correlation of .60 between cognitive skill and GDP per capita. Hunt (2010, pp. 437–439) considers Rindermann's analysis to be much more reliable than Lynn and Vanhanen's. By measuring the relationship between educational data and social wellbeing over time, this study also performed a causal analysis, finding that when nations invest in education this leads to increased well-being later on. Kamin (2006) has also criticized Lynn and Vanhanen's work on the IQs of sub-Saharan Africans.

Wicherts, Borsboom & Dolan (2010) argue that studies reporting support for evolutionary theories of intelligence based on national IQ data suffer from multiple fatal methodological flaws. For example, they state that such studies "...assume that the Flynn Effect is either nonexistent or invariant with respect to different regions of the world, that there have been no migrations and climatic changes over the course of evolution, and that there have been no trends over the last century in indicators of reproductive strategies (e.g., declines in fertility and infant mortality)." They also showed that a strong degree of confounding exists between national IQs and current national development status.

Similarly, Pesta & Poznanski (2014) showed that the average temperature of a given U.S. state is strongly associated with that state's average IQ and other well-being variables, despite the fact that evolution has not had enough time to operate on non-Native American residents of the United States. They also noted that this association persisted even after controlling for race, and concluded that "Evolution is therefore not necessary for temperature and IQ/well-being to co-vary meaningfully across geographic space."

Flynn effect and the closing gap

For the past century raw scores on IQ tests have been rising; this score increase is known as the "Flynn effect", named after James R. Flynn. In the United States, the increase was continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to about 1998 when the gains stopped and some tests even showed decreasing test scores. For example, in the United States the average scores of blacks on some IQ tests in 1995 were the same as the scores of whites in 1945.[63] As one pair of academics phrased it, "the typical African American today probably has a slightly higher IQ than the grandparents of today's average white American."[64]

Flynn has argued that given that these changes take place between one generation and the next it is highly unlikely that genetic factors could account for the increasing scores, which must then be caused by environmental factors. The Flynn Effect has often been used as an argument that the racial gap in IQ test scores must be environmental too, but this is not generally agreed – others have asserted that the two may have entirely different causes. A meta-analysis by Te Nijenhuis and van der Flier (2013) concluded that the Flynn effect and group differences in intelligence were likely to have different causes. They stated that the Flynn effect is caused primarily by environmental factors and that it's unlikely these same environmental factors play an important role in explaining group differences in IQ.[65] The importance of the Flynn effect in the debate over the causes for the IQ gap lies in demonstrating that environmental factors may cause changes in test scores on the scale of 1 SD. This had previously been doubted.

A separate phenomenon from the Flynn effect has been the discovery that the IQ gap has been gradually closing over the last decades of the 20th century, as black test-takers increased their average scores relative to white test-takers. For instance, Vincent reported in 1991 that the black-white IQ gap was decreasing among children, but that it was remaining constant among adults. Similarly, a 2006 study by Dickens and Flynn estimated that the difference between mean scores of blacks and whites closed by about 5 or 6 IQ points between 1972 and 2002, a reduction of about one-third. In the same period, the educational achievement disparity also diminished.[68] However, this was challenged by Rushton & Jensen who claim the difference remains stable. In a 2006 study, Murray agreed with Dickens and Flynn that there has been a narrowing of the difference; "Dickens' and Flynn's estimate of 3–6 IQ points from a base of about 16–18 points is a useful, though provisional, starting point". But he argued that this has stalled and that there has been no further narrowing for people born after the late 1970s. A subsequent study by Murray, based on the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, estimated that the black-white IQ difference decreased by about one-half of one standard deviation from those born in the 1920s to those born in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Recent reviews by Flynn and Dickens (2006), Mackintosh (2011), and Nisbett et al. 2012 accept the gradual closing of the gap as a fact. In his review of the historical trends, Hunt (2010, p. 411) states: "There is some variety in the results, but not a great deal. The African American means are about 1 standard deviation unit (15 points on the IQ scale) below the white means, and the Hispanic means fall in between."

Some studies reviewed by Hunt (2010, p. 418) found that rise in the average achievement of African Americans was caused by a reduction in the number of African American students in the lowest range of scores without a corresponding increase in the number of students in the highest ranges. A 2012 review of the literature found that the IQ gap had diminished by 0.33 standard deviations since first reported.

A 2013 analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that from 1971 to 2008, the size of the black–white IQ gap in the United States decreased from 16.33 to 9.94 IQ points. It has also concluded however that, while IQ means are continuing to rise in all ethnic groups, this growth is occurring more slowly among 17-year-old students than among younger students and the black-white IQ gap is no longer narrowing. As of 2008, a study published in 2013 by Heiner Rindermann, Stefan Pinchelmann, and James Thompson have estimated the IQ means of 17-year-old black, white, and Hispanic students to range respectively from 90.45–94.15, 102.29–104.57 and 92.30–95.90 points. They explain that the gap may persist due to the crack epidemic, the degradation of African-American family structure, the rise of fraud in the educational system (especially with respect to No Child Left Behind), the decrease in unskilled real wages and employment among African-Americans due to globalization and minimum wage increases, differences in parental practices (such as breastfeeding or reading to children), and "environmental conditions shaped by [African-Americans] themselves." To resolve this, they ultimately recommend the reestablishment of "meritoric principles" and "blindly graded objective central exams," as opposed to "ethnically based policies," in education.[74]

Environmental influences on group differences in IQ

The following environmental factors are some of those suggested as explaining a portion of the differences in average IQ between races. These factors are not mutually exclusive with one another, and some may, in fact, contribute directly to others. Furthermore, the relationship between genetics and environmental factors may be complicated. For example, the differences in socioeconomic environment for a child may be due to differences in genetic IQ for the parents, and the differences in average brain size between races could be the result of nutritional factors. All recent reviews agree that some environmental factors that are unequally distributed between racial groups have been shown to affect intelligence in ways that could contribute to the test score gap. However, currently, the question is whether these factors can account for the entire gap between white and black test scores, or only part of it. One group of scholars, including Richard E. Nisbett, James R. Flynn, Joshua Aronson, Diane Halpern, William Dickens, Eric Turkheimer (2012) have argued that the environmental factors so far demonstrated are sufficient to account for the entire gap. Nicholas Mackintosh (2011) considers this a reasonable argument, but argues that probably it is impossible to ever know for sure; another group including Earl B. Hunt (2010), Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn have argued that this is impossible. Jensen and Rushton consider that it may account for as little as 20% of the gap. Meanwhile, while Hunt considers this a vast overstatement, he nonetheless considers it likely that some portion of the gap will eventually be shown to be caused by genetic factors.

Health and nutrition

at least 10 µg/dL. Black and Hispanic children have much higher levels than white children. A 10 µg/dL increase in blood lead at 24 months is associated with a 5.8-point decline in IQ.[76] Although the Geometric Mean Blood Lead Levels (GM BLL) are declining, a CDC report (2002) states that: "However, the GM BLL for non-Hispanic black children remains higher than that for Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white children, indicating that differences in risk for exposure still persist."[77] Percentage of children aged 1–5 with blood lead levels10 µg/dL. Black and Hispanic children have much higher levels than white children. A 10 µg/dL increase in blood lead at 24 months is associated with a 5.8-point decline in IQ.Although the Geometric Mean Blood Lead Levels (GM BLL) are declining, a CDC report (2002) states that: "However, the GM BLL for non-Hispanic black children remains higher than that for Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white children, indicating that differences in risk for exposure still persist."

Environmental factors including childhood lead exposure,[76] low rates of breast feeding,[78] and poor nutrition[79][80] can significantly affect cognitive development and functioning. For example, childhood exposure to lead, associated with homes in poorer areas[81] causes an average IQ drop of 7 points,[82] and iodine deficiency causes a fall, on average, of 12 IQ points.[83][84] Such impairments may sometimes be permanent, sometimes be partially or wholly compensated for by later growth. The first two years of life is the critical time for malnutrition, the consequences of which are often irreversible and include poor cognitive development, educability, and future economic productivity.[85] The African American population of the United States is statistically more likely to be exposed to many detrimental environmental factors such as poorer neighborhoods, schools, nutrition, and prenatal and postnatal health care.[86][87] Mackintosh points out that for American blacks infant mortality is about twice as high as for whites, and low birthweight is twice as prevalent. At the same time white mothers are twice as likely to breastfeed their infants, and breastfeeding is highly correlated with IQ for low birthweight infants. In this way a wide number of health related factors that influence IQ are unequally distributed between the two groups.

The Copenhagen consensus in 2004 stated that lack of both iodine and iron has been implicated in impaired brain development, and this can affect enormous numbers of people: it is estimated that one-third of the total global population are affected by iodine deficiency. In developing countries, it is estimated that 40% of children aged four and under suffer from anaemia because of insufficient iron in their diets.[89]

Other scholars have found that simply the standard of nutrition has a significant effect on population intelligence, and that the Flynn effect may be caused by increasing nutrition standards across the world.[90] James Flynn has himself argued against this view.[91]

Some recent research has argued that the retardation caused in brain development by infectious diseases, many of which are more prevalent in non-white populations, may be an important factor in explaining the differences in IQ between different regions of the world.[92] The findings of this research, showing the correlation between IQ, race and infectious diseases was also shown to apply to the IQ gap in the US, suggesting that this may be an important environmental factor.[93]

A 2013 meta-analysis by the World Health Organization found that, after controlling for maternal IQ, breastfeeding was associated with IQ gains of 2.19 points. The authors suggest that this relationship is causal but state that the practical significance of this gain is debatable; however, they highlight one study suggesting an association between breastfeeding and academic performance in Brazil, where "breastfeeding duration does not present marked variability by socioeconomic position."[94] Colen and Ramey (2014) similarly find that controlling for sibling comparisons within families, rather than between families, reduces the correlation between breastfeeding status and WISC IQ scores by nearly a third, but further find the relationship between breastfeeding duration and WISC IQ scores to be insignificant. They suggest that "much of the beneficial long-term effects typically attributed to breastfeeding, per say, may primarily be due to selection pressures into infant feeding practices along key demographic characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status."[95] Reichman estimates that no more than 3 to 4% of the black-white IQ gap can be explained by black-white disparities in low birth weight.[96]

Education

Several studies have proposed that a large part of the gap can be attributed to differences in quality of education.[97] Racial discrimination in education has been proposed as one possible cause of differences in educational quality between races.[98] According to a paper by Hala Elhoweris, Kagendo Mutua, Negmeldin Alsheikh and Pauline Holloway, teachers' referral decisions for students to participate in gifted and talented educational programs were influenced in part by the students' ethnicity.[99]

The Abecedarian Early Intervention Project, an intensive early childhood education project, was also able to bring about an average IQ gain of 4.4 points at age 21 in the black children who participated in it compared to controls.[78] Arthur Jensen agreed that the Abecedarian project demonstrates that education can have a significant effect on IQ, but also said that no educational program thus far has been able to reduce the black-white IQ gap by more than a third, and that differences in education are thus unlikely to be its only cause.[100]

Rushton and Jensen argue that long-term follow-up of the Head Start Program found large immediate gains for blacks and whites but that these were quickly lost for the blacks although some remained for whites. They argue that also other more intensive and prolonged educational interventions have not produced lasting effects on IQ or scholastic performance.[47] Nisbett argues that they ignore studies such as Campbell & Ramey (1994) which found that at the age 12, 87% of black infants exposed to an intervention had IQs in the normal range (above 85) compared to 56% of controls, and none of the intervention-exposed children were mildly retarded compared to 7% of controls. Other early intervention programs have shown IQ effects in the range of 4–5 points, which are sustained until at least age 8–15. Effects on academic achievement can also be substantial. Nisbett also argues that not only early age intervention can be effective, citing other successful intervention studies from infancy to college.[101]

A series of studies by Joseph Fagan and Cynthia Holland measured the effect of prior exposure to the kind of cognitive tasks posed in IQ tests on test performance. Assuming that the IQ gap was the result of lower exposure to tasks using the cognitive functions usually found in IQ tests among African American test takes, they prepared a group of African Americans in this type of tasks before taking an IQ test. The researchers found that there was no subsequent difference in performance between the African-Americans and white test takers.[102][103] Daley and Onwuegbuzie conclude that Fagan and Holland demonstrate that "differences in knowledge between blacks and whites for intelligence test items can be erased when equal opportunity is provided for exposure to the information to be tested". A similar argument is made by David Marks who argues that IQ differences correlate well with differences in literacy suggesting that developing literacy skills through education causes an increase in IQ test performance.[105][106]

A 2003 study found that two variables — stereotype threat and the degree of educational attainment of children's fathers — partially explained the black-white gap in cognitive ability test scores, undermining the hereditarian view that they stemmed from immutable genetic factors.[107]

Socioeconomic environment

Different aspects of the socioeconomic environment in which children are raised have been shown to correlate with part of the IQ gap, but they do not account for the entire gap. According to a 2006 review, these factors account for slightly less than half of one standard deviation of the gap.[109] Generally the difference between mean test scores of blacks and whites is not eliminated when individuals and groups are matched on socioeconomic status (SES), suggesting that the relationship between IQ and SES is not simply one in which SES determines IQ. Rather it may be the case that differences in intelligence, particularly parental intelligence, may also cause differences in SES, making separating the two factors difficult.[48] Hunt (2010, p. 428) summarises data[clarification needed] showing that, jointly, SES and parental IQ account for the full gap (in populations of young children, after controlling parental IQ and parental SES, the gap is not statistically different from zero). He argues the SES-linked components reflect parental occupation status, mother's verbal comprehension score and parent-child interaction quality. Hunt also reviews data showing that the correlation between home environment and IQ becomes weaker with age.[citation needed] Hart and Risley argue that in welfare, working-class, and professional families, children hear a large disparity in the amount of language (between 13 million and 45 million words) in the age range of 0–3, and that by age 9 these differences led to large differences in child outcomes.[110]

Other research has focussed on different causes of variation within low SES and high SES groups.[111][112][113] In the US, among low-SES groups, genetic differences account for a smaller proportion variance in IQ than among higher SES populations.[114] Such effects are predicted by the bioecological hypothesis – that genotypes are transformed into phenotypes through nonadditive synergistic effects of the environment.[115] Nisbett et al. (2012) suggest that high SES individuals are more likely to be able to develop their full biological potential, whereas low SES individuals are likely to be hindered in their development by adverse environmental conditions. The same review also points out that adoption studies generally are biased towards including only high and high middle SES adoptive families, meaning that they will tend to overestimate average genetic effects. They also note that studies of adoption from lower-class homes to middle-class homes have shown that such children experience a 12–18 pt gain in IQ relative to children who remain in low SES homes. A 2015 study found that environmental factors (namely, family income, maternal education, maternal verbal ability/knowledge, learning materials in the home, parenting factors (maternal sensitivity, maternal warmth and acceptance, and safe physical environment), child birth order, and child birth weight) accounted for the black-white gap in cognitive ability test scores.

Test bias

A number of studies have reached the conclusion that IQ tests may be biased against certain groups.[117][118][119][120] The validity and reliability of IQ scores obtained from outside the United States and Europe have been questioned, in part because of the inherent difficulty of comparing IQ scores between cultures.[121][122] Several researchers have argued that cultural differences limit the appropriateness of standard IQ tests in non-industrialized communities.[123][124]

A 1996 report by the American Psychological Association states that intelligence can be difficult to compare across culture, and notes that differing familiarity with test materials can produce substantial difference in test results; it also says that tests are accurate predictors of future achievement for black and white Americans, and are in that sense unbiased.[48] The view that tests accurately predict future educational attainment is reinforced by Nicholas Mackintosh in his 1998 book IQ and Human Intelligence,[125] and by a 1999 literature review by Brown, Reynolds & Whitaker (1999).

James R. Flynn, surveying studies on the topic, notes that the weight and presence of many test questions depends on what sorts of information and modes of thinking are culturally-valued.[126]

Stereotype threat and minority status

Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies or by which one is defined; this fear may in turn lead to an impairment of performance.[127] Testing situations that highlight the fact that intelligence is being measured tend to lower the scores of individuals from racial-ethnic groups who already score lower on average or are expected to score lower. Stereotype threat conditions cause larger than expected IQ differences among groups.[128] Psychometrician Nicholas Mackintosh considers that there is little doubt that the effects of stereotype threat contribute to the IQ gap between blacks and whites.

A large number of studies have shown that systemically disadvantaged minorities, such as the African American minority of the United States generally perform worse in the educational system and in intelligence tests than the majority groups or less disadvantaged minorities such as immigrant or "voluntary" minorities.[48] The explanation of these findings may be that children of caste-like minorities, due to the systemic limitations of their prospects of social advancement, do not have "effort optimism", i.e. they do not have the confidence that acquiring the skills valued by majority society, such as those skills measured by IQ tests, is worthwhile. They may even deliberately reject certain behaviors that are seen as "acting white."

Research published in 1997 indicates that part of the black-white gap in cognitive ability test scores is due to racial differences in test motivation.[132]

Attempts to replicate studies evincing significant effects of stereotype threat however have not yielded the same results. In 2004 Sackett et al. found that eliminating stereotype threat does not eliminate the racial test performance gap, and in 2005 Tyson et al. found African Americans to have motivation similar to or even better than that of white Americans.[133][134] Self-affirmation exercises promoted by research scientists such as Geoffrey L. Cohen have not been shown to be effective by attempts to replicate his studies purporting them to be successful.[135] A 2015 meta-analysis conducted by Flore & Wicherts of studies on the relationship between gender and stereotype threat found the observed estimates to be inflated by publication bias, arguing the true effect to be most likely near zero.[136]

Research into the possible genetic influences on test score differences

Ongoing research aims to understand the contribution of genes to differences in intelligence. Currently there is no non-circumstantial evidence that the test score gap has a genetic component, although some researchers believe that the existing circumstantial evidence makes it plausible to believe that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually appear. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, are more important in explaining the racial IQ gap. Several lines of investigation have been followed in the attempt to ascertain whether there is a genetic component to the test score gap as well as its relative contribution to the magnitude of the gap.

Genetics of race and intelligence

Geneticist Alan R. Templeton argues that the question about the possible genetic effects on the test score gap is muddled by the general focus on "race" rather than on populations defined by gene frequency or by geographical proximity, and by the general insistence on phrasing the question in terms of heritability.[141] Templeton points out that racial groups neither represent sub-species nor distinct evolutionary lineages, and that therefore there is no basis for making claims about the general intelligence of races.[141] From this point of view the search for possible genetic influences on the black-white test score gap is a priori flawed, because there is no genetic material shared by all Africans or by all Europeans. Mackintosh (2011) points out that by using genetic cluster analysis to correlate gene frequencies with continental populations it could possibly be the case that African populations had a higher frequency of certain genetic variants that contribute to an average lower intelligence. Such a hypothetical situation could hold without all Africans carrying the same genes or belonging to a single Evolutionary lineage. According to Mackintosh, a biological basis for the gap thus cannot be ruled out on a priori grounds.

Intelligence is a polygenic trait. This means that intelligence is under the influence of several genes, possibly several thousand. The effect of most individual genetic variants on intelligence is thought to be very small, well below 1% of the variance in g. Current studies using quantitative trait loci have yielded little success in the search for genes influencing intelligence. Robert Plomin is confident that QTLs responsible for the variation in IQ scores exist, but due to their small effect sizes, more powerful tools of analysis will be required to detect them.[142] Others assert that no useful answers can be reasonably expected from such research before an understanding of the relation between DNA and human phenotypes emerges.[87] Several candidate genes have been proposed to have a relationship with intelligence.[143][144] However, a review of candidate genes for intelligence published in Deary, Johnson & Houlihan (2009) failed to find evidence of an association between these genes and general intelligence, stating "there is still almost no replicated evidence concerning the individual genes, which have variants that contribute to intelligence differences".[145] In 2001, a review in the Journal of Black Psychology refuted eight major premises on which the hereditarian view regarding race and intelligence is based.[146]

A 2005 literature review article by Sternberg, Grigorenko and Kidd stated that no gene has been shown to be linked to intelligence, "so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time". Hunt (2010, p. 447) and Mackintosh (2011, p. 344) concurred, both scholars noting that while several environmental factors have been shown to influence the IQ gap, the evidence for a genetic influence has been circumstantial, and according to Mackintosh negligible. Mackintosh however suggests that it may never become possible to account satisfyingly for the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors. The 2012 review by Nisbett et al. (2012) concluded that "Almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range". Hunt and several other researchers however maintain that genetic causes cannot be ruled out, and that new evidence may yet show a genetic contribution to the gap. Hunt concurs with Rushton and Jensen who considered the 100% environmental hypothesis to be impossible. Nonetheless, Nisbett and colleagues (2012) consider the entire IQ gap to be explained by the environmental factors that have thus far been demonstrated to influence it, and Mackintosh does not find this view to be unreasonable.

Heritability within and between groups

An environmental factor that varies between groups but not within groups can cause group differences in a trait that is otherwise 100 percent heritable

Twin studies of intelligence have reported high heritability values. However, these studies are based on questionable assumptions. When used in the context of human behavior genetics, the term "heritability" is highly misleading, as it does not convey any information about the relative importance of genetic or environmental factors on the development of a given trait, nor does it convey the extent to which that trait is genetically determined. Arguments in support of a genetic explanation of racial differences in IQ are sometimes fallacious. For instance, hereditarians have sometimes cited the failure of known environmental factors to account for such differences, or the high heritability of intelligence within races, as evidence that racial differences in IQ are genetic.[150]

Psychometricians have found that intelligence is substantially heritable within populations, with 30–50% of variance in IQ scores in early childhood being attributable to genetic factors in analyzed US populations, increasing to 75–80% by late adolescence.[48][145] In biology heritability is defined as the ratio of variation attributable to genetic differences in an observable trait to the trait's total observable variation. The heritability of a trait describes the proportion of variation in the trait that is attributable to genetic factors within a particular population. A heritability of 1 indicates that variation correlates fully with genetic variation and a heritability of 0 indicates that there is no correlation between the trait and genes at all. In psychological testing, heritability tends to be understood as the degree of correlation between the results of a test taker and those of their biological parents. However, since high heritability is simply a correlation between traits and genes, it does not describe the causes of heritability which in humans can be either genetic or environmental.

Therefore, a high heritability measure does not imply that a trait is genetic or unchangeable, however, as environmental factors that affect all group members equally will not be measured by heritability and the heritability of a trait may also change over time in response to changes in the distribution of genes and environmental factors.[48] High heritability also doesn't imply that all of the heritability is genetically determined, but can also be due to environmental differences that affect only a certain genetically defined group (indirect heritability).[151] The figure to the left demonstrates how heritability works. In both gardens the difference between tall and short cornstalks is 100% heritable as cornstalks that are genetically disposed for growing tall will become taller than those without this disposition, but the difference in height between the cornstalks to the left and those on the right is 100% environmental as it is due to different nutrients being supplied to the two gardens. Hence the causes of differences within a group and between groups may not be the same, even when looking at traits that are highly heritable.[151] In his criticism of the Bell Curve, Noam Chomsky further illustrated this with the example of women wearing earrings:

To borrow an example from Ned Block, "some years ago when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring was due to a chromosomal difference, XX vs. XY." No one has yet suggested that wearing earrings, or ties, is "in our genes," an inescapable fate that environment cannot influence, "dooming the liberal notion."[152]

In regards to the IQ gap the question becomes whether racial groups can be shown to be influenced by different environmental factors that may account for the observed differences between them. Jensen originally argued that given the high heritability of IQ the only way that the IQ gap could be explained as caused by the environment would be if it could be shown that all blacks were subject to a single "x-factor" which affected no white populations while affecting all black populations equally.[153] Jensen considered the existence of such an x-factor to be extremely improbable, but Flynn's discovery of the Flynn effect showed that in spite of high heritability environmental factors could cause considerable disparities in IQ between generations of the same population, showing that the existence of such an x-factor was not only possible but real.

Jensen has also argued that heritability of traits rises with age as the genetic potential of individuals becomes expressed. He sees this as related to the fact that the IQ gap between white and black test takers has been shown to appear gradually, with the gap widening as cohorts reach adulthood. This he sees as a further argument in favor of Spearman's hypothesis (see section below).

In contrast, Dickens and Flynn argued that the conventional interpretation ignores the role of feedback between factors, such as those with a small initial IQ advantage, genetic or environmental, seeking out more stimulating environments which will gradually greatly increase their advantage, which, as one consequence in their alternative model, would mean that the "heritability" figure is only in part due to direct effects of genotype on IQ.

Today researchers such as Hunt (2010), Nisbett et al. (2012) and Mackintosh (2011) consider that rather than a single factor accounting for the entire gap, probably many different environmental factors differ systematically between the environments of white and black people converge to create part of the gap and perhaps all of it. They argue that it does not make sense to talk about a single universal heritability figure for IQ, rather, they state, heritability of IQ varies between and within groups. They point specifically to studies showing a higher heritability of test scores in white and medium-high SES families, but considerably lower heritability for black and low-SES families. This they interpret to mean that children who grow up with limited resources do not get to develop their full genetic potential.

Multiple studies have been conducted over the past several decades to survey scientific estimates on the heritability of the IQ gap. A review by Snydermann and Rothman in 1988 found that 45% of the scientists they questioned believed the gap to be "a product of genetic and environmental variation," 15% and 1% respectively "entirely to environmental" and "genetic variation," while the remaining 38% either declined to answer or stated that the evidence was inconclusive.[158] The heritability of intelligence was estimated on average to be 59.6% for white Americans and 57.0% for black Americans among those who answered that the evidence was sufficiently conclusive.[159] The Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Linda Gottfredson in 1994, signed by 52 professors specializing in intelligence and allied fields, that estimated the heritability of individual variation to range between 40–80%, but also stating that "there is no definitive answer" to explain the racial gap.[160] Social psychologist Donald T. Campbell criticized the report, arguing that it overstated the plausibility of genetic explanations and underestimated the extent of environmental differences between races.[161] A 1995 report by the APA stated that there is more plausible evidence for an environmental than for a genetic explanation, but that there was "no adequate explanation" for the black-white IQ gap.[162][163] In a 2013 followup on Snyderman & Rothman, Rindermann et al. found the average and median estimates of the black-white IQ gap to be heritable by 47% and 50% respectively among surveyed scientists who believed that the available evidence allowed for a reasonable estimate. This survey however yielded a response rate of 18% (228 participants) compared to Snyderman & Rothman's 65% (661 participants).[164]

Spearman's hypothesis

Spearman's hypothesis states that the magnitude of the black-white difference in tests of cognitive ability is entirely or mainly a function of the extent to which a test measures general mental ability, or g. The hypothesis was first formalized by Arthur Jensen who devised the statistical Method of Correlated Vectors to test it. Jensen holds that if Spearman's hypothesis holds true then some cognitive tasks have a higher g-load than others, and that these tasks are exactly the tasks in which the gap between black and white test takers are greatest. Jensen, and other psychometricians such as Rushton and Lynn, take this to show that the cause of g and the cause of the gap are the same—in their view genetic differences.

Mackintosh (2011, pp. 338–39) acknowledges that Jensen and Rushton have shown a modest correlation between g-loading, heritability, and the test score gap, but he does not accept that this demonstrates a genetic origin of the gap. He points out that it is exactly in those the tests that Rushton and Jensen consider to have the highest g-loading and heritability such as the Wechsler that has seen the highest increases due to the Flynn effect. This suggests that they are also the most sensitive to environmental changes. And in turn, if the highly g-loaded tests are both more liable to environmental influences and as Jensen argues, the ones where the black-white gap is most pronounced, it suggests in fact contrary to Jensen's argument that the gap is most likely caused by environmental factors. Mackintosh also argues that Spearman's hypothesis, which he considers to be likely to be correct, simply shows that the test score gap is based on whatever cognitive faculty is central to intelligence, but not what this factor is. Nisbett et al. (2012, p. 146) make the same point, noting also that the increase in the IQ scores of black test takers is necessarily also an increase in g.

James Flynn (2012, pp. 140–1) argues that there is an inherent flaw in Jensen's argument that the correlation between g-loadings, test scores and heritability support a genetic cause of the gap. He points out that as the difficulty of a task increases a low performing group will naturally fall further behind, and heritability will therefore also naturally increase. The same holds for increases in performance which will first affect the least difficult tasks, but only gradually affect the most difficult ones. Flynn thus sees the correlation between in g-loading and the test score gap to offer no clue to the cause of the gap.

Hunt (2010, p. 415) states that many of conclusions of Jensen, and his colleagues rest on the validity of Spearman's hypothesis, and the method of correlated vectors used to test it. Hunt points out that other researchers have found this method of calculation to produce false positive results, and that other statistical methods should be used instead. According to Hunt, Jensen and Rushton's frequent claim that Spearman's hypothesis should be regarded as empirical fact does not hold, and that new studies based on better statistical methods would be required to confirm or reject the hypothesis that the correlation between g-loading, heritability and the IQ gap is due to IQ gaps consisting mostly of g.

Adoption studies

A number of studies have been done on the effect of similar rearing conditions on children from different races. The hypothesis is that by investigating whether black children adopted into white families demonstrated gains in IQ test scores relative to black children reared in black families. Depending on whether their test scores are more similar to their biological or adoptive families, that could be interpreted as either supporting a genetic or an environmental hypothesis. The main point of critique in studies like these however is whether the environment of black children—even when raised in white families—is truly comparable to the environment of white children. Several reviews of the adoption study literature has pointed out that it is perhaps impossible to avoid confounding of biological and environmental factors in this type of studies. Given the differing heritability estimates in medium-high SES and low-SES families, Nisbett et al. (2012, pp. 134) argue that adoption studies on the whole tend to overstate the role of genetics because they represent a restricted set of environments, mostly in the medium-high SES range.

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (1976) examined the IQ test scores of 122 adopted children and 143 nonadopted children reared by advantaged white families. The children were restudied ten years later.[167] The study found higher IQ for whites compared to blacks, both at age 7 and age 17.[167] Rushton & Jensen (2005) cite the Minnesota study as providing support to a genetic explanation. Nonetheless, acknowledging the existence of confounding factors, Scarr and Weinberg the authors of the original study, did not themselves consider that it provided support for either the hereditarian or environmentalist view.

Three other adoption studies found contrary evidence to the Minnesota study, lending support to a mostly environmental hypothesis:

Eyferth (1961) studied the out-of-wedlock children of black and white soldiers stationed in Germany after World War 2 and then raised by white German mothers and found no significant differences.

Tizard et al. (1972) studied black (West Indian), white, and mixed-race children raised in British long-stay residential nurseries. Two out of three tests found no significant differences. One test found higher scores for non-whites.

Moore (1986) compared black and mixed-race children adopted by either black or white middle-class families in the United States. Moore observed that 23 black and interracial children raised by white parents had a significantly higher mean score than 23 age-matched children raised by black parents (117 vs 104), and argued that differences in early socialization explained these differences.

Rushton and Jensen have argued that unlike the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, these studies did not retest the children post-adolescence when heritability of IQ would presumably be higher.[22][47] Nisbett (2009, p. 226) however point out that the difference in heritability between ages 7 and 17 are quite small, and that consequently this is no reason to disregard Moore's findings.

Frydman and Lynn (1989) showed a mean IQ of 119 for Korean infants adopted by Belgian families. After correcting for the Flynn effect, the IQ of the adopted Korean children was still 10 points higher than the indigenous Belgian children.[172]

Reviewing the evidence from adoption studies Mackintosh considers the studies by Tizard and Eyferth to be inconclusive, and the Minnesota study to be consistent only with a partial genetic hypothesis. On the whole he finds that environmental and genetic variables remain confounded and considers evidence from adoption studies inconclusive on the whole, and fully compatible with a 100% environmental explanation.

Racial admixture studies

Most people have an ancestry from different geographic regions, particularly African Americans typically have ancestors from both Africa and Europe, with, on average, 20% of their genome inherited from European ancestors.[173] If racial IQ gaps have a partially genetic basis, one might expect blacks with a higher degree of European ancestry to score higher on IQ tests than blacks with less European ancestry, because the genes inherited from European ancestors would likely include some genes with a positive effect on IQ. Geneticist Alan Templeton has argued that an experiment based on the Mendelian "common garden" design where specimens with different hybrid compositions are subjected to the same environmental influences, would be the only way to definitively show a causal relation between genes and IQ. Summarizing the findings of admixture studies, he concludes that it has shown no significant correlation between any cognitive and the degree of African or European ancestry.

Studies have employed different ways of measuring or approximating relative degrees of ancestry from Africa and Europe. One set of studies have used skin color as a measure, and other studies have used blood groups. Loehlin (2000) surveys the literature and argues that the blood groups studies may be seen as providing some support to the genetic hypothesis, even though the correlation between ancestry and IQ was quite low. He finds that studies by Eyferth (1961), Willerman, Naylor & Myrianthopoulos (1970) did not find a correlation between degree of African/European ancestry and IQ. The latter study did find a difference based on the race of the mother, with children of white mothers with black fathers scoring higher than children of black mothers and white fathers. Loehlin considers that such a finding is compatible with either a genetic or an environmental cause. All in all Loehlin finds admixture studies inconclusive and recommends more research.

Another study cited by Rushton & Jensen (2005), and by Nisbett et al. (2012), was Moore (1986) study which found that adopted mixed-race children's has test scores identical to children with two black parents—receiving no apparent "benefit" from their white ancestry. Rushton and Jensen find admixture studies to have provided overall support for a genetic explanation though this view is not shared by Loehlin (2000), Nisbett (2009), Hunt (2010), Mackintosh (2011), nor by Nisbett et al. (2012).

Reviewing the evidence from admixture studies Hunt (2010) considers it to be inconclusive because of too many uncontrolled variables. Mackintosh (2011, p. 338) quotes a statement by Nisbett (2009) to the effect that admixture studies have not provided a shred of evidence in favor of a genetic basis for the gap.

Mental chronometry

Mental chronometry measures the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response by the participant. This reaction time (RT) is considered a measure of the speed and efficiency with which the brain processes information.[176] Scores on most types of RT tasks tend to correlate with scores on standard IQ tests as well as with g, and no relationship has been found between RT and any other psychometric factors independent of g.[176] The strength of the correlation with IQ varies from one RT test to another, but Hans Eysenck gives 0.40 as a typical correlation under favorable conditions.[177] According to Jensen individual differences in RT have a substantial genetic component, and heritability is higher for performance on tests that correlate more strongly with IQ.[178] Nisbett argues that some studies have found correlations closer to 0.2, and that the correlation is not always found.[179]

Several studies have found differences between races in average reaction times. These studies have generally found that reaction times among black, Asian and white children follow the same pattern as IQ scores. Black-white differences in reaction time, however, tend to be small (average effect size .18). Rushton & Jensen (2005) have argued that reaction time is independent of culture and that the existence of race differences in average reaction time is evidence that the cause of racial IQ gaps is partially genetic instead of entirely cultural. Responding to this argument in Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett has pointed to the Jensen & Whang (1993) study in which a group of Chinese Americans had longer reaction times than a group of European Americans, despite having higher IQs. Nisbett also mentions findings in Flynn (1991) and Deary (2001) suggesting that movement time (the measure of how long it takes a person to move a finger after making the decision to do so) correlates with IQ just as strongly as reaction time, and that average movement time is faster for blacks than for whites. Mackintosh (2011, p. 339) considers reaction time evidence unconvincing and points out that other cognitive tests that also correlate well with IQ show no disparity at all, for example the habituation/dishabituation test. And he points out that studies show that rhesus monkeys have shorter reaction times than American college students, suggesting that different reaction times may not tell us anything useful about intelligence.

Brain size

A number of studies have reported a moderate statistical correlation between differences in IQ and brain size between individuals in the same group. And some scholars have reported differences in average brain sizes between Africans, Europeans, and Asians. J. P. Rushton has argued that Africans on average have smaller brain cases and brains than Europeans, that Europeans have smaller brains than East Asians, and that this is evidence that the gap is biological in nature. Critics of Rushton have argued that Rushton's arguments rest on outdated data collected by unsound methods and should be considered invalid. Recent reviews by Nisbett et al. (2012a) and Mackintosh (2011) consider that current data does show an average difference in brain size and head-circumference between American blacks and whites, but question whether this has any relevance for the IQ gap. Nisbett et al. argue that crude brain size is unlikely to be a good measure of IQ; for example, brain size also differs between men and women, but without well-documented differences in IQ. At the same time newborn black children have the same average brain size as whites, suggesting that the difference in average size could be accounted for by differences in postnatal environment. Several factors that reduce brain size have been demonstrated to disproportionately affect black children.

Earl Hunt states that brain size is found to have a correlation of about .35 with intelligence among whites and cites studies showing that genes may account for as much as 90% of individual variation in brain size. According to Hunt, race differences in average brain size could potentially be an important argument for a possible genetic contribution to racial IQ gaps. Nonetheless, Hunt notes that Rushton's head size data would account for a difference of .09 standard deviations between black and white average test scores, less than a tenth of the 1.0 standard deviation gap in average scores that is observed. Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan (2010) argue that black-white differences in brain size are insufficient to explain 91% to 95% of the black-white IQ gap.

Archaeological data

Archaeological evidence does not support claims by Rushton and others that blacks' cognitive ability was inferior to whites' during prehistoric times as a result of evolution.

Policy relevance and ethics

The 1996 report of the APA commented on the ethics of research on race and intelligence.[40] Gray & Thompson (2004) as well as Hunt & Carlson (2007) have also discussed different possible ethical guidelines.[40][193][non-primary source needed] Nature in 2009 featured two editorials on the ethics of research in race and intelligence by Steven Rose (against) and Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams (for).[194][195]

According to critics, research on group differences in IQ will reproduce the negative effects of social ideologies (such as Nazism or social Darwinism) that were justified in part on claimed hereditary racial differences.[38][196] Steven Rose maintains that the history of eugenics makes this field of research difficult to reconcile with current ethical standards for science.[195]

Linda Gottfredson argues that suggestion of higher ethical standards for research into group differences in intelligence is a double standard applied in order to undermine disliked results.[197] James R. Flynn has argued that had there been a ban on research on possibly poorly conceived ideas, much valuable research on intelligence testing (including his own discovery of the Flynn effect) would not have occurred.[198]

Jensen and Rushton argued that the existence of biological group differences does not rule out, but raises questions about the worthiness of policies such as affirmative action or placing a premium on diversity. They also argued for the importance of teaching people not to overgeneralize or stereotype individuals based on average group differences, because of the significant overlap of people with varying intelligence between different races.[47]

The environmentalist viewpoint argues for increased interventions in order to close the gaps.[199] Nisbett argues that schools can be greatly improved and that many interventions at every age level are possible.[200] Flynn, arguing for the importance of the black subculture, writes that "America will have to address all the aspects of black experience that are disadvantageous, beginning with the regeneration of inner city neighbourhoods and their schools. A resident police office and teacher in every apartment block would be a good start."[201] Researchers from both sides agree that interventions should be better researched.[179][22]

Especially in developing nations, society has been urged to take on the prevention of cognitive impairment in children as of the highest priority. Possible preventable causes include malnutrition, infectious diseases such as meningitis, parasites, cerebral malaria, in utero drug and alcohol exposure, newborn asphyxia, low birth weight, head injuries, lead poisoning and endocrine disorders.[202]

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography
NYCT/MTA

As Earth Day approaches and as part of recommendations from a blue-ribbon commission tasked with reducing the impact of public transit on the environment, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) New York City Transit (NYCT) has installed approximately 6,500 sustainable composite ties in a major Staten Island Railway (SIR)

track renewal project to repair significant damage caused by Superstorm Sandy.

The St. George SIR terminal is undergoing a major track and switch reconstruction project as the railway continues to recover from Sandy-related damage. Prior to the storm in October 2012, a terminal rehabilitation project had been planned to repair and update signals, switches and track. Sandy made the project critical when storm surge flooded SIR tracks and the entire St. George yard complex with corrosive saltwater, highlighting areas where flood protection or protective infrastructure needed to be installed. The saltwater significantly damaged all 12 tracks, multiple switches, equipment and cables, as well as facilities and the train control tower.

“With careful planning and foresight, we took this opportunity to not only make critical Sandy-related repairs but to do it better using environmentally friendly materials,” said Doug Connett, vice president and chief officer for Staten Island Railway.

NYCT started the St. George renewal project in September 2014, with plans to integrate resiliency measures while replacing outdated or damaged equipment and making repairs. Those resiliency measures include raising signal equipment to 72 inches above the tracks, raising platforms for battery and generator enclosures and installing a new third rail system.

Repairs at St. George include the replacement of 12,000 linear feet of track and installation of a total of approximately 7,500 high-density plastic rail ties. The ties, which are made of 100 percent recycled materials, were manufactured by Axion International.

The change in track tie materials from wood to high-density plastic stems from a recommendation made by the MTA’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainability, which released a report in 2009 on ways to operate a greener transit system throughout the New York area. The commission’s final report made nearly 100 recommendations to reduce the MTA’s carbon footprint while generating savings and economic growth, one of which included a recommendation that the MTA expand procurement of sustainable railroad ties across all rail agencies.

The $105-million St. George Terminal project is taking place with no service interruptions to customers and is 55 percent complete with composite tie installation to be completed by June 1.
Feel the rhythm, feel the ride, c’mon man its bobsled time! Cool runnings!

Jamaica’s two-man bobsled team of Winston Watts and Marvin Dixon qualified for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. It’s the first time a Jamaican bobsled team has qualified for the Winter Olympics since 2002.

#BREAKING: Jamaica’s 2 man Bobsled qualified for Winter Olympics in Sochi . CONGRATULATIONS!!!! #JamaicaBobsled pic.twitter.com/Ns1nnhqn9b — Team Jamaica (@JamaicaOlympics) January 18, 2014

An entire generation is familiar with the Jamaican bobsled team after Cool Runnings. The Disney movie told the somewhat fictionalized story of how the Caribbean country defied the odds to qualify in the four-man bobsled for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary.

Qualifying for the 2014 Olympics was the easy task for the two-man team of Dixon and Watts. Heading into St. Moritz, they only needed to avoid disaster in order to earn their spot in Russia. The hard part will be getting to the games.

Watts told Chadband the financial hardship the team is under at the moment:

In truth, we still don’t really know at the moment if we’d even have enough funds or sponsorship to fly to Sochi itself for the Games itself. It all depends. Our families need to be taken care of first. If there’s no funding, who knows? But, I’m one of life’s optimists. I put my heart on the line for this. Any British companies out there interested in sponsorin’ us? Hopefully, the Jamaican Olympic Association will step in and support us now we’ve qualified.

Now that the Jamaicans have officially qualified, financial benefactors may come out of the woodwork after hearing of Watts’ story. Perhaps the Jamaican Olympic Association will pony up some dough, too.
OTTAWA—Canadian auto parts companies and their unionized workers are criticizing an influential business group for urging the Liberal government to move forward quickly with a revamped Trans-Pacific Partnership. They say Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was right to hold off on signing a renewed TPP last month at the APEC summit in Vietnam and that the government’s critics of that decision are misguided.

Flavio Volpe and jerry Dias, pictured here, say critics of the government’s decision on the TPP are misguided. ( Cole Burston / Toronto Star )

The presidents of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association and Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union which represents autoworkers, say that’s because the TPP is bad for the small and medium-sized auto parts companies and their employees. Read more: Canada’s decision to decline TPP agreement shouldn’t have been a surprise: Trudeau

Article Continued Below

Thomas Walkom: Why Justin Trudeau will eventually join the new Trans-Pacific Partnership Five things to know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Flavio Volpe and Jerry Dias both say the Liberals need to go slow to undo the potential damage done to their sector when the previous Conservative government agreed to concessions in the original TPP that would have given Japanese carmakers an unfair advantage in the Canadian market. Earlier this week, the Business Council of Canada sent Trudeau an open letter signed by 18 chief executives, telling him Canada must immediately join the reconstituted version of the TPP, which Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of in January. John Manley, the council president, said it was imperative for the Trudeau Liberals to join because Asia will move on without Canada at a time when this country needs to diversify its trade portfolio.

But Volpe said the Liberal government has taken a “thoughtful approach” that benefits small and medium-sized companies and their employees instead of racing for the “trophies” that completed trade agreements represent. “It’s not un-Canadian to try to get better terms before you get into bed with someone for decades,” Volpe said in an interview Wednesday.

Article Continued Below

“The U.S. is no longer in it, so there’s no reason to accept terms when the context has changed.” Dias said Manley represents the interests of the chief executives and large companies, not their workers. “It’s about allowing corporations to do anything they want,” said Dias. “It’s about a philosophy of free enterprise, as opposed to putting Canadians to work.” Volpe and Dias said separately that the previous Conservative government of Stephen Harper is to blame for agreeing to the original TPP deal during the 2015 federal election campaign. They said it was bad for their sector and was reached without consulting their industry until late in the process. “The TPP was about politics. It wasn’t about economics. Harper was losing in the polls, he needed it as part of his election platform,” said Dias. Japan and the U.S. agreed in secret in April 2015 on what the content provisions of automobiles ought to be and then “foisted” the agreement on Canada and Mexico, said Volpe. The Rules of Origin content levels were set at “historic lows” at 35 per cent for parts and 45 per cent for cars, which would have allowed cars built in non-TPP countries such as China and Thailand to flood the North American market, he said. The current Liberal government listened to the concerns of the auto industry and blocked a plan by the 10 remaining TPP countries to sign a newly-configured version of the Pacific Rim trade pact last month at the APEC summit, said Volpe. Trudeau incurred the wrath of Australia and Japan, who had been pushing the new, non-U.S. version of the deal. Lawrence Herman, a Toronto trade expert with Herman and Associates, said finding a way to eventually join the new TPP is vital to Canada’s trade interests — but not at the expense of the auto sector. “We just need to be sure that any trans-Pacific deal recognizes that Canada, unlike the Asian parties, is part of an integrated North American auto market,” said Herman. Scott Sinclair, senior research fellow with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said the new TPP agreement is the same as the old flawed one, and the Liberals are right to be wary. “With the U.S. out, no Canadian-assembled vehicle can realistically meet the pact’s rules of origin, which amounts to a one-way opening of the Canadian auto market,” he said. “It will be impossible for the Trudeau government to honestly square this zombie pact with a genuinely progressive trade agenda.”

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Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park have printed transparent transistors on transparent paper. The finished device is flexible, up to 84% transparent, and in theory this could be the first step towards green, paper-based electronics.

As we’ve covered before, printing computer circuits isn’t overly difficult — you just need to find the right conductive and semiconductive inks (which can be tricky), and then print them out on a suitable substrate until you have a transistor. Because these ink-based printed circuits are very thin, though, the smoothness of the substrate is very important. When you’re dealing with layers of ink that are a few nanometers thick, any blemish on the substrate is enough to disrupt the flow of electrons and break the circuit.

In the case of regular old paper, bumps and blemishes are usually measured in micrometers — far too irregular to print circuitry on. Not to be deterred, the researchers at the University of Maryland used nanopaper — paper created from wood pulp that’s been specially treated with enzymes and mechanically beaten. Nanopaper has a much more regular structure than normal paper, and is stronger (and transparent) as a result. More importantly, though, nanopaper is smooth to within just a few nanometers. “It’s as flat as plastic,” says Liangbing Hu, one of the researchers who worked on the project.

With the nanopaper in hand, the researchers then created some transistors by printing three inks: First a layer of carbon nanotubes, then a dielectric ink, then a semiconducting ink, and then another layer of nanotubes. The nanotubes not only act as electrodes but also act as a structural backbone. The final transistors are up to 84% transparent, and the device continues to work while bent.

Moving forward, it’s easy to imagine flexible, printed devices that are responsibly sourced using renewable sources. The fact that these printed circuits are highly transparent could also be useful, either for cosmetic reasons in wearable computing, or for building displays. Before such applications can be considered, though, the researchers will have to find a way of producing these transparent transistors using roll-to-roll printing, or another commercial, mass-producible process.

Now read: The first flexible, fiber-optic solar cell that can be woven into clothes

Research paper: DOI: 10.1021/nn304407r – “Highly Transparent and Flexible Nanopaper Transistor”
The upcoming Men’s EHF EURO 2016 in Poland will be the chance for all handball fans to see some new faces in European handball. Some of them are already known from their performance in the clubs and national teams, but still they are Under 23, ready to improve and conquere handball world in years to come.

Handball-Planet.com made a list of BEST 7 youngstars (generation 1994 and younger) for the upcoming event which we would like to see. The leader of the team is Handball-Planet Young World Player 2015 – Sanders Sagosen.

RIGHT BACK: Fabian Wiede (Germany)

PLAYMAKER: Sanders Sagosen (Norway)

LEFT BACK: Vuko Borozan (Montenegro)

LINE-PLAYER: Blaž Blagotinšek (Slovenia)

LEFT WING: Rune Dahmke (Germany)

RIGHT WING: Darko Đukić (Serbia)

GOALKEEPER: Torbjorn Bergerud (Norway)

Our list didn’t include some names who will miss the tournament (Lasse Andersson or Paul Drux). However, like in the list of BEST 7 “old guns”, we couldn’t find the left wing player (1994 and younger) who will be close to the final squad, so we decided to put Rune Dahmke (1993). On the other side, the lack of young goalies is more than visible, so our choice is young Norwegian Torbjorn Bergerud, who probably won’t get a chance to play in poland.
Written by Stephanie Siam

When I reverted to Islam in March 2005, I have to admit I was afraid. Okay, perhaps nervous is a better choice of word, as I wasn’t scared or frightened. And I know I’m not alone in admitting this feeling, especially with female converts. The process of transitioning into Islam from a previous faith/belief system (because face it, even if you don’t believe in God, you believe there is no God) is daunting:

What will my friends think? How will I be received by the public? Does this mean I have to start dressing like an Arab or East Asian-er? Do I have to start my life over from the beginning, rethinking every choice I’ve ever made?

While all of those are valid concerns, and ones that I did contemplate at some point in time post-reversion, they weren’t what I was afraid of. My fear came from telling my father.

Not my family. Not my Mother.

My Father.

Now, before you start thinking my dad is this overbearing and close-minded totalitarian who lives for controlling others’ lives, he’s NOT. In fact, he’s the polar opposite. He’s one of the most open-minded individuals I’ve ever known in my life. And if there is a perfect antonym for overbearing, that describes him, too. I mean, for Heaven’s sake, the man used to sit and logically discuss with me the reasons I should pick up my toys when I was 3 years old. If there’s anything my dad is not, it’s overbearing and close-minded.

So, why was I scared of telling my dad I had become Muslim?

My father has a strong head on his shoulders (don’t confuse strong with stubborn). His choice of worship was not made based on how he was brought up (Nazarene). He didn’t look to his parents to tell him how he should worship God or practice his religion (Christianity). Instead, he went to a Christian college, studied the history and lineage of the Bible and Christianity, and majored in Bible Studies. His goal: to become a preacher.

When he became a member of the Church of Christ denomination, he did so knowing full-well that it represented the beliefs he personally held based on his extensive studying. To him, it was correct.

Now there I was, his 23-year-old daughter, midway through my graduate school program, and I’d converted to Islam. And I had to tell my Father. The same father who responded to my 16-year-old self’s idea of becoming Baptist with, “I’ve failed as a father!”

So, one day while my parents were in town for a wedding, my father and I drove over to the beach at Gulf Shores. We had lunch, talked about religion a little bit, and mostly discussed general life topics. (My father is also a severe introvert, like me, and idle conversation is not a forte of his.)

After lunch, we walked out on the beach. I’d planned my delivery. I asked him what it was exactly that he believed about life and death. He started out with the history of religion (he always starts with the history behind the pertinent question), and then he transitioned into his personal beliefs. Once he finished, I offered my part. I told him nobody had ever really asked me what I believe. It was always just assumed because I was part of a certain family or church that I shared the same beliefs. But, obviously, I didn’t.

Then came the time to deliver my blow. I told him I was thinking about becoming Muslim. (I couldn’t own up to it full-force yet; I needed time to let the idea sink in for him.) Surprisingly, he didn’t stop walking. He didn’t yell (not surprisingly). He just said one thing, and his response has stayed with me every day since. It has had my back when people were against me. It has given me conviction along my chosen path. And those words were:

As your father, it is my job to let you know that I think you’re wrong. But you’re an adult. And if you chose to believe something just because I told you so, that would be just as wrong.

It was all I needed. I didn’t need an “I support you” or a “That’s wonderful”. And I know he still doesn’t like my choice. And I know there have been many tears shed on his side on my behalf. But I also think both he and my mom have come to conclusion that after nearly a decade, a husband and a child, I’m not going through a phase.

And as each day goes by, I never lose hope that one day my family will join me in truly understanding the history, relevance and authority of our beautiful Islam, insha’Allah. Until that day comes, I will continue to enjoy the avid discussion my father and I have about our beliefs, and I will rest easy knowing that despite our differences, we still respect each others’ beliefs … and rights to have them.

Follow us (upper right of the page). Email us (islamwich@yahoo.com). Like our face with your face on Facebook (facebook.com/islamwich). Tumble with us on Tumblr (islamwich.tumblr.com). Pin with us (pinterest.com/islamwich). Follow us on twitter (@islamwich).

Like the post, share it, pin it, comment on it, and/or do whatever social media magic it is that you prefer. Find out more about us in the understandably named “About” page and browse other posts in “Table of Contents”.
One of the tough parts of running a business is deciding when to put more effort into something and when to not. We know we've been pretty silent here since the end of the season, and after a lot of internal debate, we've decided to stop posting editorial content on the BBR blog.

This obviously has nothing to do with the quality of the content produced by lead writer, Neil Paine. His posts were phenomenal, and I know many readers looked forward to them every week. A big thanks to Neil for making this such a vital place for basketball discussion and analysis. As a small company, focus is vital for our success, and we are choosing to focus our energy on pumping out as much statistical basketball data as possible and that means cutting back in other areas.

None of the existing content is going to go away. We'll keep it up here for as long as the site is open (which we intend to be a very long time). If you would like to contact Neil, he's available at np@sports-reference.com.

Thank you most of all for your patronage.
Porsche #918 of 918 units has been built. The last one.

If you had plans to buy a brand new Porsche 918 Spyder, you’d better hurry because Porsche has just built its last unit. According to The Telegraaf, the last Porsche 918 Spyder rolled off the assembly line earlier yesterday (June. 18, 2015) and its burgundy. All in all, its been 21 months since the Porsche 918 was put into production. Porsche has been working around the clock to produce the number of units planned within a reasonable amount of time. To make one, it takes the work of exactly 100 specialists about 100 man hours from start to finish. On average, that works out to be about 1.4 Porsche 918’s built everyday.

There are still plenty of Porsche 918s left to buy, it’s just that you’ll have to secure your spot in line.According to Porsche, it’s on a first come, first serve basis. That means you’ll have your pick of the available Porsche 918’s and don’t have to take necessarily the next one that comes off the assembly line. Porsche released some interesting figures attached to sales so far. For example, did you know that 30 percent of all Porsche 918 sales so far have gone to Americans? That works out to 297 units that have landed on American soil (leave some for the rest of the world, why don’t you!)

The Porsche 918 is a tour-de-force that honestly only comes around once in a lifetime. Like a lot of the other examples coming out at this golden age of supercars, it’s a hybrid. That means technically with the battery power available, it can run 12 miles on electricity alone. But those batteries are for strictly for performance and when tied to its power unit (internal combustion engine), there’s a combined 887 HP and 944 lbs-ft of torque available. That’s courtesy of a 4.6 L V8 and two electric motors on the front and rear axle paired to a seven-speed PDK. MSRP for this German hybrid? $847, 975. Better bring your Visa Black Card. And just for old times sake and to lament the fact that the Nurburgring is closed to any future lap records (as this goes to “print”) here’s the 918 straight whipping it around the ‘Ring.
What’s the definition of serendipity? Being randomly selected as winner from thousands of entries to a draw for tickets to a crunch World Cup rugby match where your son, Paul O’Connell, is team captain.

Unsuspecting Irish Examiner marketing executive Catriona Buckley was momentarily floored by the answer she received after phoning the lucky winner of the newspaper competition yesterday and asking if she was free to travel.

“Yes. But is it OK if I am Paul O’Connell’s mother?” said the equally astounded Shelagh O’Connell.

Shelagh actually had the Irish Examiner in her hand and was looking at the hilarious front-page picture of Paul on a ride at Alton Towers amusement park with his teammates when she took the call.

“I buy the Examiner all of the time because I think the sports coverage is excellent,” Shelagh said. She had already scanned the newspaper for details of the competition winner.

“I didn’t see anything about it, so I assumed it was over and I hadn’t won. When I saw the Cork number flashing up on the phone, I thought it was a call from Cope where Michael’s [her husband] sister is based. I was quite surprised and shocked to hear I had won the competition.”

But had her famous son not already sorted tickets for his mum and dad for Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium where Ireland take on France in their final pivotal pool game on October 11?

“He doesn’t get tickets until the day of the game,” said Shelagh “But to be honest, match tickets are not the problem. It’s the flights and actually getting there. For the last game, when Ireland played Canada in Cardiff, we had to fly into London, followed by a four-hour drive to Cardiff. I wasn’t the best after sitting in the car for four hours.

“And I’m really looking forward to flying straight to Cardiff and having somewhere to stay, which in Cardiff is a huge problem.”

Problem solved then, thanks to her win, which guarantees her two nights in the 4-star Morgans Hotel in Swansea, just 65km from the stadium, with match transfers laid on. Her win also includes return flights from Dublin to Cardiff, airport transfers, the assistance of a Killester Travel Rep, a Rugby World Cup souvenir, and two match tickets.

So who’s the lucky travelling companion?

“I suppose I have to bring Michael, it would look kind of bad otherwise,” Shelagh laughed, adding that Paul’s brothers, Justin and Marcus, “will go mad when they hear”.

To win, Sheila had to answer eight World Cup rugby-related questions.

And while her son Paul is used to victory, is this her first big win?

“I’ve never won anything of significance before so this is a great surprise. But hopefully we’ll have a few good wins in the World Cup too and we’ll have the [Webb Ellis] Cup at the end of October.”
What can be wrong with giving scholarships to the meritorious? A meritorious society is a just society, right? Giving money according to “worth” seems way better, ethically, than giving to the well-connected, or to those of a favored race or religion, right?

Well, maybe. But then again, sometimes maybe not.

The problem of law school merit scholarships is a complicated and nuanced one, especially for those who have not considered it at length. In brief, here are five background points underlying the ethical conundrum I will subsequently sketch out:

Law Schools, like car dealerships, have list prices for their wares. Tuition charges for all law schools must be stated on their web sites and in their written materials, pursuant to regulators’ (ABA, AALS) requirements. There must be some silly people out there who pay list price for their cars, I suppose, and there are certainly people who pay full tuition under the impression that that’s what everyone pays. But in reality not everyone pays list price, and those who have done so are quickly disabused when they arrive at 1L. Law Schools always want to attract the “best” students, and one way to attract them is to price discriminate, i.e., to offer discounts from list. “Best,” of course, is a concept with many possible denotations, and in days of yore American law schools tended to have diverse understandings of it. Today, though, U.S. News and World Report rankings are so influential tha they have become the cart driving the law school admissions horse. USNWR has homogenized our understanding of student value – Law School Admissions Test scores and undergraduate Grade Point Averages are the measures of student excellence. The higher the median LSAT and GPA scores of the admitted student body, the higher a law school’s ranking will be (the two factors combined account for 22.5% of a school’s ranking), and the higher the ranking, ceteris paribus, the better will be the jobs offered to graduates, the better paid will be its alumni base, the better will be the faculty lured to work there, and the better will be the students enticed to apply there. Rising ranking thus stimulates a “virtuous circle” while falling ranking leads to a “vicious circle” that, if left unattended, can result what some fear to be a “death spiral.” Buying better students is one attempt to move from a vicious circle to a virtuous one. Today, law jobs are quite hard to come by for many law school grads, and law school tuition as risen so high during the boom years that many grads are saddled with student loans they have great difficulty repaying. Bankruptcy is not normally available to discharge student loan debt. So minimizing student loans through discounts from tuition list price is a high priority for law school applicants. In our increasingly meritorious nation, the cream has often already risen to the top. The wealthy tend to be smarter and better educated than the poorer – and they tend to have children who are smarter and better educated than are the children of poorer parents.

These five factors play out in predictable ways. At super-elite law schools (Yale/Harvard/Stanford, etc.), virtually all students have stellar LSAT and GPA scores. Those with such scores are willing to pay list price for the experience, the contacts and the credential these Brahmin schools provide – and these schools can therefore eliminate merit scholarships and admit selectively based on criteria other than LSAT and GPA. [Did you rise from humble beginnings? Did you overcome your physical handicap and climb Everest, writing a Pulitzer-winning account of your exploit?] But at most schools, merit scholarships will be offered to the high LSAT and GPA scorers among applicants to that school. Most schools must pay to lure those scorers away from other, equally or possibly higher-ranked schools that are bidding for their attendance. And those merit scholars will tend to be more intelligent and from tonier zip codes than lower-ranked admittees to the same law school.

One key additional fact bears mention now. It is far from irrational for USNWR to use median LSAT and GPA to rank schools. Student LSAT and GPA scores are, unsurprisingly, significantly correlated with law school performance. So it’s meaningful to say that the student body at a higher ranked school tends to be “better” than the student body at a lower-ranked school. Employers can use school rank as a proxy in making employment decisions – schools are a convenient aggregation of students of a given talent level. That’s how the virtuous (or vicious, as the case may be) snowball starts rolling.

The upshot of all this is that, at most law schools, price discrimination results in poorer, less well-educated students “subsidizing” (paying higher tuition than) richer, better-educated students. For their subsidy, poorer students are penalized a second time at graduation – because the subsidized richer students will tend to finish at the top of the class and get better paying jobs, while the poorer students will find it harder and harder to find employment to pay for their higher student loans. Thus are “list price” payers made to seem to be chumps over and over again, while the recipients of merit scholarships laugh, as it were, all the way to the bank.

This looks in many ways like a classic regressive tax.

What should be done about this? That’s not clear – it’s not self-evident that merit scholarships are “unfair” or “racist” or “classist”, even if merit scholarship recipients tend to be from tonier zip codes and of paler hues. Results don’t correlate with motives. But the results are regressive, it seems, and if regressivity is itself justification for reform, a second question arises:

What can be done?

As indicated above, the Yales of this world offer essentially no merit scholarships – they attract LSAT and GPA studs willing to pay list price. Their scholarships are need-based, so redistribution tends to be from haves to have-nots. At the other end of the USNWR spectrum, University of La Verne College of Law in California just announced that, like certain innovative car dealerships, it will charge the same non-negotiable “discounted” price to all matriculants. Merit scholarships are out at La Verne, and instead of a list price of $39,900 replete with heavy price discrimination, all new matriculants will pay $25K. It’s “as if” every student got a $15K scholarship, if you will – though in reality the "discounted" price is an indication of the extent of prior price discrimination.

La Verne is a lowest-tier USNWR school, recently provisionally re-accredited after being denied full ABA accreditation, and it is unlikely that it attracted many high-scoring LSAT and GPA stars while price discriminating. Perhaps La Verne has little to lose and much to gain in PR benefits from its new, “fairer” tuition system. But can La Verne’s fixed-price model spread to higher ranked schools? That will be hard to do because of collective action problems – for fixed-price law schools risk losing their best students to rival schools that continue to price discriminate. Rationally, the temptation is to continue to impose the regressive tax.

For those who believe this to be ethically problematic, outside intervention may be needed to solve what is essentially a Prisoners’ Dilemma. The ABA might, for instance, ban merit scholarships at accredited schools. US News and World Report might cease using student LSAT and GPA scores in law school rankings. Will these things happen? Count me doubtful. If USNWR abandoned LSAT and GPA, a rival publication would spring up and take its place. And the ABA seems hardly likely to resist pressures by firms that are anxious to use law schools as selection proxies in their hiring process.

Law professors are, for the most part, lawyers, and we are bound ethically to make access to our profession accessible to qualified and interested people. Have we done this by setting up a system that transfers resources from the more to the less needy? If so, perhaps we need to rethink what we are doing. Or should we stick our heads in the sand and forget about this whole problem – after all, LSAT test taker numbers are finally increasing again, right? What, us worry?

As always, your comments are welcome. Contact me at mkrauss at gmu dot edu.
Why the court will uphold Obamacare For its reputation, mainly

Predictions are always hazardous when it comes to the economy, the weather and the Supreme Court. I won’t get near the first two right now, but I’ll hazard a guess on what the court is likely to decide tomorrow: It will uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) by a vote of 6 to 3.

Three reasons for my confidence:

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First, Chief Justice John Roberts is — or should be — concerned about the steadily declining standing of the court in the public’s mind, along with the growing perception that the justices decide according to partisan politics rather than according to legal principle. The 5-4 decision in Citizen’s United, for example, looked to all the world like a political rather than a legal outcome, with all five Republican appointees finding that restrictions on independent corporate expenditures violate the First Amendment, and all four Democratic appointees finding that such restrictions are reasonably necessary to avoid corruption or the appearance of corruption. Or consider the court’s notorious decision in Bush v. Gore.

The Supreme Court can’t afford to lose public trust. It has no ability to impose its will on the other two branches of government: As Alexander Hamilton once noted, the court has neither the purse (it can’t threaten to withhold funding from the other branches) or the sword (it can’t threaten police or military action). It has only the public’s trust in the court’s own integrity and the logic of its decisions — both of which the public is now doubting, according to polls. As chief justice, Roberts has a particular responsibility to regain the public’s trust. Another 5-4 decision overturning a piece of legislation as important as Obamacare would further erode that trust.

It doesn’t matter that a significant portion of the public may not like Obamacare. The issue here is the role and institutional integrity of the Supreme Court, not the popularity of a particular piece of legislation. Indeed, what better way to show the court’s impartiality than to affirm the constitutionality of legislation that may be unpopular but is within the authority of the other two branches to enact?

Second, Roberts can draw on a decision by a Republican-appointed and highly respected conservative jurist, Judge Laurence Silberman, who found Obamacare to be constitutional when the issue came to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The judge’s logic was lucid and impeccable — so much so that Roberts will try to lure Justice Anthony Kennedy with it, to join Roberts and the four liberal justices, so that rather than another 5-4 split (this time on the side of the Democrats), the vote will be 6-3.

Third and finally, Roberts (and Kennedy) can find adequate Supreme Court precedent for the view that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gives Congress and the president the power to regulate healthcare — given that heathcare coverage (or lack of coverage) in one state so obviously affects other states; that the market for health insurance is already national in many respects; and that other national laws governing insurance (Social Security and Medicare, for example) require virtually everyone to pay (in these cases, through mandatory contributions to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds).

OK, so I’ve stuck my neck out. We’ll find out tomorrow how far.
I was in Cleveland the day LeBron announced he would be taking his talents to South Beach. I’ve performed music in Cleveland more times than I can count. One of the things I enjoy about touring is getting to meet sports fans of all different teams, and walks of life. In that one day I gained more respect for Cleveland as a fan base than I have for any other in my life.

The sense of absolute misery that overtook everyone – from gas station attendants to elite music promoters and executives – was overwhelming. Even dogs walked around aimlessly, looking like they had been recently kicked. Cleveland is a city that lives vicariously through their professional sports franchises. Win or lose (and there’s been a lot more “lose” both recently and historically) the fans there take it personally. I love that about them.

Now, the Cleveland Browns are at a crossroads. Coming off a disappointing 4-12 season in 2011, the organization is faced with a monumental decision: What to do at quarterback, the league’s most vital position. My friends, my loyal readers, my fellow students of NFL sickness; it is here you will learn that whatever road Cleveland takes from their present situation into the wild blue yonder will come through Central Texas.

Browns QB Colt McCoy needs little introduction around these parts. While at the University of Texas, he broke nearly every Longhorn single-season and career QB record and took home 13 of 15 major QB awards his senior season as a Heisman and national championship finalist. McCoy is tough, gritty, smart, elusive, and accurate which makes up for his “so-so” arm strength. After being drafted in the third round and getting to start in spot duty in 2010, Colt came into the 2011 season as the Browns’ starting QB in a West Coast system that many close to the team thought he was beginning to get a good grasp of. The Browns’ season went on to be hampered by brutal injuries along the offensive line, a constant merry-go-round freak show at the running back position, and a complete lack of playmaking ability at WR. McCoy was lost for the season to a concussion suffered in Pittsburgh during week 13 via an illegal James Harrison hit. When the dust settled on the Browns’ 2011 season, only three numbers really mattered, though: 4, 12, and 0. Four wins, 12 Losses, and zero career wins for Colt McCoy against AFC North division opponents.

There’s a kid from up the road you might have heard of named Robert Griffin III. The Heisman-winning Baylor QB represents most everything a team looking for revitalization on offense could ask for. He has a big arm, he’s smart, he’s a great leader, and he exhibits excellent downfield vision and elite running ability. The best part: He does not rely on his feet to bail him out. Unlike most elite running QBs, he will always look to make the play with his arm first, sometimes taking brutal hits to remain in the pocket until his receiver comes open.

The Browns have two first-round picks in this year’s NFL draft. Pick No. 4 and pick No. 22. I will be attending the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis next week, and was invited for inclusion in Mike Mayock’s NFL Combine media conference call, where I had a chance to address the Cleveland QB issue. His thoughts were much different from those of NFL writing legend and Senior Editor for the Browns Vic Carucci who we spoke with in Mobile, Ala., earlier this month at the Senior Bowl.

Lets start at the top: The Colts will take Andrew Luck (QB, Stanford) with pick one. Saint Louis picks second. They have too much money tied up in Sam Bradford to even consider a QB. Their reasonable options are as follows: Matt Kalil (OT, USC), Justin Blackmon (WR, Oklahoma State), Morris Claiborne (CB, LSU) or in the best case scenario, trade out of the pick to someone who wants Robert Griffin and accumulate more picks through the very valuable late first, second, and third rounds. The two teams thought to be interested in possibly trading up are the Redskins and the Browns. At pick three, the Vikings would love to have Kalil fall to them, as LT is their single biggest need. If he is not there and Griffin is still on the board, they will try to trade down to a team wanting Griffin as the Vikes reached to draft QB Christian Ponder in last year’s draft. If they cannot trade down and Kalil is gone, I expect them to take Morris Claiborne at this point. Now we come to the Browns at pick four (assuming they did not trade up.) If Griffin is there … should they take him?

I say no.

“We haven’t seen an athlete like RG3 in many drafts,” Mike Mayock, lead draft analyst for the NFL Network told me. “The chance that the Browns may be able to get him, that’s exciting. It will be a ride, that’s for sure. There are a few flaws to his game, mainly lack of anticipation and waiting on plays to develop leading to too many big hits, but the bottom line is the kid is a playmaker.”

To me, the issue is not about Griffin’s playmaking ability or even his ability to be an elite NFL QB. I see the issue as being the system. Browns GM Mike Holgren is a Bill Walsh disciple. He has been building championship variations of the West Coast offense for almost 30 years now. In coming to Cleveland, he put his managerial trust in Head Coach Pat Shurmur who runs what he likes to call a “pure” form of the West Coast offense. Vic Carrucci affirmed our suggestion that there is generally a three-year learning curve for QBs developing into this kind of system. He went on to say that many decision-makers within the organization were beginning to see vast, marked improvement in McCoy’s progression in the system that was cut off too early in 2011 (albeit by only three games).

He said that if he had to prognosticate at this early juncture, that he believes McCoy will come in as the team’s starting QB next season. Carucci told us that the Browns scouting department has done such a bang-up job on the defensive side of the ball (drafting four defensive starters in the last two drafts) that he believed 2012 would be the year that Shurmur would finally get to address some of the offensive issues that have been left largely unanswered.

So I asked Mike Mayock, "Why would an offensive-minded coach (knowing how hard it is to go through a long QB development process) want to risk the possibility of making his hot seat even hotter by throwing in a wild-card uber-athlete at QB with no surrounding weapons?"

“That’s an interesting question – but we saw it all last year. Offenses are showing more and more … Cam Newton, for example. Look at Cam. He comes to Carolina, they build around him. All these guys, Jake Locker [Titans], Christian Ponder [Vikings], if there is one thing we learned last year it is that rookie QBs can come in and contribute," Maycock replied.

"But you said he has no anticipation. I agree. Do you not think that anticipation is important in a timing-based precision West Coast offense in which you must 'throw receivers open' as opposed to 'throwing to open receivers'?" I questioned.

“Yea, and its another one of these deals,” Mayock said. “You have an exceptional player here and a chance you may be able to get him. Childress, Shurmur, you know; they would have to change how they do some things, sure.”

Mike Holmgren doesn’t just “change things”. His staff will not either. Thinking in such broad terms can be messy. Panthers Head Coach Ron Rivera had the luxury of “letting Cam be Cam” on offense because he was a first-year defensive head coach with his hands full trying to fix the heap of garbage Carolina runs on D week in and week out. I see the idea of RG3 to the Browns as one that could create a lot of excitement for a fan base in dire need of some sort of positive spark, but I just don’t like the fit. Holmgren has stated publicly he will be taking a QB in 2012. This is not an indictment on the position or its current standing, just an affirmation of his regime’s “bullpen” mantra in either drafting or signing a new QB each season for depth and seasoning.

I see so many more reasonable options later in the draft. An accurate, smart passer like Kirk Cousins (Michigan State) in the third round would be ideal to groom under McCoy in case his development does not positively continue given his new weapons and surrounding cast. At that point, you have an accurate passer and student of the game coming into the system without the handicaps that McCoy endured his first season as a starter due to lack of offensive personnel. The position needs to be upgraded, but that does not mean that McCoy could not bring about that upgrade with a better offensive line, an entire off-season/training camp, and at least one offensive playmaker. If Griffin falls to pick four, I believe the Browns could trade down to six and let the Redskins take Griffin. At pick six, hopefully the Browns could land a Justin Blackmon, a Trent Richardson (RB Alabama), or worst case, a Riley Reiff (OT Iowa). Then at pick 22, there will be an embarrassment of riches at offensive skill options, especially WR. Through the second and third rounds is where the greatest value for interior offensive line is found.

I do believe Robert Griffin III will be an outstanding NFL QB. I simply do not believe he will be an outstanding Cleveland Brown QB given the current state of the organization.

[Alex Dunlap is the host of RosterWatch on 104.9FM ESPN Radio Austin, founder of Rosterwatch.com, and a featured expert contributor to the FantasyPros.com network. He is also an NFL draft analyst for PlayTheDraft.com.]
The minister responsible for Centrelink has been cleared of any wrongdoing following allegations he shared private information without consent.

The Australian Federal Police has told Human Services Minister Alan Tudge it will not be investigating the claims any further.

Labor asked the AFP in March to investigate whether Mr Tudge had broken the law when he released an individual's personal Centrelink details to the media.

"The Australian Federal Police will not be pursuing Labor's allegations that I broke privacy law," Mr Tudge said in a statement on Monday.

The AFP's assistant commissioner made it clear that the information released by my office and prepared by my department was approved for release and was therefore not an unauthorised disclosure, Mr Tudge said.

"The decision to end the consideration of this referral is no surprise."

Mr Tudge reiterated that the law allows for the release of limited information to respond to incorrect or misleading statements in the media about specific cases to maintain the integrity of government programs.

He branded Labor's referral as a political stunt and part of a "scare campaign".

© AAP 2019
During Jan/Feb AIG would call up and just ask for complete unwind prices from the credit desk in the relevant jurisdiction. These were not single deal unwinds as are typically more price transparent - these were whole portfolio unwinds. The size of these unwinds were enormous, the quotes I have heard were " we have never done as big or as profitable trades - ever ".

This is largely due to AIG-FP unwinds.

Allowing for significant reserve release and trade PnL, I think for the big correlation players this could have easily been US$1-2bn per bank in this period.

far

these profits were a) one-time in nature due to wholesale unwinds of AIG portfolios, b) entirely at the expense of AIG, and thus taxpayers, c) executed with Tim Geithner's (and thus the administration's) full knowledge and intent, d) were basically a transfer of money from taxpayers to banks (in yet another form) using AIG as an intermediary.

This protocol would allow non-market close outs

The purpose of the Protocol is to permit parties to agree upfront that in the event of a counterparty default, they will use Close-Out Amount valuation methodology to value trades. Close-Out Amount valuation, which was introduced in the 2002 ISDA Master Agreement, differs from the Market Quotation approach in that it allows participants more flexibility in valuation where market quotations may be difficult to obtain .

Industry participants observed the significant benefits of the Close-Out Amount approach following the default of Lehman Brothers. In launching the Close-Out Amount Protocol, ISDA is facilitating amendment of existing 1992 ISDA Master Agreements by replacing Market Quotation and, if elected, Loss with the Close-Out Amount approach .

"This is yet another example of ISDA helping the industry to coalesce around more efficient and effective practices, while maintaining flexibility," said Robert Pickel, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, ISDA. "The Protocol permits parties to value trades in the way that is most appropriate, which greatly enhances smooth functioning of the market in testing circumstances."

Zero Hedge is rarely speechless, but after receiving this email from a correlation desk trader, we simply had to hold a moment of silence for the phenomenal scam that continues unabated in the financial markets, and now has the full oversight and blessing of the U.S. government, which in turns keeps on duping U.S. taxpayers into believing everything is good.I present the insider perspective of trader Lou (who wishes to remain anonymous) in its entirety:"AIG-FP accumulated thousands of trades over the years, all essentially consisted of selling default protection. This was done via a number of structures with really only one criteria - rated at least AA- (if it fit these criteria all OK - as far as I could tell credit assessment was completely outsourced to the rating agencies).Main products they took on were always levered credit risk, credit-linked notes (collateral and CDS both had to be at least AA-, no joint probability stuff) and AAA or super senior portfolio swaps. Portfolio swaps were either corporate synthetic CDO or asset backed, effectively sub-prime wraps (as per news stories regarding GS and DB).Credit linked notes are done through single-name CDS desks and a cash desk (for the note collateral) and the portfolio swaps are done through the correlation desk. These trades were done is almost every jurisdiction - wherever AIG had an office they had IB salespeople covering them.Correlation desks just back their risk out via the single names desks - the correlation desk manages the delta/gamma according to their correlation model. So correlation desks carry model risk but very little market risk.I was mostly involved in the corporate synthetic CDO side.As these trades are unwound, the correlation desk needs to unwind the single name risk through the single name desks - effectively the AIG-FP unwinds caused massive single name protection buying. This caused single name credit to massively underperform equities - run a chart from say last September to current of say S&P 500 and Itraxx - credit has underperformed massively.I can only guess/extrapolate what sort of PnL this put into the major global banks (both correlation and single names desks) during this period.For those to whom this is merely a lot of mumbo-jumbo, let me explain in layman's terms:AIG, knowing it would need to ask for much more capital from the Treasury imminently, decided to throw in the towel, and gifted major bank counter-parties with trades which were egregiously profitable to the banks, and even more egregiously money losing to the U.S. taxpayers, who had to dump more and more cash into AIG, without having the U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclose the real extent of this, for lack of a better word, fraudulent scam.In simple terms think of it as an auto dealer, which knows that U.S. taxpayers will provide for an infinite amount of money to fund its ongoing sales of horrendous vehicles (think Pontiac Azteks): the company decides to sell all the cars currently in contract, to lessors atbelow the amortized market value, thereby generating huge profits for these lessors, as these turn around and sell the cars at a major profit, funded exclusively by U.S. taxpayers (readers should feel free to provide more gripping allegories).What this all means is that the statements by major banks, i.e. JPM, Citi, and BofA, regarding abnormal profitability in January and February were true, howeverFor banks to proclaim their profitability in January and February is about as close to criminal hypocrisy as is possible. And again, the taxpayers fund this "one time profit", which causes a market rally, thus allowing the banks to promptly turn around and start selling more expensive equity (soon coming to a prospectus near you), also funded by taxpayers' money flows into the market. If the administration is truly aware of all these events (and if Zero Hedge knows about it, it is safe to say Tim Geithner also got the memo), then the potential fallout would be staggering once this information makes the light of day.And the conspiracy thickens.Thanks to an intrepid reader who pointed this out, a month ago ISDA published an amended close out protocol , i.e. CDS trade crosses that were not alligned with market bid/offers.Of course ISDA made it seem that it was doing a favor to industry participants, very likely dictating under the gun.

And, lo and behold, on the list of adhering parties, AIG takes front and center stage (together with several other parties that probably deserve the microscope treatment).

So - in simple terms, ISDA, which is the only effective supervisor of the Over The Counter CDS market, is giving its blessing for trades to occur (cross) below where there is a realistic market bid, or higher than the offer. In traditional equity markets this is a highly illegal practice. ISDA is allowing retrospective arbitrary trades to have occurred at whatever price any two parties agree on, so long as the very vague necessary and sufficient condition of "market quotations may be difficult to obtain" is met. As anyone who follows CDS trading knows, this can be extrapolated to virtually any specific single-name, index or structured product easily. In essence ISDA gave its blessing for below the radar fund transfers of questionable legality. The curious timing of this decision and the alleged abuse of CDS transaction marks by and among AIG and the big banks, is striking to say the least.

This wholesale manipulation of markets, investors and taxpayers has gone on long enough.
LeBron James has been ridiculed after people pointed out that his rant targeting “uneducated” Trump voters was itself full of linguistic errors that suggest James isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“And am I saying that the people of Ohio wasn’t educated?” the NBA star pondered. “Am I saying that some of the other states that voted for him was uneducated? They could have been or they could not have been. But that doesn’t mean it was the right choice.”

The meme below was created to highlight how James’ rant against dumb Trump voters didn’t exactly make him sound like a rocket scientist, containing at least five linguistic errors in the space of four sentences.

“LeBron, please see me after class,” the note sardonically ends.

Nobody expects LeBron to sound like the Queen of England, but if he’s going to throw shade at Trump voters for their lack of intelligence, he has to expect to get some back.

James was the most high profile figure to attack Trump over his NFL comments in the hours after the president made them in Alabama on Friday night.

As with many of the celebrities who threw their weight behind ‘take a knee’ – James campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, hilariously introducing her as ‘President Hillary Clinton’ at a rally in Cleveland just days before the election.

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:

Follow on Twitter: Follow @PrisonPlanet

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*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
While the Berenstain Bears is ostensibly a mundane and inconsequential example of the Mandela Effect, there are other instances that are so uncanny, they’re hard to ignore. For example, when Darth Vader reveals his paternalistic relationship to Luke in Star Wars, most remember him saying, “Luke, I am your father.” In ‘reality,’ he says, “No, I am your father.” While an intransigent Star Wars fan might scoff at someone who misquotes such an important scene, it can’t be ignored that most people remember it in the former. Even James Earl Jones, who voiced Darth Vader, remembers the line incorrectly.

Movie quotes aside, an example of a famous real-life event that has been brought into the mystery of the Mandela Effect regards the famous protester at Tiananmen Square. The ‘Tank Man,’ whose defiant act of rebellion, standing in front of a tank with grocery bags in hand, is remembered by many as resulting in his death from being run over. In fact, he was not run over and there is no evidence of it, but many remember his crushing demise distinctly.

This is nothing new to those familiar with the theory and there are many other examples that support it; so many that there is an entire subreddit devoted to the effect. With topics ranging from movies that never existed, to discrepancies in historical events, people vehemently claim to remember very particular things differently, but on a large, collective scale. Some people’s reactions are visceral when they experience new revelations due to the Mandela Effect, to the point of incurring panic attacks or questioning reality.

MANDELA EFFECT THEORIES AND CERN

One pragmatist theory for explaining the Mandela Effect is that it is simply a failure in collective memory. Our brains are very easily influenced by our own filters, as well as the perception of others. Many common instances of the Mandela Effect are trivial and maybe just went unnoticed in the past, or are the result of conclusions that our brains jump to based on the context of an image or video. But some are substantial, like an entire country hundreds of miles out of place.

One of the more intriguing theories that attempts to explain this phenomenon points a finger at CERN and the large hadron collider in Switzerland. CERN’s experiments are intended to find illusory particles that could potentially show evidence of a multiverse, create tiny black holes or discover dark matter. While all of this sounds very exciting, it also sounds potentially dangerous. What could possibly go wrong if we opened up a black hole in Europe, or tapped into another dimension with consequences unknown? While the scientists at CERN assure us their experiments are conducted on such a controlled, small scale as to have little, if any, negative consequences, some believe that their meddling in quantum fields has led to some strange effects, resulting in some kind of interdimensional entanglement.

One of the quantum particles that CERN has been searching for is the graviton. These elusive particles correspond with how gravity would react between different dimensions and are still only hypothetical, but the way CERN describes them is intriguing.

“If gravitons exist, it should be possible to create them at the LHC, but they would rapidly disappear into extra dimensions. Collisions in particle accelerators always create balanced events – just like fireworks – with particles flying out in all directions. A graviton might escape our detectors, leaving an empty zone that we notice as an imbalance in momentum and energy in the event. We would need to carefully study the properties of the missing object to work out whether it is a graviton escaping to another dimension or something else.”

Is CERN inducing these gravitons, creating holes to other dimensions and swapping idiosyncrasies in our world? Or are we just having a collective memory lapse?
Image caption People took the streets again on Friday in Cairo, the traditional day of protest

On chilly, rain-soaked streets, activists turned out for a peaceful march to al-Ittihadiya, the presidential palace in Cairo's well-off Heliopolis district.

"Step down, step down, Muslim Brotherhood!" and "Freedom is for us and for you!" were among the chants.

Some carried placards showing a red cross through the face of President Mohammed Morsi.

Meanwhile, in Tahrir Square, the scene of renewed clashes between protesters and police over the past week, numbers swelled to several thousand after Friday prayers.

Rallies against Mr Morsi also took place in cities along the Suez Canal where he imposed emergency measures to try to halt recent violence. Demonstrators carried pictures of young men killed in the fighting.

More than 60 people died in the latest wave of unrest that added to the sense of a deep crisis in Egypt.

The numbers at the latest demonstrations were lower than expected and greatly diminished from those seen two years ago, at the height of the Egyptian uprising.

However, they were another expression of the anger and disappointment that many Egyptians feel over the performance of their new Islamist leader who narrowly won last June's presidential election.

'New authoritarianism'

Mr Morsi's critics accuse him of betraying the values of the 2011 revolt and imposing a new brand of authoritarianism that concentrates power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, the religious organisation from which he stems.

Image caption Protesters say they want to purge the country's judiciary and interior ministry

The main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front (NSF), demands a national unity government and amendments to the new Islamist-tinged constitution. Revolutionary groups also call for reforms.

"We're not for or against Morsi. He just hasn't fulfilled his electoral promises," says Mohammed Adel, a leader of the 6 April Youth Movement which helped organise the latest protests.

"We want the constitution to be changed, we want the judiciary and interior ministry to be cleansed and we want violence by the state to stop."

The president's supporters argue that his detractors refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election and are trying to seize power through the street.

Mr Morsi has not ruled out a committee to re-examine the rushed new constitution but says a new government will be decided after parliamentary elections in a few months.

"After the elections we will have a parliament chosen by the people. It is the duty of parliament to make a new government," he told journalists on Wednesday.

Al-Azhar agreement

This week brought a stern warning from the head of the military that continuing political strife could cause the collapse of the state.

Egypt's army 490,000 active soldiers

Military governed between February 2011 until June 2012

Gen Abdul Fattah al-Sisi (pictured above) is head of the armed forces and minister of defence

Military's budget not made public or scrutinised by parliament. It is overseen by National Defence Committee made up of military chiefs and cabinet members

US military aid to Egypt $1.3bn

According to some estimates army controls 40% of economy Profile: Abdul Fattah al-Sisi Suez: the city fighting a curfew Q&A: Egypt's riots and political crisis Black Bloc anarchists emerge

Afterwards, Egypt's Grand Imam summoned rival political factions, youth groups and church officials to the headquarters of al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old institution that is the top seat of Sunni Islam.

They agreed to sign up to a charter condemning violence and committed to dialogue as a way to end the crisis.

It prompted the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohammed ElBaradei, a leader of the NSF, to speak of his "optimism" while the head of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, Saad el-Katatni, declared it "a historic day".

The agreement appeared to help take away the impetus for further mass protests on what activists had called "The Friday of Salvation".

A lot of Egyptians are also weary of demonstrations or are worried about their personal safety.

Egypt on edge

The economy was already teetering before the latest turmoil. Tourism and foreign investment have fallen dramatically. The central bank has been forced to drain currency reserves to prop up the Egyptian pound.

"The country is going down. It's worse now than under the old president," said one man observing protesters at the entrance to Tahrir Square.

Another bystander chimed in: "[The former president, Hosni] Mubarak was lousy and he was a thief but at least we had security and we were living".

Parts of central Cairo have become no-go areas for many ordinary people with reports of a spike in sexual assaults and increased crime and lawlessness.

The Nile-side luxury hotel, the Semiramis InterContinental, has been closed after masked men looted it early on Tuesday, terrifying guests.

"This is a disaster," said small businessman, Gamal.

"I have loans that I can't repay. We need tourism to come back, we need the economy to come back and we need a strong leader who can make the right decisions."
New York City is a battlefield. I know what you’re thinking — psychological warfare, the endless grim clashing of economic forces — but I am being literal. When we ponder America’s defining war, the Revolution, we think of Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Lexington and Concord, yet its largest battle, a vast and ferociously fought chess match in August and September of 1776, right after the formal declaration of the colonies’ independence, ranged over what are now the five boroughs. As to why the place was so hotly contested, you already know the answer. Then, as now, as ever, New York City was the center of it all. Both sides believed that if the British took control of New York and the Hudson River, the American resistance would likely collapse.

The battle isn’t as well known today as other encounters during the Revolution, in part because the city has done an excellent job of removing most traces of it. Where Boston sets aside hallowed historic precincts and wends a handsome brick Freedom Trail through its Revolutionary sites, New York City buries its past under mountains of concrete and steel. Hills have been flattened, islands swallowed up by landfill, shorelines redrawn.

But I was determined to find Revolutionary New York, and I did eventually, after a fashion. It helped that I had an organizing principle. I was researching a book, and, since my book isn’t about military strategy I wasn’t trying to cover all of the complex maneuverings of troops. I write narrative history, which to me means focusing on people’s lives. Getting to know the places in which those lives unfolded helps me in my efforts to get into the individuals’ heads and hearts.
Twilight sparkleboyfriend Robert Pattinson is starring in a new movie, premiering Friday, about a young couple falling in love in New York. It's all romantic and silly, until the film's exploitative gotcha! ending. Want to know what it is?

New York Magazine ran the spoiler a couple of weeks ago, and now the Village Voice, the third "Top Critic" review on RottenTomatoes, just spilled the beans. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter kept slightly more mum about the ending, alluding only to some grim foreshadowing of Lower Manhattan skylines...

The end?

Everything is hunkydory for most of the film. Two young sexys — Bobby Patentleather, crazy Claire from Lost — meet cute during college in the gray whirlwind of New York. They battle past sadnesses, mean daddies, and cigarette addictions on their course to true love. They get married and the Vampyr heads off to his first day of grownup man work. He goes up and up in an elevator and everyone in the audience is saying "My, that's an awfully tall building, where does he work exactly?" And then, can you guess it?

9/11.

Edward Pattinson dies of 9/11 at the very end of Remember Me and all the film's happiness goes with him. This is their shocker! It's like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had featured just a few more vampire sexpots. And if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had used a national tragedy as an opportunistic, zam-bang! instant-meaning hook at the end, rather than throughout the whole book.

So well done, filmmakers! Doesn't this oddly make you want to see it? And it makes us curious whether more critics will get so upset/annoyed/tickled by the hokum ending of a twinklevampire movie that they too will let the 9/11 cat out of the 9/11 bag.
SpaceX announced an audacious plan on Wednesday to land an approximately 6,000kg spacecraft on the surface of Mars. This simple declaration from the uber-popular rocket company drew a ton of questions from all quarters, and Ars spoke to a range of people across the space industry to get some answers. How big a milestone would this be? Can SpaceX do it? Is the plan realistic? And why does Rice play Texas, anyway? (OK, we didn't actually try to figure out that last one.)

Is this really a big deal?

Oh, heavens, yes. No private company has ever launched a significant, independently financed expedition into deep space, let alone all the way to Mars. In fact, only two world powers have ever softly landed spacecraft on Mars. The United States has done so half a dozen times, and the Soviet Union did it once with Mars 3 in 1971—although the vehicle failed after sending back just 15 seconds of data. And all previous soft landings have been relatively small and light; SpaceX is talking about landing a Dragon weighing about 6,000kg on the surface of Mars. The previous landing heavyweight was Curiosity, at 900kg. Soft-landing a 6,000kg object on Mars would be a stunning achievement for NASA or any government-backed space agency. For a private company, it's unheard of.

Can they do it?

Why not? In just the last six months, SpaceX has successfully launched and then recovered the first stages of multiple Falcon 9 rockets, first landing them on the ground and then later landing on an autonomous drone ship. SpaceX is known for making bold promises, and—eventually—delivering on them. However, the company has missed deadlines before, and making the 2018 launch window to Mars will be a real challenge.

What’s so challenging about the timeframe?

The 2018 launch presupposes that the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket will be ready to fly by 2018. That launch vehicle, capable of hefting 53 tons to low-Earth orbit (almost twice the ground-to-LEO payload capacity of the Space Shuttle), has already slipped in its development several times. SpaceX is now talking about a test flight by the end of this year, but there is low confidence in the launch industry that the company will make the deadline.

One reason for the delays may be complexity: Falcon Heavy combines three Falcon 9 core stages for a total of 27 engines. Nevertheless, when SpaceX gets the vehicle flying, Falcon Heavy's economy is tantalizing, slashing the cost of getting tons of cargo into space. If the vehicle isn’t ready for 2018, the launch would likely slip to 2020, when the next window for a fast transit to Mars opens.

If SpaceX gets the big rocket to work, then what?

Probably the biggest remaining hurdle would be planetary protection. Attorney Michael Listner, founder of Space Law and Policy Solutions, explained to Ars that Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty requires countries to ensure that launches from within their borders take precautionary measures to prevent contamination of other planets. If SpaceX can’t demonstrate that it's complying with the terms of the treaty with Red Dragon, decontaminating both the inside and outside of the vehicle, the Federal Aviation Administration could withhold a launch license. Phil Larson, a SpaceX official, said the company is working toward meeting the requirements. “SpaceX takes planetary protection seriously, and we are working with relevant NASA officials to ensure proper procedures are followed,” he told Ars.

Is SpaceX working with NASA, then?

NASA is providing advice and guidance to SpaceX through a Space Act Agreement. The agency and the company have been long-time partners through NASA’s commercial cargo and commercial crew programs, and this continued cooperation is an extension of that relationship. It's likely that NASA, with its assets in orbit around Mars, will help facilitate communication between the Red Dragon and Earth. But NASA is not providing any funds to support the effort to land a Dragon on Mars.

What’s in it for NASA?

Soft-landing on Mars is complicated because of the planet's extremely thin atmosphere. According to Tabatha Thompson, a spokeswoman for NASA, the agency is interested in potentially cribbing from whatever techniques SpaceX uses to slow and land the Red Dragon. “The collaboration offers NASA the potential flight technology demonstration of critical entry, descent, and landing for human exploration—particularly supersonic retro-propulsion—in the Mars atmosphere," Thompson explained. "SpaceX has sought NASA’s support because the agency has unique expertise in deep space exploration in areas such as deep space communication and navigation.” A successful mission may also open the door to future cooperation between SpaceX and NASA's aims to return soil samples from the surface of Mars.

How much will it cost?

SpaceX isn't saying. The Falcon Heavy list price for a launch is $135 million, and then there’s the cost of the Dragon spacecraft, the mission planning, executing and monitoring the flight, and any number of other factors. Industry sources speculate that the cost probably would be in the range of at $300 million to $500 million for a soup-to-nuts mission. That's just a guess, though—no hard numbers are available.

Why is SpaceX doing this?

Because Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. As noted earlier, one of the most important first steps is figuring out how to land stuff on the red planet, which has a thin atmosphere and therefore doesn't provide a very effective medium for aerobraking. A spacecraft must attain a great velocity (and therefore invest a lot of energy) to reach Mars in six to nine months, and once it's there, it must then somehow shed that energy and slow down. Musk believes the upgraded Dragon 2 spacecraft will be able to use its eight SuperDraco engines to hammer away at its velocity and then land on Mars in a powered descent, similar to the way the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon. This too is technology NASA would be eager to see demonstrated.

But the only way to be sure is to give it a try without cargo or people. If this test works, Musk will have checked one of many boxes required to safely send humans to Mars.

Doesn’t NASA have plans to go to Mars, too?

Yes, NASA says it's on a Journey to Mars, although there is some skepticism in the aerospace community about how real that venture actually is. NASA is cooperating with SpaceX on its Red Dragon mission, but if SpaceX is successful, it could prove embarrassing for the space agency (though the real shame more appropriately lies with policymakers). NASA has spent nearly $20 billion on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion space capsule to date, and in the absolute best-case scenario will fly them around the Moon at the end of 2018. How would the public react if a private company can, largely on its own dime, develop nearly comparable vehicles and fly all the way to Mars in the same year?

But, again, can a private company really do this?

Ars put that question to Rick Tumlinson, an aerospace entrepreneur and de facto evangelist for the "New Space" movement—that cadre of young companies like SpaceX that are trying to break the mold of traditional aerospace. “We’re seeing a paradigm shift,” Tumlinson told us. “It’s like a roller coaster moment. You slowly get to the top, and you’re rolling along like we've been, and then all of a sudden it’s going to accelerate. What we’re seeing is the beginning of that with exploration.” Tumlinson argued that in 2016 the SpaceXs, the Blue Origins, and other new space companies are doing remarkable things in space.

If SpaceX succeeds, what comes next?

Like Musk, Tumlinson is one of the true believers in settlement on other worlds, and he thinks the true purpose of NASA and the nation’s space program should be to enable humans to move into the solar system. The Red Dragon mission would lay down a marker, he said. “Being able to demonstrate that you are capable of putting a spacecraft on Mars that is in the range of one needed to carry the first humans there—that is firing the first shot of a revolution that’s going to lead to the settlement of space," Tumlinson said. "Being able to show you can land that kind of spacecraft puts you on a track that people have to take seriously.”

In short, if Red Dragon does land, it validates Musk's vision of colonizing Mars. Keep your hands and feet inside the ride, because this roller coaster only gets faster from here.
There is no shortage of things to protest when it comes to this small Middle Eastern country. From the raging war next door, to its repercussions, to the rampant corruption, human rights abuses, the disappearance of elections, rising unemployment, emigration, crippled institutions, and pollution -the grounds are endless. However, when one looks at Lebanon, protests are virtually non-existent on a large scale at least, not since the 2015 garbage-fueled summer demonstrations -which were an exception to the rule- died out.

At every turn of events we witness as those directly impacted take to the streets in small numbers. It is a rarity to see any significant form of consequential solidarity on the advent of crises. Take the kidnapped Lebanese soldiers debacle and the resurfaced waste management disaster for instance. The only protests that occurred related to these issues were those organized by a handful of citizens even though the repercussions of said crises are wide-reaching.

In a bid to better understand what has been repeatedly described as a self-induced state of perpetual sleep, I revisited some studies pertaining to cognitive behavior in high stress environments. While I may not be an expert in the field, these models that I am about to present certainly struck a chord.

Dissociation: The Hidden Epidemic

This seemingly somnambulistic behavioral pattern as exhibited by many Lebanese when it comes to civil rights may in large be due to what psychologists refer to as dissociation.

Dissociation is “an adaptive defense in response to high stress or trauma characterized by short or long term memory loss and a sense of disconnection from oneself or one’s surroundings.” (After all how many times have we questioned our attention span and our collective memory?) According to Marlene Steinberg and Maxine Schnall, the authors of “The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation – The Hidden Epidemic,” dissociation is a defense mechanism employed to detach oneself from the emotional stimuli that victims have been or are continuously being exposed to. In other terms, it helps us cope with stressful situations, which may otherwise feel overwhelming.

Dissociation can happen in varying degrees, from mild to aggressive. In fact it is so wide-ranging that many of us remain oblivious to our very own dissociation -a vital part of our ingrained survival system. Ever driven a car to a destination only to realize upon arriving that you cannot remember a large part of your trip? That’s mild dissociation; a disconnection from part of oneself to the environment.

In Lebanon, anecdotal evidence suggests that this pattern seems to have been adopted as the general mode de vie, whereby even the most abhorrent of circumstances can just make their way into becoming another addition to the myriad problems already at hand. As a result, a feeling of powerlessness ensues. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds itself.

Dissociation and PTSD; past and present:

Dissociation is a sub-type of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a mental health condition triggered by a terrifying event and most commonly diagnosed in war veterans. Several studies indicate that a significant part of the Lebanese population who lived through the 1975-1990 Civil War carry the trauma of the bloody years that saw the killing of over 250,000 civilians and thousands of forced disappearances.

According to studies, rates of PTSD and depression reach a staggering 30% in some areas, affecting many children and adolescents as well as adults. PTSD may delay developmental processes by causing regression, dependence on substance abuse and dissociation, putting the brain in a perpetual state of self-defense.

When the brain is in defense mode it exhibits symptoms that include amnesia (loss of memory for short or long periods of time), depersonalization (feeling detached from one’s body or one’s emotions), derealization (feeling detached from one’s surroundings or people), identity confusion (uncertainty, conflict about who you are), and identity alteration (alterations in personality and behavior).

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Dissociation reduces motivation:

As mentioned above, dissociation occurs when confrontation with overwhelming experience from which actual escape is not possible alters consciousness in a way that allows those affected to continue functioning under fierce conditions. In other words, and under a state of dissociation, when inconvenient situations are ignored, sufferers are afforded the illusion of their disappearance if only momentarily. Another addition to dissociation is depersonalization, which means that if calamity does not involve one’s group directly, it can be easily swept to the side.

Dr. Susan Rosenthal, author of Power and Powerlessness, says “dissociation mentally disconnects us from intolerable experiences. When thinking brings pain, dissociation helps people to move through life without thinking; we shut out the world or imagine it to be much safer than it really is. By numbing fear, anger and pain, dissociation creates a false sense of safety, reducing our motivation to remove the dangers that threaten us.”

“Severe dissociation numbs compassion and empathy, making it possible for people to do cruel and monstrous things that they would never do in a non-dissociated state.”

Perhaps this can explain why the Lebanese party scene thrived as Israeli bombs ravaged parts of Beirut and South Lebanon during the 2006 war, or why people now feel paralyzed in the face of countless problems. It also explains everyday behavioral patterns that allow many of us to continue functioning when cataclysms, such as terrorist attacks or remote conflicts, occur.

Dissociation, the media and politics:

According to Dr. Rosenthal, the media encourage mass dissociation when calamities such as war are covered in a sanitized manner and include commentary that “drips with lies.” “Doublespeak”, she says, promotes dissociation to make the unacceptable acceptable. “Invasion is defense; civilian deaths are collateral damage; a freedom fighter is a terrorist working for us; and a terrorist is a freedom fighter working for them. Politicians revel in doublespeak.”

“Dissociation separates contradictory experiences to avoid internal conflict, making it possible to love our own children and support wars that kill other people’s children; to want freedom and support wars that deny others their freedom. To feel outrage at being robbed and support wars that rob the people of other lands.”

Dissociation in the face of terrible injustice is mistakenly perceived as a lack of caring instead of what it really is: a psychological defense against feeling powerless, Rosenthal concludes.

In Lebanon, press institutions are structured around a fundamental schism. On the one hand, there is media that act as a profit making enterprise, gravitating towards neutrality rather that objectivity in order to safeguard access to the powerful, and thus investing heavily in sensationalism in order to increase viewership. On the other, there is media that act as a politically affiliated initiative and is devoted to contextualizing the truth in a way which is beneficial to their party. This media model relies heavily on donations from politicians or well-connected individuals, even though such a thing is against the law.

The result? A weak democracy and an even weaker electorate, fueling a never ending cycle of dissociation and powerlessness.

Dissociation feeds oligarchy, systemic powerlessness:

American presidential nominee Donald Trump can easily be likened to any of our homegrown Lebanese politicians with his tax-evading shenanigans, sexist statements and racist gabble. Like local lawmakers and executives, Trump relies on fear and the power dynamic. In other words he makes the dissociated powerless feel more powerful and in that context nothing else matters. In Lebanon dissociation and powerlessness are the prevailing tropes, and ordinary citizens rely on a structure that supports a multitude of mini Donald Trumps, or what its commonly referred to as the “za’im” (meaning: leader).

While this system predates Lebanon’s 1975-1990 Civil War that reintroduced dissociation en masse as a method of survival, it thrived throughout the bloody years and continues, alongside the ingrained powerlessness of the people, to be the modus operandi of the national political landscape. Without dissociation and an overbearing feeling of powerlessness many Lebanese would not have taken part in the bloodshed that lasted so many years, nor would they have sworn allegiance to leaders on the premise of momentary power in an otherwise helpless situation.

Years after the end of the Civil War dissociation and powerlessness remain the dominant force at play. The powerful leaders of that war are currently the country’s Ministers and MPs thanks to an amnesty law that allows them to remain in power, widening the gap between the wealthy elite and the people. This structure has largely remained unchallenged even in the face of rampant corruption, culminated in the worst era of governmental performance yet.

Poverty, pacification policies seal the deal:

Material wealth equals power and as Lebanon’s economy continues to nosedive, so do its people become more powerless. This isn’t the case for the ruling oligarchs and their circle of elites who keep their riches out of state coffers through a ‘Wealth Defense Industry’: a cadre of professionals hired to lobby government and advise ways of hiding wealth, often through keeping it in tax havens.

The Wealth Defense Industry’s main objective is to maintain and increase the power and wealth of the elite. In turn, and as part of maintenance works, those in power implement pacification policies, and band aid to bullet wound fixes. They keep things barely running but not bad enough to ignite a revolution. The only way out of poverty comes in the form of making connections with the major game-players. To do that one has to swear allegiance and undying loyalty in exchange for a price or a job. This artificial system (which the Israeli government is widely known for using) ensures that a segment of the population is comfortable enough to suppress any potential uprising. To protect the status quo this segment would find it difficult to abandon privilege for the sake of larger national goals such as restorative justice. As a result, helplessness again prevails and feeds the dissociation mechanism.

How to break free:

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Lebanon cannot move forward without adequately dealing with its past. Anything short of that is leading us to the same results. Although there is a general attitude that seeks to bury the wounds of war, it is counter constructive to continue to pretend that these scars do not exist. The ghost of the events that occurred in the past are still haunting us today; they are on our televisions, in our media, inside parliament and inside our minds. They are being passed down from one generation to the next, feeding the cycle and the broken system; feeding dissociation, separateness and powerlessness. To overcome this we first must agree to openly discuss trauma, mental health illnesses, and inherited and learned behavioral patterns without restraint, without shame.

The overall mental health state of a society is a determining factor in its functionality. Mental health issues and self-serving behavioral patterns in Lebanon have long been dismissed as farce at worst and survivalist at best; our general attitude sees them as both contradictory and coexisting weaknesses and strength rather than obstacles, and for that we are paying a high price. Our mental health system is broken and badly funded. (According to a WHO assessment, the budget for Mental Health in Lebanon constitutes only 5% of the general health budget.) Our capacity for sound judgement is clouded with confusion and misinformation. As a result, these alignments continue to reinforce a system that is disintegrative and exploitative.

Combating oligarchy and dissociation is no easy business, especially when external threats that first reinforced those patterns -war and conflict- loom. According to Jeffrey Winters, author of “Oligarchy,” the mechanisms needed when fighting such a system on a technical front include reducing the power of money in shaping politics, ensuring equal opportunities for escaping poverty, and the redrafting of a tax system that invests in creating widespread prosperity and growth. In other words, wealth needs to be redistributed as a first step towards democratizing a nation and strengthening its institutions. Unfortunately our very own institutions have come to be weakened and polarized between the one for the poor and one for the privileged. This polarization reinforces oligarchy and inequality. Without strong institutions, the people come to rely more on their za’ims, and are coerced into favoring privatization (which serves the zai’ms and their inner circle) over restorative public policies. This is turn feeds the cycle of powerlessness and separateness.

On another front, our education system must include civic engagement, and the development of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make a difference through political and non-political processes. We must learn to overcome our differences in a civil manner, to empower the electorate, to inform the young and old and to contribute positively to an issue even if the issue does not affect us personally. This will restore a sense of community and nationhood.

The current system at play is unsustainable at best and self-destructive at worst. Policies of pacification, separateness, poverty and dependence wreak havoc on both land and people. The less engaged, less aware the nation is, the heavier it is on its environment and well-being. This unmistakably affects the quality of life for current and future generations, ensuring a bad ending especially with the threat of climate change, population growth and climate migration. The time to look at that stranger in the mirror has come; deflection is no longer a luxury we can afford.
By Wild

Wild here again, and I’ve got us another battle report in preparation for Crucible. For this tournament Rhyas’ full Rearguard theme list was in, as was Thagrosh the Messiah with the Archangel. The tournament was also notable for us as being the final event before we go to Crucible, and several of us were preparing, including two of my opponents. Once again, I forgot to take pictures, but luckily for my 2nd round, Anthony from Frozen Kommander was my opponent and took pictures of the end of each turn starting from his 1st turn. Check out his youtube channel here. That out of the way, time to go over the two lists I’m running.

List One: Rearguard theme force, Tier 4

• Rhyas, Sigil of Everblight

• Succubus

• Nephilim Soldier

• Typhon

• Shredder

• Blighted Nyss Swordsmen 10-man

• Swordsmen Abbot and Champion

• Blighted Ogrun Warspears 5-man

• Blighted Warspear Chieftan

• Blighted Ogrun Warspears 5-man

• Blighted Warspear Chieftan

• Blighted Nyss Shpeard

• Warmonger War Chief

• Warmonger War Chief

Coming in at 50 points, Rearguard acts as not only my infantry list, but also my “Hold the Line” list. There are 3 major points to this tier. The first is at Tier 1, Stealth for the entire army turn 1. This alone wouldn’t sound so bad if Tier 4 didnt exist: All Blighted Ogrun models gain Advance Deployment. That’s 14 models 13-16” already in from the board edge….and stealthed. Heavy Infantry no less. Tier 3 is the icing on the cake, allowing Rhyas to place her Upkeep spells Occultation and Rapport for free before deployment. Standing in at FURY 5, this allows her to have both spells out and cast Dash out on Turn 1, allowing with proper placement her entire infantry army a SPD Buff. Her warbeasts don’t benefit, but since Typhon and the others are acting as a second line along with the Swordsmen, this is not an issue. Now the other list:

List Two: Thagrosh the Messiah

• Thagrosh the Messiah

• Archangel

• Succubus

• Carnivean

• Shredder

• Shredder

• Shredder

• Spawning Vessel

• Blighted Nyss Hex Hunters

• Bayal, Hound of Everblight

And here is my secondary, the beast heavy Thagrosh list. With the inclusion of the Archangel and the Carnivean, Thagrosh has the Hex Hunters as advance forces, though it does have skornergy in that Thagrosh is an Abomination, and the Hex Hunters + the Succubus are not. It’s a dangerous combination. Their job is to break through and assassinate the target, especially with Rabid + Manifest Destiny.

With three rounds, my opponents were Trolls, Khador, and Trolls again. Sadly I did not get a chance to get the list for my first round, but I’ll go over and fill in as much as I can. On to round 1.

Round 1: Scenario – Incursion

An old favorite, this scenario changed from last year. The middle flag no longer disappears, though it doesn’t score as much, whether you dominate it or not it’s still the same. The outer flag if you dominate it is worth 2 points. As for the opponent’s list, in advance I must apologize, as I am missing about 8 points, working completely from memory. Also all the pictures for round 1 will be through vassal, so they’re approximations.

• Grissel Bloodsong, Marshal of the Kriels

• Troll Axer

• Troll Impaler

• Dire Troll Mauler

• Trollkin Runebearer

• Krielstone Bearer and Stonescribes

• Krielstone Elder

• Trollkin Warders 5-man

• Trollkin Warders 5-man

• Janissa Stonetide

• Stone Scribe Chronicler

Opting to go first, my Rhyas list is selected against this matchup. With Rhyas in the middle, my Swordsmen took the right while my Ogrun AD into the left and right flanks, with the War Chiefs directly in front of Rhyas. Swordsmen get their stealth and Typhon maintains his Rapport. His force mirrors my own with Grissel staying in the middle along with the Bearer unit behind and to the right, while the Warders stay on the flanks. The units directly opposing my own are their prey. Aside from one forest, terrain never came up.

End of turn 1 comes up and he has popped his feat in anticipation of the Warspears coming in.

Round 2 begins, and the left flag disappears, leaving only the right flag. The Warspears are fully walking into a wall against their prey, it was just a matter of could they break the brick. The combination of Assault, Charge Attacks, Prey and the number that could see the War Chiefs….resulted in the right flank holding their line, while the left flank lost more hitboxes and at least one death. The presence of the feat, their battle-driven, and the Krielstone made sure they weren’t breaking or losing anyone. The feat was also in play, and the combination of attacks ate away at my deathclock, leaving me with 30 minutes left. This was in direct opposition to my opponent’s, who had still 50 minutes. Also at all times, Janissa placed a wall in the way, I’m just being lazy to show it but it is there as an influence. I did however end my turn with the Nephilim Soldier basing the flag, forcing a response from my opponent and controlling the tempo of the game.

On his turn, the War Chiefs are quickly dispatched of and the Swordsmen fall under attack by Grissel. Grissel also lands attacks by Rhyas, not hitting her directly however. The Shepard and Succubus both fall quickly in the blasts. The Mauler is the only one capable of responding to the Soldier in the end, and is forced to deal with the light, and kill it. It was also the only warbeast in dangerous distance of Grissel. Janissa prevents a potential assassination with her wall.

Round 3 begins, and Typhon quickly deals a lot of damage but not killing the Mauler. Rhyas sees to that and steals the precious fury. Sprinting back to base to base with the flag, she makes a nearly critical mistake of keeping Occultation on her Swordsmen, though with other targets and priority its unknown which was the wiser move. The left flank forces the side to fold up more, but they’re keeping the body count even. The right flank however slowly with their heavily damaged side keeps dwindling the Wardens, thanks to the arrival of the Swordsmen. However the aura prevents a total collapse of the right flank. I do score a point for dominating the flag. Legion 1-0

Back to the Trollbloods, and with a combination of transfers and shots, force Rhyas to transfer to Typhon, and Typhon is eventually killed along with the Shredder. The Warspears on the left lose more, down to two men. The Axer and Krielstone bearers are in the fray now, tearing and jamming it up. Note by now most of the Swordsmen are dead, how many actually survived, I do not remember. But the Prey is kept as the Warspears who did not take the brunt on the right side barely get damaged. Of special note is an AOE that did not hit Rhyas but did create a patch of rough terrain at a point between herself and Typhon before he died. I am no longer in control of the point, but nothing is in base to base.

Round 4, and endgame is upon us. My force is no longer capable of taking out the caster. However, my front line did do something, prevent the Trolls from advancing to the flags. The right flag is unmolested, and while unable to be reached by Dash, is capable of a full sprint from Rhyas to get there. Knowing that my army can last for one more turn and is much faster, I put it into motion. Of EXTREME Special note is the time at the start of this round: 10 minutes left. Only critical movements were done, as the last Swordsmen fought and killed Krielstone Bearers. The Axer is the only thing capable of contesting it at this point, and is not a heavy warbeast.

His turn consists of killing the last few swordsmen left in the way of the Axer, and running the Axer to get close to Rhyas, preventing the Final 2 points as I dominated and scored for 3-0 on my turn.

The final round, and with only 5 minutes left Rhyas cuts herself for her 5, and kills the Axer. The sprint caps the objective and ends the game. Time left: 3 minutes on my clock, about 17 left on his.

The second round coming soon….
Over the years, I've learned to be cautious with C++ pointers. In particular, I'm always very careful about who owns a given pointer, and who's in charge of calling delete on it. But my caution often forces me to write deliberately inefficient functions. For example:

vector < string > tokenize_string ( const string & text );

Here, we have a large string text , and we want to split it into a vector of tokens. This function is nice and safe, but it allocates one string for every token in the input. Now, if we were feeling reckless, we could avoid these allocations by returning a vector of pointers into text :

vector < pair < const char * , const char *>> tokenize_string2 ( const string & text );

In this version, each token is represented by two pointers into text : One pointing to the first character, and one pointing just beyond the last character.1 But this can go horribly wrong:

// Disaster strikes! auto v = tokenize_string2 ( get_input_string ()); munge ( v );

Why does this fail? The function get_input_string returns a temporary string, and tokenize_string2 builds an array of pointers into that string. Unfortunately, the temporary string only lives until the end of the current expression, and then the underlying memory is released. And so all our pointers in v now point into oblivion—and our program just wound up getting featured in a CERT advisory. So personally, I'm going to prefer the inefficient tokenize_string function almost every time.

Rust lifetimes to the rescue!

Going back to our original design, let's declare a type Token . Each token is either a Word or an Other , and each token contains pointers into a pre-existing string. In Rust, we can declare this as follows:

# [ deriving ( Show , PartialEq )] enum Token < 'a > { Word ( & 'a str ), Other ( & 'a str ) }

The type &str represents a slice of a pre-existing String . It's sort of like the pair<const char *,const char *> in C++. But the really interesting part here is the 'a . This is a named lifetime parameter, and it says, “A value of type Token has the same lifetime as the &str that it contains.”

Looking at the LLVM intermediate representation, Token looks like a nice, efficient data structure. It appears to be a tag byte for the enum, some padding, and two pointers for the &str :

%"enum.Token<[]>" = type { i8, [7 x i8], [2 x i64] }

Update: According to keeperofdakeys, those last two i64 values are actually a pointer and a length.

Parsing safely

Now we can define a safe tokenize_string3 function. Here, the function delaration says, “We take an input value of type &str with lifetime 'a , and we return a Vec<Token> where each token has lifetime 'a .”

fn tokenize_string3 < 'a > ( text : & 'a str ) -> Vec < Token < 'a >> { let mut result = vec! []; for cap in regex! ( r "( \ w+)|( \ W+)" ) .captures_iter ( text ) { let token = if cap .pos ( 1 ) .is_some () { Word ( cap .at ( 1 )) } else { Other ( cap .at ( 2 )) }; result .push ( token ); } result }

This works quite nicely:

# [ test ] fn test_parse_safe () { assert_eq! ( vec! [ Word ( "The" ), Other ( " " ), Word ( "cat" )], tokenize_string3 ( "The cat" )); }

But what if we destroy text early?

But let's rewrite this function to work like our C++ code, where our temporary string was destroyed before we tried to use our tokens:

# [ test ] fn test_parse_unsafe () { let v = { let text = "The cat" .to_string (); tokenize_string3 ( text .as_slice ()) }; assert_eq! ( vec! [ Word ( "The" ), Other ( " " ), Word ( "cat" )], v ); }

Rust detects the error, and refuses to compile test_parse_unsafe :

main.rs:67:26: 67:30 error: `text` does not live long enough main.rs:67 tokenize_string3(text.as_slice()) ^~~~ main.rs:64:24: 70:2 note: reference must be valid for the block at 64:23... (…code snippet deleted…) main.rs:65:17: 68:6 note: ...but borrowed value is only valid for the block at 65:16 (…code snippet deleted…)

In other words, we can do all kinds of apparently reckless things with pointers, and Rust backs us up.

There are some good discussions of alternative C++ versions on Hacker News, /r/programming and /r/rust. But just to clarify:
The Apple Watch is set sell millions in its first year on shelves. Already the new, quite possibly redundant, gadget has moved over 2 million in preorders alone, and analysts are betting on anywhere from 9 to 30 million sold in the first year.

That's out of myriad different models ranging from just a few hundred dollars for the iPeasant version, to as much as $17,000 for the Apple Watch Edition, with the high-end settling on the customized, diamond-studded Lux Watch Omni which costs a measly $114,995.

If you see someone wearing an Apple Watch that cost over $100,000...well, just know that somewhere there's a Swiss watch-maker rolling over in their grave.

The first Apple Watches are shipping out this week, but the entire roll-out of the wearable is of the "soft launch" variety, rolling out to stores later in the summer. Customers will need appointments at Apple Stores to demo and purchase the watch, because suddenly Apple doesn't like lines outside its stores.

This is one silver lining, no pun intended. The Apple device lines are among the most irritating phenomena of our age.

Indeed, the entire Apple hype machine ranks among the most irritating phenomena of our age. While the company has done marvelous work in the realm of marketing and product design---and I don't begrudge them one ounce of success---the willingness of the masses to simply hop aboard that train irks me to no end. I am a reverse-snob in this regard, I admit it.

In one sense, it's quite remarkable that Apple Watch sales are projected to be so high, while Android smart watches have made very little of a dent in the fledgling tech genre. There's little reason to believe the Apple Watch will be such a huge step up over the competition, and Pebble still seems like the smart way to go if you want actual functionality and not just hipster-tech social signaling.

Then again, as Forbes contributor Paul Lamkin notes "With the Pebble considered a smartwatch success story after around 1 million sales, and Android Wear causing only a minor blip with its estimated 1 – 1.5 million device sales across its multi-branded range in the platform’s first year of existence, the Apple Watch could be the benchmark-raising saviour of a slow-burning new tech genre."

A rising tide lifts all boats or some such. It's the Starbucks effect, where the rise of the massive coffee chain actually boosted mom-and-pop cafes all across the country rather than put them out of business. The iPhone in many ways paved the way for other smartphones; the iPad opened the floodgates for Android tablets and even Windows 8 tablets. So it will go with the Apple Watch---while it's late to the party, it's nonetheless the wearables' vanguard, come to ready the teeming masses.

But I can't help myself: Smartwatches already strike me as superfluous.

True, there's something kind of neat about being able to check your texts and step totals and Twitter at the flick of a wrist---but my phone is already right there in my pocket, or on the table, and its screen is way, way bigger. The added expense of an Apple Watch to an iPhone setup doesn't strike me as a particularly good value proposition.

It's much more for show, for style, for fashion, for signaling than for functionality, of course, and as a rather more utilitarian techie, I guess that just rubs me the wrong way. It must be my inner-Luddite, or just the budding curmudgeon in me, but I think we're already overly connected. My smartphone is enough of a distraction from the world. But at least we smartphone owners keep ours in our pockets rather than sporting them around on our wrists for all the world to see in all their gaudy splendor.

While Apple and its app-developers may need to find ways to not annoy Apple Watch wearers, the wearers themselves may be a source of annoyance for the rest of us (though I don't recommend shaming them the way non-smokers have attempted to shame smokers. Fighting rudeness with more of the same strikes me as fairly awful.)

In any case, I'm hardly alone in thinking this.

“These smartwatches can be as annoying as our smartphones and more visible since you wear them,” says Pamela Eyring, the president of The Protocol School of Washington according to MarketWatch. “But smartphones can be hidden easier when you’re with people since you can tuck them into a handbag or jacket pocket.”

Others suggest that perhaps social norms surrounding acceptable watch-checking behavior will shift, though not any time soon.

“Yes, norms shift," manners-expert and author Henry Hitchings writes to New York Magazine. "We feel different about someone taking a phone call in our presence from how our grandparents might have felt about it. But modern communications technology, of which the Apple Watch is of course just one example, has created uncertainty rather than a new set of social certainties. And while some people may applaud the social fluidity that results from that, there are obvious problems to do with our confusion about privacy, ownership, the distinction between the real and the virtual, and so on.”

This uncertainty is emphasized by the fact that the Apple Watch is part of our attire, Hitchings also notes, which brings up deeper questions of how we set social norms and boundaries.

Call me a traditionalist hold-out but I believe that a watch's core mission is simply to keep the time. It shouldn't have to be charged every day. I shouldn't have to wake it up in order to check the time. And it shouldn't be designed with planned obsolescence in mind.

The truth of the matter is this: Your Apple Watch will be out-of-date in a year or two. Even your $17,000 model will seem slow and clunky compared to whatever Apple makes in 2017. Watches are supposed to be the closest thing we have to engineered immortality. Watches and firearms. Smartwatches do not fit that bill.

You might argue that phones were once meant to merely take calls, and now do so much more, and you'd have a point. But phones were never instruments designed to last. They were even more utilitarian than watches. And modern smartphones actually expand on the functionality of a phone in truly useful ways, and might as well be called smart-cameras at this point regardless. Regardless, even smartphones have raised issues of manners and what counts as acceptable behavior.

I recall one day, years ago at my daughter's preschool, parents were invited to see what their kids had been working on, talk to the teachers, play in the playground. There were snacks. It was a time carved out for kids and their parents.

Yet glancing around I counted probably half the dads glued to their phones for much of the brief morning visit. I have my own moments when I'm sucked away from life, into the bowels of Twitter or some other dark dungeon of social media. An Apple Watch, I suspect, would only hasten my descent.

"I can’t seem to get past the worry that Apple’s Next Best And Brightest Thing is designed for a future that I don’t particularly want to inhabit," writes Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel. "A pingy, buzzy, always visible, always on future that I’ll have to enter begrudgingly."

But hey, at least there won't be Apple zealots lining the street. That's something to be cheery about.
“It was an idea whose time had come, and the technology finally caught up with the vision.” -Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Ph.D.

If you’re at all familiar with VR, you’ve probably heard that VR is more than “just games” a time or two. Used to describe applications of VR that go beyond first-person shooters—think education, conservation, training, etc.—the phrase is something that many in the industry intuitively understand. Still, it continues to merit saying, especially when we talk about the research and clinical practice of virtual reality in cognitive and physical therapy treatment by leading psychologists and clinicians—which goes way beyond gaming; it has the potential to change the way we think about therapy altogether.

Despite the recent surge in VR development over the last few years, the idea of using virtual reality in a therapeutic setting isn’t a new idea. Research regarding VR simulations to treat specific phobias was around as early as the nineties, but the technology simply wasn’t advanced enough for such treatment to be feasible. Head mounted displays were clunky, computer processing speeds laughable, and 3D graphics downright primitive in comparison to what’s available VR today. Perhaps even more importantly: the technology required for advanced VR in the 90s was too costly to ever be seriously considered for mass distribution.

Clearly, things have changed.

“We’re seeing more companies emerge in the last two years than we’ve seen in the last twenty years,” said Skip Rizzo, Ph.D, director for medical virtual reality at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. “It was an idea whose time had come, and the technology finally caught up with the vision.”

An unlikely contributor led the way in funding and support for VR therapy research: the US military. Operation Iraqi Freedom led to an unforeseen number of troops returning home from the battlefront with physical and emotional trauma, prompting the military to seek out new, innovative treatment options for their soldiers and vets—especially those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Virtual Iraq VRET was developed from 2005-2007 as an answer to the military’s problem at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. During the early stages of development, Rizzo considered different treatment options, but eventually decided on exposure therapy for the project.

“Whenever I design a VR application in a clinical area, I look at, okay, what do we know works in the real world that we can use VR to amplify, or extend the effect?” said Rizzo. “Exposure therapy was a no brainer.”

Exposure therapy employs the patient’s imagination and memory to actively engage with their “triggers” or source of trauma, as opposed to avoiding it. With time, prolonged exposure to the trauma lessens its hold on the individual.

Though traditional exposure therapy is the most widely accepted therapy for PTSD, it has its limitations. Some patients are unwilling or unable to recount the traumatic narrative, resulting in ineffective treatment. VR enhances the treatment by allowing patients and clinicians to take the guesswork out of the experience by dropping them into a virtual scenario that is tailored to their individual experience. In VR, the patient is fully emotionally immersed in the traumatic situation while physically remaining in a safe, controlled setting. The use of VR in exposure treatment also enhances the experience for the therapist, who can view the experience on a screen and witness first-hand what exactly triggers the patient, along with listening to the patient’s recollection of the event.

Over time, Virtual Iraq VRET advanced and morphed into project BRAVEMIND, which yielded exceedingly positive results through clinical trials. BRAVEMIND is now being used in VAs, university clinics, and Army, Navy, and Airforce medical centers to treat PTSD patients.

“A little known secret is, since we’ve been doing the work, the two iterations of the exposure therapy system have been deployed to over a hundred sites,” said Rizzo.

Despite the wide distribution, he hesitates to call VR therapy mainstream just yet, saying instead that “it’s right at the tipping point.”

Since its creation, BRAVEMIND has expanded to include treatment scenarios for PTSD in combat medics and victims of military sexual assault. Psychologists are also researching ways that VR can be used in PTSD diagnosis as well as treatment. As Rizzo’s team looks to expand the therapy to non-combat related PTSD patients, the potential seems limitless.

“We’re finding out new things all the time,” he said.

Though PTSD treatment is a pretty strong focus of research for many VR therapists, in part due to support and funding from the US military, psychologists have also successfully incorporated virtual reality into treatment for patients with a number of other physical and cognitive disorders. For example, the very nature of VR makes it an extremely effective tool for treating patients with phobias—something that the Virtual Reality Medical Center has been doing for the past 21 years.

While many VR therapy treatment options are still in conceptual or testing phases, the VRMC has treated a staggering number of cases across its three US based clinics since it first opened its doors.

“I’ve conducted over 10,000 VR therapy and training sessions,” said VRMC President Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold, Ph.D., MBA, BCB, BCN.

Using VR-enhanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in which patients are taught breathing with biofeedback techniques that are applied in the VR world, the team of psychologists have successfully treated patients with a fear of needles, claustrophobia, fear of public speaking, flying related anxiety, and more. Patients treated at VRMC often have phobias so severe that facing their fear—be it spiders, blood, flying, etc.—in the real world would be simply inconceivable. VR gives people with phobias the ability and power to confront their fears head on in a virtual setting.

“It’s empowering for the patient,” said Wiederhold.

VR therapy treatments for PTSD and phobias are similar in that they use the virtual environment to have the patient confront their fear or trauma in a safe, controlled setting. However, VR can be applied in completely different ways to treat other disorders like depression. An innovative study by UCL Barcelona professor Chris Brewin used a “body switch” method to help alleviate depression symptoms in a small, controlled trial.

Depressed patients entered a VR world in which there was a crying child who needed their help. After the patients consoled the child, they virtually switched bodies with the child and heard their own voice through an avatar consoling them. Though the study showed overwhelmingly positive results, the small trial lacking a control group needs extensive further testing and research before it can be used regularly as a treatment for people with depression.

Other methods of VR depression treatment are being explored by The VR Therapy Center in Grand Rapids, MI. Since it opened in January 2015, the center has treated over 300 patients suffering from depression using VR. Founded by psychotherapist Thomas J. Overly, LMSW, the clinic’s team has found that VR treatment is most effective in patients with comorbid depressive symptoms; 75% of the patients treated at the clinic have depression symptoms that are connected to other behavioral or interpersonal issues such as PTSD. The therapy has improved depressive symptoms in many patients, but Overly and his team are on a mission to improve upon the current platforms available for VR depression treatment.

Enter PromenaVR: a software system designed by Overly that allows clinicians to actually enter the VR environment with patients and have customized, two-way interactions with them inside of the virtual world. The experience is tailored so that the clinician appears as any race, gender, age, or body type depending on the specific needs of the patient, creating a “story that is their story.”

Settings range from a casual living room to open public spaces. Currently in beta, the software system was created “to treat depression and comorbidity issues that aren’t being addressed in typical VR therapy platforms that are available right now,” said PromenaVR COO, CMO Tanya Kellen. While not being used to treat patients just yet, the team at VR Therapy Center and PromenaVR believes that the interactive, two-way immersion system is the key to successfully treating depression using virtual reality in the future.

From PTSD, phobia, depression treatment and beyond, it’s clear that the future of VR therapy is extremely bright. Though it’s unclear how or when the technology will finally “go mainstream,” Rizzo predicts that it will do so in waves, with VR pain management therapy as the first to really be accepted as standard practice nationwide.

“I think in the next year you’re going to see more and more hospitals using VR for pain distraction or discomfort reduction,” said Rizzo.

VR is a tool that has the power to change the way we think about therapy, but at the end of the day, Rizzo believes that it is just that—a tool.

“In one sense, VR offers some magic in delivering this type of content, but, we’re always operating from a base of what we know works in the real world,” said Rizzo. “How can we do it better, more effectively, more consistently, and in a more engaging way.”

In other words, VR won’t replace the expertise and care of psychologists and psychiatrists or the tried and true techniques in therapy that have been used for decades. But it can—and will—improve and enhance the therapy experience in ways that haven’t even been imagined yet. After all: “It’s a revolution.”

Image Credit: USC Institute for Creative Technologies and UCL Barcelona
Clarifying The Trustwave CA Policy Update

We've seen a number of comments and questions on Twitter regarding a recent Trustwave CA Policy Update to our legal repository (https://ssl.trustwave.com/CA). This update discusses a subordinate root revocation. This is a proactive revocation, of the only certificate we issued for these purposes, that is the result of careful consideration in light of recent policy changes and the changing PKI landscape.

This single certificate was issued for an internal corporate network customer and not to a 'government', 'ISP' or to 'law enforcement'. It was to be used within a private network within a data loss prevention (DLP) system. The subordinate certificate was subject to a Certification Practice Statement (CPS), Subscriber Agreement and Relying Party Agreement crafted by Trustwave after an audit of the customer physical security, network security, and security policies.

The system was created using dedicated hardware device designed for SSL proxy and acceleration, with a FIPS-140-2 Level 3 compliant Hardware Security Module (HSM) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module) for subordinate root storage and for the purpose of private key generation of the re-signed SSL certificates. This means that once the trusted subordinate root was placed into the device it could not be extracted.

Additionally, when the system would accept an outbound SSL connection from within the customer network, and negotiate the session with the server outside the customers network, the private key for the resulting re-signed SSL certificate (that is presented to the internal network) would be generated in the HSM and only live for the duration of the SSL request. No party had access to the re-signed SSL certificate private keys at any time, nor could they gain access to them. This is what prevented the customer from being able to perform ad hoc issuance of certificate for any domain and use them outside of this hardware and infrastructure.

Trustwave has decided to be open about this decision as well as stating that we will no longer enable systems of this type and are effectively ending this short journey into this type of offering.

We take information security very seriously as a trusted CA and we felt that a few clarifications were in order to help everyone understand our actions.
Most Russians acknowledge that the country is facing a potentially lengthy economic crisis, but at the same time don’t expect to suffer any personal consequences such as redundancy or delays in salary payment in the near future as a result.

The latest poll conducted by the independent public opinion agency Levada Center in mid-September showed that 82 percent of Russians currently agree with the statement that their country’s economy is in decline or stagnation. When a similar poll was held in 2014 only 61 percent of respondents shared this opinion.

A quarter of Russians polled said they expected the current crisis to be long-term, compared to just 16 percent two years back. Around a fifth – 21 percent – said they expected it to end no sooner than in two years.

READ MORE: 80% of Russians would not join protests – poll shows

At the same time, those questioned were mostly optimistic about their own perspectives amid a stagnating economy. Just under half – 49 percent – were confident that they and their family members would not experience delays in receiving wages, while 24 percent admitted that such a scenario was possible and 17 percent confessed that they had already experienced this.

Forty-four percent of respondents said they did not expect to lose their jobs in connection with the ongoing crisis. Just under a third – 28 percent – said that this was possible and 14 percent answered that they knew about ongoing job cuts from personal experience.

Deputy director of the Levada Center Aleksey Grazhdankin explained the results of the poll by the fact that people compare the current economic difficulties with the much worse crisis of 1998. “Only a sharp fall in living standards can really affect public opinion. People tend to adapt to smaller deviations.”

Researcher Leontiy Byzov from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Sociology institute said in comments with Kommersant daily that the picture revealed by the poll could be explained by the fact that the average Russian thought that the economic crisis was imposed by hostile forces from abroad and therefore could not be really deep or serious.

“Russians consider the current problems to be provoked by foreign-based ‘enemies of the people.’ They do not expect any cuts in their wages because they fully trust the authorities not to allow this,” he said.

Similar research conducted by the state-run agency VTSION in January this year showed that about 62 percent of Russians saw the economic situation as normal, but 52 percent expect the crisis to deepen in the future.

READ MORE: Citizens see situation in Russia as ‘normal’ but expect crisis to deepen, poll shows

In September Levada pollsters released the results of research that showed that over 80 percent of Russians are currently unwilling to participate in mass protests over political or economic issues. Only 18 percent allowed for the very possibility of protests caused by decreases in living standards, and only 6 percent said that they would consider taking part in such protests if they happened.
Image caption Andrew RT Davies (L) and Alun Cairns (R) will not take part in the debate

A row has erupted between senior Welsh Tories after it emerged neither Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies nor Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns were taking part in Tuesday's BBC Wales leaders' debate.

The Tories were represented by education spokesman Darren Millar AM.

Mr Cairns said it was intended that Mr Davies would be the representative.

But a spokesman for Mr Davies accused Mr Cairns of being "unwilling" to take part himself.

He said Mr Davies had been happy to take part, but on the basis that one candidate took part in the three Welsh TV debates.

It had been expected that Mr Davies would take part in the earlier Ask The Leader BBC Wales debate, but prior to broadcast, the Conservative Party decided to put up Mr Cairns.

It is understood Mr Davies - who had taken part in the ITV Wales debate earlier in May - is on holiday.

The other parties put up their campaign leaders - Labour's Carwyn Jones, Plaid Cymru's Leanne Wood, Lib Dem Mark Williams and UKIP's Neil Hamilton.

Image caption Darren Millar is education spokesman for the Conservatives in the Welsh Assembly

Mr Cairns told BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show that it was "always intended" that Mr Davies would be the debate's Conservative representative.

The Welsh Secretary said he himself was "never" going to be part of the programme, and claimed Mr Davies could not be there for personal reasons.

He said he was confident Mr Millar would do an "excellent job".

Mr Cairns appeared for the Conservatives in last week's series of Ask the Leader programmes on BBC Wales.

Mr Cairns' comments prompted a critical statement from a spokesman for Andrew RT Davies.

He said: "With the Secretary of State unwilling to take part in the General Election debates, Andrew was more than happy to fill in - but that agreement was reached on the basis that it would be best for the party to put forward one candidate for all of the programmes.

"Given that Alun was willing to take part in the Ask the Leader programmes, Andrew felt that it was no longer necessary to return from celebrating his wedding anniversary to do the debate.

"It's a bit of a surprise that Alun isn't taking part tonight, but our Policy Director Darren will do a brilliant job."

Image caption Mr Millar is one of five senior politicians taking part in the BBC Wales leaders debate

A spokesman for BBC Wales said: "BBC Wales invited the main political parties in Wales to nominate a leader to take part in its Leaders' Debate.

"The party chooses its representative and in this instance the Conservative Party has nominated Darren Millar AM."

First Minister Carwyn Jones said the decision showed "incredible disrespect to the people of Wales that the Secretary of State, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, can't be bothered to turn up at a leaders' debate".

In a statement Plaid Cymru accused the Conservatives of treating "democracy with contempt" and claimed "avoiding scrutiny" seemed to be a "key strategy" for the Tories.

UKIP said it was "very strange for a party leader to be replaced in two leader debates".

The Liberal Democrats claimed Andrew RT Davies "will be desperate to be avoid being next in line for another car crash TV appearance from the Conservatives".

In 2015, then Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb represented the Tories in the debates, while Owen Smith, then shadow Welsh secretary, took part for Labour.

Mr Jones says he is now involved - instead of Shadow Welsh Secretary Christina Rees - to reflect a change of rules that officially appointed him Welsh Labour leader earlier this year.

Analysis by Daniel Davies, BBC Wales political correspondent

The Conservative campaign was supposed to be about the leadership of Theresa May.

And yet the Welsh Conservatives will be represented by three politicians in three leaders' TV broadcasts.

This is not what they planned.

I'm told Andrew RT Davies was willing to do all three, but clearly that has broken down.

There are contrasting accounts of why that happened. People have differing opinions over who should be participating.

Behind the scenes, there is tension within the party.

One source calls it a "shambles".

Carwyn Jones - Labour

Despite not being a candidate at the 2017 general election, Carwyn Jones is undoubtedly the face of Labour's campaign in Wales - with little or no mention of Jeremy Corbyn.

That reflects the view that he is more popular in Wales than Labour's UK leader with the party running a distinct Welsh campaign on this side of Offa's Dyke.

Mr Jones grew up in Bridgend, the constituency he has represented in the assembly since 1999, and has been a member of the cabinet since 2000.

During that time he has held the post of environment minister, education minister and the Welsh Government's main legal advisor.

Following Rhodri Morgan's decision to stand down as first minister in 2009, Carwyn Jones beat off the challenge from Edwina Hart and Huw Lewis to become the third leader of the Welsh Government.

When the 2010 general election saw Labour lose power in Westminster, it left Mr Jones as the most senior elected Labour politician in the UK.

He has used his role to try to push for further powers for the assembly and for more clarity on how the different governments of the UK should work together.

However, his views have often put him on a collision course with Welsh Labour MPs who were said to have given him a "roasting" over his views on one occasion.

Mr Jones did not back any of the candidates for the Labour leadership in 2015.

And while he has been lukewarm at best in his support for Jeremy Corbyn, he has also criticised Labour MPs who have been openly critical of their leader.

Watch Carwyn Jones on Ask the Leader

Darren Millar - Conservative

Brought up in Towyn on the north Wales coast, Mr Millar had a background in accountancy before being elected to the Welsh Assembly in 2007 to represent Clwyd West.

A committed Christian, he is currently spokesman for the Welsh Conservatives on education, and has poked fun at his being dubbed "Millar the Cereal Killer" because of his opposition to free school breakfasts - acknowledging its echoes of when former prime minister Margaret Thatcher was called "the milk snatcher".

During the last assembly term, from 2011 to 2016, Mr Millar chaired the assembly's public accounts committee.

While at the helm of the influential body the AM led an inquiry into the Welsh Government's sale of public land to raise funds for regeneration. The inquiry resulted in a highly critical report claiming taxpayers had been short-changed by millions.

He was previously his party's health spokesman for Wales, where he was vocal on problems such as hospital waiting lists and shortages in GP recruitment and, particularly as a north Wales AM, failings at the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board.

Before being elected to the assembly, Mr Millar was a Conwy county borough councillor, and at the age of 24 was the youngest serving mayor in Wales, for his home patch of Towyn and Kinmel Bay.

Like Mr Jones and Ms Wood, he is not a candidate in the general election.

Image copyright ITV

Leanne Wood - Plaid Cymru

Leanne Wood was the outsider who broke the Plaid Cymru mould when she won the party's leadership election in 2012 to succeed Ieuan Wyn Jones.

She is Plaid's first female leader, the first to be a non-fluent Welsh speaker and the first from outside the party's heartlands in north and west Wales.

Born and raised in the Rhondda valleys - where she still lives - her political awakening came during the miners' strikes of the 1980s.

But, unlike many of her peers, Ms Wood turned to Plaid Cymru rather than Labour.

The former probation officer and lecturer in social work was hired as a researcher by MEP Jill Evans.

In 2003, Ms Wood realised her own political ambitions as she entered the Welsh Assembly as a regional AM for South Wales Central.

Nine years later, the staunch republican - considered to be on the left of her party - was elected leader after promoting her economic vision for an independent Wales.

Arguably her biggest personal triumph came in last year's Welsh Assembly elections when she won the Rhondda seat by beating the former Labour minister Leighton Andrews.

In the 2015 general election campaign Ms Wood enjoyed significant UK media coverage but this high public profile did not translate to any increase in seats at Westminster - the party stayed on three.

She is not standing in this election although there was speculation that she would run in the Rhondda.

Party officials and members say the public like her and respond to her on the doorstep - but will this result in the party winning more seats this time round?

Mark Williams - Liberal Democrats

Mark Williams was born in Hertfordshire in 1966 where he lived until 1984 when he went to study politics at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.

On leaving university, he worked for the then Liberal MP for Ceredigion, Geraint Howells, before becoming a researcher to the Liberal group of peers in the House of Lords.

After spells as a primary school teacher and deputy head teacher, he was elected to Parliament in 2005 when he won the Ceredigion seat from Plaid Cymru.

Mr Williams remained a Lib Dem backbencher when Nick Clegg took the party into the Westminster coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.

He was re-elected as the Lib Dems' sole MP in Wales in 2015.

In 2016, he was named leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats in place of Kirsty Williams, who stepped down after a disastrous assembly election left her as the party's only remaining AM.

Mr Williams is pro-EU and a strong supporter of devolution.

Neil Hamilton - UKIP

Neil Hamilton was born in Monmouthshire in 1949 and spent most of his childhood in Carmarthenshire.

His father was a mining engineer and took part in the rescue effort at the Aberfan disaster of 1966 in which 144 people died, most of them children.

He studied economics and politics at Aberystwyth University and went on to become a barrister.

Mr Hamilton served as Conservative MP for the Cheshire seat of Tatton from 1983 to 1997. Anti-EU, he gained a reputation for being an outspoken MP and was a minister in John Major's government.

He lost his seat in the 1997 general election to the independent challenger, Martin Bell, following the "cash for questions" scandal.

While away from politics, Mr Hamilton has appeared on many celebrity TV and radio shows - often with his wife Christine - including Have I Got News For You?

Mr Hamilton made his political comeback in 2016 when he was elected under the UKIP banner to represent the Mid and West Wales region in the Welsh Assembly , where he leads a group of five AMs.

He has been a controversial figure in the assembly, calling two female AMs "political concubines" in the "harem" of First Minister Carwyn Jones.

Mr Hamilton also apologised after complaints that he told an opposition AM that "suicide was an option" after she said how disappointed she was with the referendum vote for Brexit.

BBC Wales Leaders' Debate - BBC One Wales, Tuesday 30 May at 20:30 BST

Followed by reaction on BBC Two Wales at 22:00 BST
in October 2014 after videos of the acts were found

She will also serve time for stabbing someone with a fork and biting a child

She was let off with

The young woman who had sex with a dog three times to 'arouse' her partner has been let off on probation after the court heard she told a psychologist: 'This has ruined my life'.

Jenna Louise Driscoll, a 27-year-old Brisbane waitress, choked back tears as a District Court judge handed down a probation order for charges including bestiality.

The frizzy-haired waitress breathed a huge sigh of relief upon learning she would walk free.

Jenna Louise Driscoll, 27, was let off with a suspended sentence for bestiality at the Brisbane District Court in Queensland on Monday (pictured at hearing last Friday)

'Your conduct in the bestiality offences was repugnant,' Judge Terry Martin said.

She had sex with the pitbull terrier on three occasions - in January, March and April of 2014.

Videos of the appalling acts were found on her phone by police while she was being investigated for drug trafficking.

In his sentencing, the judge said it seemed the bestiality occurred 'in the context of your partner wanting to be aroused by watching such appalling conduct'.

'You were clearly a willing participant in acts of sexual intercourse with the dog,' he said.

Driscoll was formally charged in 2014 after police found videos of her having sex with a dog

Driscoll was, however, convicted of stabbing a woman with a fork and biting a child, causing minor injuries.

She was also handed a two-and-a-half-year suspended jail sentence for drug trafficking, which she 'used to pay the rent and other living expenses'.

Her lawyers had argued she had suffered from the publicity of her crimes - providing the court with news articles and a list of Google links.

The defence also referred to the case of Harriet Wran - the daughter of a former New South Wales premier - where a judge considered the effect of huge media attention.

The Brisbane woman spent the weekend behind bars after pleading guilty to three bestiality charges and other matters

But Judge Martin had little sympathy, telling the fidgety redhead: 'The adverse publicity is a result of your conduct'.

The judge said Driscoll had a dysfunctional childhood and was subjected to physical and emotional abuse growing up.

The court heard she was studying the Year 12 to improve her lot in life.

Judge Martin told the court she 'may or may not' be remorseful over her actions but a jail sentence could see her exposed to 'corrupting influence'.

'This has ruined my life. I very much regret what I've done,' Driscoll said in a psychologist's report read out in court.

She was also described as extremely embarrassed, anxious and depressed in the report.

Driscoll had pleaded guilty to all charges.

She had been charged after police discovered three videos of her having inappropriate sexual contact with the dog

Under the order, she will have to undergo regular drug tests and must abstain from using illicit substances.

Driscoll had spent the weekend behind bars while Judge Martin considered his sentence, but not before branding her acts ‘repulsive’ and ‘against the order of nature’.

Driscoll appeared in court on Monday afternoon wearing dark glasses, a grey top and skirt.
July 19, 2016

Tickets to Tacotopia at the Track are $45 if purchased online in advance and provide entry to the track and unlimited tacos. Promo code SDVILLE saves $5 per ticket. Admission for this event is open to all ages and no pets are allowed. Children age 2 and under get in for free, and children's tickets are available for those ages 3-10 for $20 (must be accompanied by an adult). Ticket holders are asked to bring a hard copy of their Tacotopia at the Track ticket to The Reader booth at will-call, located near the Run Admission Gates (look for signage), in order to receive their wristband and an entry ticket to the races.

Get your tickets to Tacotopia at the Track before they sell out. For more info and to scoop your passes, visit sandiegoreader.com/tacotopia-at-the-track Participating eateries serving tacos at Tacotopia at the Track include Aquis es Texcoco BBQ, City Tacos, Common Theory Public House, El Paisa Mexican Grill, El Trebol Marisco's, Encinita's Fish Shop, Henry's Pub, La Guerrerense, Lolita's Mexican Food, Lucha Libre, Mariscos El Pulpo, The Patio Group, Parq Restaurant, Meze Greek Fusion, Puesto, Salud, South Park Brewing Company, The Taco Stand, Tacos Kokopelli, TJ Oyster Bar, Tostadas North Park, Un Mundo Mexican Grill and many more! At Tacotopia at the Track, after you eat your weight in tacos and bask in the San Diego sunshine, there will be a live concert from 311 and Matisyahu (for those 18 and over) which is included with admission! There will also be a full cash bar serving beer, wine and cocktails.Tickets to Tacotopia at the Track are $45 if purchased online in advance and provide entry to the track and unlimited tacos. Promo codesaves $5 per ticket. Admission for this event is open to all ages and no pets are allowed. Children age 2 and under get in for free, and children's tickets are available for those ages 3-10 for $20 (must be accompanied by an adult). Ticket holders are asked to bring a hard copy of their Tacotopia at the Track ticket to The Reader booth at will-call, located near the Run Admission Gates (look for signage), in order to receive their wristband and an entry ticket to the races.

The San Diego Reader is continuing its search to find the best taco in Southern California, and on Saturday, August 13, over 40 top eateries from America's Finest City, Tijuana & Los Angeles (including Ensenada's famed La Guerrerense!) will compete for bragging rights at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club at the inaugural Tacotopia at the Track . There is also a free concert by 311 & Matisyahu following the event! We're giving away 2 tickets to this already-almost-sold-out event and also offering promo codefor $5 savings on any ticket type. Read on for all the details and be sure to enter.The participants for this event were carefully curated and the best part about Tacotopia is that attendees pick the champion. After trying signature tacos from as many restaurants as possible, each attendee will place their token in a voting box on the table of their favorite vendor. The vendor who receives the most tokens wins the title of "Best Taco"!
Photovore roared, the massive creature’s head thrown back in a cry of victory. The air around it grew dark as it drew in the ambient light. Blaze lay on the asphalt at the monster’s feet, drained and unconscious. Huma was still in the air, trying to get a shot at Photovore but barely dodging the creature’s blasts of scorching heat. Lian—she still didn’t think of herself as Hornet—watched from atop a nearby roof, trying desperately to come up with a new play…but instead, thinking about what Mantis would say when they got back to base. “Why couldn’t you keep control?”, or “You have to do better, Hornet,” or the worst, “Are you sure you still want to be here?” No. She couldn’t let herself get distracted. Mantis would lecture her soon enough. Right now? She and her team had a monster to take down. She put her hand to her ear and clicked on her communicator. “Blaze, if you can hear me, stay low. Huma, get ready to come in at a 45 degree angle along the street. I have a plan. We can do this, boys.” We can do this, she thought, and she dove off the building into battle.

Masks is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you play young superheroes who are growing up in a city several generations into its superheroic age. Halcyon City has had more than its fair share of superheroes, superteams, supervillains, and everything in between. Over the course of three different generations of super-people, Halcyon City has seen it all.

You play members of the fourth generation, young adults trying to figure out who they are and what kind of heroes they want to be. The rest of the world is telling them what to do, but they’ll find their own path amidst the noise. And kick some butt along the way. After all, what’s the point of being a hero if you can’t fight for the things you believe in?

Masks is based on the award-winning Powered by the Apocalypse system developed by Vincent Baker and used in Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts,Urban Shadows, and more. It’s a rules-light system that fuels some of the best innovations in gaming in the last ten years, and Masks has been built from the ground up to incorporate everything I’ve learned about Powered by the Apocalypse games.

When you take an action that would trigger a move, you roll two six-sided dice, add them together with one of your Labels (a stat that describes your hero), and look to the move to see what the results are. On a 10+, you get what you want, and maybe a little extra. On a 7-9, you get what you want, but at some kind of cost or with a complication. On a 6 or less—a miss—the GM says what happens next, and chances are things get complicated for our young heroes.

Masks produces stories like those found in Young Justice, Teen Titans,Young Avengers, X-Men, and more, using the Powered by the Apocalypse rules to provide an easy but useful skeleton for awesome storytelling!

Masks was successfully Kickstarted! Check it out!

Halcyon City is a metropolis of gleaming spires and countless cultures, one of the greatest cities in the world. It also has far and away the greatest concentration of super-powered individuals in the entire world. Why that is…no one’s yet been able to say, but the why isn’t as important as the radioactive dinosaur stalking its way down Main Street or the devious mole people burrowing up underneath the Halcyon City Bank and Trust. The people of Halcyon City see more superheroics in a day than most people see in a lifetime.

Halcyon City has adapted to the superheroes and their struggles in ways both obvious and subtle, from rapid-action construction crews designed to deal with destruction and mayhem to supervillain penitentiaries (like The Spike) near or even in city limits. It’s a place of wonders and dangers…and it’s awesome to live here. There’s no place like it on Earth.

Supers have been around publicly for over half a century, starting with the first folks to put on the mask in the late ’30’s. Supers may have been around for much longer than that, but it’s only since they came forward and became a dominant force in the city that meta-historians, sociologists, and suprologists have tried to classify them by generation.

The Gold Generation was the first, filled with costumed adventurers and men and women with powers greater than mere mortals. They were noble and honorable, and they fought for their country, for justice, for freedom and liberty. At the time, they could do no wrong. Nowadays, the historians of Halcyon City acknowledge the many flaws, blind spots, and failings of the Gold Generation, but no one can deny the good they did. Their statues stand across the city, and their names adorn buildings and streets. Though the vast majority of them are dead or retired at this point, the new generation of heroes can still feel their influence. The heroes that would come later were often more powerful, but the Gold Generation started it all.

The Silver Generation came next: the first true supers. The Gold Generation was mighty, skilled, and maybe even superhuman, but the new generation could fly, tear holes in the fabric of reality, or summon up the primal forces of nature. The Silver Generation was the first generation to devote themselves to fighting supervillains, monsters, and dangerous phenomena instead of criminals or political wrongdoers. They carried on the “nobility” and “honor” of the Gold Generation–to them, matters were most often black and white. Their powers boosted them to the top of the superhero scene, and most of them are still in positions of power and authority in Halcyon City. They’re in charge of the largest superhero teams, the heads of giant megacorporations, and the most powerful politicos in the city. But they’re aging, passing into obsolecence, and they’re looking for new heroes to carry their torch.

The Bronze Generation, the children and proteges of the Silver Generation, came up in a world already filled to the brim with superpowers and cosmic phenomena, with magic and madness. Their elders were still on top for most of their lives, and even those who tried to follow in the Silver Generation’s footsteps found themselves pushed out by their parents’ and mentors’ dominance. Many found new paths, becoming explorers of the strange and unusual or dark vigilantes in the streets that the Silver Generation had abandoned…or even becoming government agents. They were the first cynical supers, the first introspective generation, examining the legacy left them by their elders and finding it wanting and incomplete. While the Silver Generation is still dominant, the Bronze Generation lurks in the niches that the Silver Generation wouldn’t touch. They’ve shaped the world in their own way.

And then…there’s you. An unnamed generation, not yet clear in temperament or destiny. No one knows yet how you’re going to reshape the world. That’s all down to you, your team, and your choices.

When you create your character in Masks, you use a playbook designed to provide a template for your character. Each playbook is geared toward a different kind of young superhero, offering you options and choices alike to customize your character as a hero of Halcyon City. You can download them here.

The basic set includes of playbooks includes:

The Bull – You’re tough, gruff, and powerful on the outside, and caring on the inside—oh, and you were made by an evil organization that’d love to get you back: can you learn to rely on the team enough to save you from yourself?

The Nova – You’re amazingly, egregiously, horrifyingly powerful, and keeping control is a struggle: can you come to terms with your power before it destroys you? Or someone you care about?

The Outsider – You’re not from here, and you don’t quite understand this place, but you find it fascinating: can you find a way to belong? Or will you always be different?

The Legacy – You’re carrying on a long tradition of heroism and nobility: how can you balance that legacy with your own identity?

The Protege – You’re tied to a mentor who trained you: do you want to be them? Or someone else entirely?

The Janus – You put on the mask, become someone different, escape your mundane life, but you know your responsibilities are always waiting for you: who are you really? The mask or the mundane?

The Delinquent – You’re a rabble-rouser, a rules-breaker, and an incorrigible prankster, someone who pushes people away while secretly wishing they would stay close: can you stop being a little shit for long enough to let them know you actually care?

The Doomed – Your powers are killing you; they come with some awful, nightmarish fate. But until that end comes, you’re going to work to change the world: how much are you willing to give up for your cause before your doom comes?

The Transformed – You don’t look human anymore and the world won’t let you forget it: can you learn to accept yourself? Can you deal with their looks, stares, and fear without becoming the monster they see?

The Beacon – You’re here because this is awesome, and you may not quite fit in, but screw it, you’re going to do this anyway: can you prove that you actually deserve to be here? Or are you just a wannabe?

Characters in Masks each have five mechanical attributes called “Labels.” Labels represent how your character views their identity. Are you a Danger or a Savior? A Freak or Superior? Or are you just Mundane?

Each Label ranges from -2 to +3; the higher the rating is, the more the character sees their self by that light. If you have Danger +3, you see yourself as a threatening, violent figure. If you have Mundane -2, you see yourself as anything but a normal person.

The Labels include:

Freak, which is all about being strange, unusual, unknown, different, unique, powerful, weird, and special.

Danger, which is all about being strong, threatening, violent, destructive, badass, frightening, reckless, and mighty.

Savior, which is all about being defensive, protective, overbearing, moralistic, guarding, patronizing, and classically heroic.

Superior, which is all about being clever, faster, better, arrogant, dismissive, commanding, egotistical, and smart

Mundane, which is all about being normal, empathetic, understanding, kind, boring, simple, uninteresting, and human.

The Labels shift and change over the course of the game as your self-image changes, most often due to the influence of others. As these Labels shift, so does your position in the story: a hero who sees their self as a Danger is better at directly engaging villains and threats, but their low Mundane means they might struggle to connect with ordinary people after a fight.

Influence is a mechanic used to keep track of whose words matter to you. When you have Influence over someone else, it means they care about what you say. When someone else has Influence over you, it means that you’re affected by their words.

Much of Masks involves giving, taking, and losing Influence over others. After all, you can’t convince your teammate to stop being a Danger if you don’t have Influence over them. When you do have Influence over them, and you tell them how they endangered civilians, your words might lead their Labels to shift. They might be chagrined at your words, and shift their Danger up, and their Savior down—they see themselves as more of a Danger, because of what you said. Or, they might resist, argue with you, and wind up shifting their Savior up and their Danger down—they don’t care what you say because they define who they are, and they choose to be a Savior.

Influence allows for a quick and easy way to understand whose words can cause your Labels to shift. You care about what they say, so your self-image is tied up in how they view you, what they say about you, and what you accept about their perspective on the world.

Of course, you are just a young superhero, trying to find your way. And that means in Masks, all the adults have influence over you by default. But you can resist what they say to free yourselves of their words. You just have to stand up to them, and tell them that you make your own path…easy, right?

You can keep up with the latest Masks news over at the G+ community, or on our social media. Also check out the long example of play Brendan wrote, as well as our backer appreciation page and the Halcyon City Champions!
TAXILA: On the recommendation of the special branch, the local administration has banned the entry of four firebrand cleric in Taxila and Wah Cantonment for 60 days.

According to a notification, the step has been taken to maintain peace during Muharramul Harram.

The notification revealed that there were reasons to believe that they will give inflammatory speeches or indulge in activities prejudicial to public safety and maintenance of good order in the city as well as district.

Their speeches and even presence may promote hatred among different sects and thus posing problems for law and order.

Meanwhile, on the directives of the Punjab government, Taxila police have mounted a watch on the activities of the persons included in Fourth Schedule list.

The provincial government has directed the police to take foolproof security arrangements for Muharram processions and congregations.

Besides, the sources said transfers of the police officials have also been barred to put all their energies on the security arrangements and finalization of the security plan.

The police have also been directed to keep a check on the distribution of literature prejudicial to religious harmony.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2015

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This view of a full moon was photographed by an Expedition 14 crewmember onboard the International Space Station. Earth's horizon and airglow is visible at left.

As the full moon rises this Wednesday evening, June 18, many people will be fooled into thinking it's unusually large.

The moon illusion, as it's known, is a trick in our minds that makes the moon seem bigger when it's near the horizon. The effect is most pronounced at full moon. Many people swear it's real, suggesting that perhaps Earth's atmosphere magnifies the moon.

But it really is all in our minds. The moon is not bigger at the horizon than when overhead.

The illusion will be particularly noticeable at this "solstice moon," coming just two days before summer starts in the Northern Hemisphere. The reason, according to NASA, lies in lunar mechanics: The sun and full moon are like kids on a see-saw; when one is high, the other is low. This week's high solstice sun gives us a low, horizon-hugging moon and a strong, long-lasting version of the illusion.

If it's any consolation, space station astronauts report the same effect.

Here's how it works: Your mind believes things on the horizon are farther away than things overhead, because you are used to seeing clouds just a few miles above, but the clouds on the horizon can indeed be hundreds of miles away. So if we think something (such as the moon) is farther away, and it's not, then it seems larger.

If you remain doubtful, test the idea yourself. Go out at moonrise with a small object, perhaps a pencil eraser. Hold it at arm's length as the moon rises and compare the sizes of the moon and the eraser, then repeat the experiment an hour or two later when the moon is high in the sky. A rolled up tube of paper works well, too.

Moonrise times vary by location. On Wednesday, it will come up at these local times at these locations, according to NASA: New York City, 8:58 p.m.; Miami, 8:35 p.m.; Seattle, 9:51 p.m.

The moon rises about 50 minutes earlier Tuesday night, when the effect will also be noticeable because the moon will be nearly full. Oh, and that raises another fallacy: There's no such thing as a full moon.

Additional moonrise times for your location are available from the U.S. Naval Observatory Web site.
Most of us can't fully succumb to our techno-lust until we've seen a finished gadget in use. Here's the dirty secret, though – none of your perverted fantasies about multiple-touchscreen smartphones can be realized until someone makes a dual-core chip that would know what to do with them. Samsung's new Orion 1-GHz dual-core ARM microprocessor could make those kinky dreams come true.

Samsung announced the new chip in a press release earlier this week; it will be pushed out to "select customers in the fourth quarter of 2010" and go into "mass production in the first half of 2011."

So what's the big deal? We've had dual-core processors in our laptops for years! Ah, but those processors are way too big and power-hungry for mobile standards. You don't want to strap your laptop's battery to your phone, do you? By necessity, mobile chips are all about small size and low power-consumptions. That's why IBM's working on mobile chips with super-sleep modes and Intel just went ahead and bought smartphone chipmaker Infineon just to get in the game, as Gadget Lab reported last week.

But wait – haven't Qualcomm and Texas Instruments already announced their dual-core processors for mobile devices? And didn't LG even announce that they're going to start packing graphics champ NVidia's Tegra 2 dual-core processor into smartphones? This can't just be about mobile multicore processors.

How right you are. This is where we have to unpack those other big numbers attached to the Orion's specs. The real gem of the Orion is its video processing. Part of this is just the multicore processing; lightweight single-core mobile chips can't really handle true high-definition (1080p) video. Like the Tegra, the Orion can. What's more, it's got an "onboard native triple display controller architecture that compliments multitasking operations in a multiple display environment." Translation: three-way. Smartphones with multiple screens that can display different video on each screen, plus output an entirely different video to a third. These chips are polymorphously perverse.

So that's the truth about these chips. A smartphone or tablet's hardware body and capacitative touchscreen are just pretty clothes and suggestive sunglasses. Once you strip those away away, all of the hot, sinewy action is happening underneath.

Photo: "Big Sister" by Schodts at Flickr. Used gratefully under a Creative Commons license.

See Also:
Tool Announces"Vicarious" As New Single, Release Date Set

Band Photo: Tool (?)

Jonathan Cohen of Billboard.com reports: Tool has revealed the track list for its next studio album, "10,000 Days." As previously reported, the set is due May 2 via Volcano. The first single/album opener "Vicarious," which stretches past the seven-minute mark, is due to arrive April 17 at U.S. rock radio outlets.

True to form, the 11-track "10,000 Days" sports a number of epic tunes, particularly "Rosetta Stoned" and "10,000 Days (Wings Pt. 2)," both of which clock in at 11:14. Near the end of the disc are the substantially lengthy "Intension" (7:21) and "Right in Two" (8:56).

"10,000 Days" is the follow-up to 2001's "Lateralus," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 2.3 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

As previously reported, Tool will play its first U.S. show since late 2002 when it headlines the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on April 30 in Indio, Calif. No other U.S. dates have been confirmed. Afterward, the band will spend the first portion of the summer playing the European festival circuit, with dates on tap through July 9 at Finland's Turku Festival.

Here is the track list for "10,000 Days":

"Vicarious"

"Jambi"

"Wings for Marie (Pt. 1)"

"10,000 Days (Pt. 2)"

"The Pot"

"Lipan Conjuring"

"Lost Keys (Blame Hofman)"

"Rosetta Stoned"

"Intension"

"Right in Two"

"Viginti Tres"

Source: Billboard.com
The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an informal investigation on Thursday into the details of the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) notorious $1.3 billion iPad project, which was supposed to give every child in the nation's second-largest school system an iPad loaded with Pearson curriculum. The Los Angeles Times said that a source inside LAUSD confirmed that the commission was asking questions about how the bond money that was set aside to fund the program was used.

The iPad program met many roadblocks since its inception in 2013, and recent allegations of improprieties during the bidding process for the bond money derailed the program permanently. Back in December, the FBI raided the school district's offices , taking with them 20 boxes of information pertaining to the program. At the time, the LAUSD superintendent resigned, although he has denied wrongdoing.

Just yesterday, LAUSD's attorney wrote to Apple demanding refunds for Pearson curriculum that the school system deemed unsatisfactory. It also said it would not accept any more shipments from Apple or Pearson in the future. Pearson was a subcontractor for Apple in the deal between the tech giant and LAUSD.

On Thursday, District officials told the LA Times that “they were optimistic that they had addressed the SEC concerns.” The LA Times also reported that LAUSD had prepared a presentation in March that “outlined measures it took to inform the public and potential investors about how bond funds [for the iPad program] would be spent.”

The school district reportedly told the SEC that the bonds used to fund the iPad program were general obligation bonds that were not meant to generate revenue for investors. It also maintained that it was transparent in its dealings and that “all necessary disclosures were made to the public, underwriters, rating agencies, and investors.”
S. 3100: Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act passes committee (and what you can do)

GovTrack.us Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 5, 2016

A “sanctuary city” is a city that protects illegal immigrants from federal or state prosecution, either by expressly prohibiting or never requiring legal inquiries about immigration status. There are more than 300 sanctuary cities in the United States.

There have been many Republican attempts to prevent sanctuary cities. The latest is S. 3100, the Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act, which would withhold certain federal grants from sanctuary cities. The bill was introduced last week on June 27 and made it past committee the next day. While it may receive a Senate vote, the White House has threatened to veto similar previous bills.

What supporters say

Many sanctuary cities have another, more controversial, practice to protect illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from being deported. An immigrant arrested for an unrelated crime, and then later determined to be in the country illegally, will often only be punished for the crime. They may serve jail time or pay a fine but they will not be not deported.

Many critics of sanctuary cities see this practice as dangerous, citing increasing violent crime rates in San Francisco since 2011. Bill sponsor Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) described a San Francisco murder committed by an illegal immigrant. The shooter had been in police custody three months earlier but was not deported due to sanctuary practices. Many feel that the murder represents a clear example of a death that would have been avoidable if not for the sanctuary city. (Proponents of sanctuary cities argue that the cities are just as safe, if not safer, than other cities.)

What opponents say

A 2015 Washington Post article presents a different picture on the effects of sanctuary cities. It argues that sanctuary cities were the solution to criticisms about inhumane treatment of immigrants and racial profiling. “Immigrant advocates said all of this deeply damaged already-limited police trust in immigrant communities, making people afraid to call police or provide information. That, these advocates argued, was the real threat to public safety.”

How to get involved

Support an advocacy group you agree with:

Stop sanctuary cities by supporting the Federation for American Immigration Reform

Protect sanctuary cities by supporting the American Immigration Council

Call Congress: Whether you want to support S. 3100 or oppose it, it is worth letting your senators know. You can do this by clicking on the yellow “Call Congress” button at the top of the bill page. You can also let others know how you feel about the bill by reacting with an emoji.
May 17th, 2017

Wests Tigers five-eighth Mitchell Moses has let the fans down after jumping ship to Parramatta mid-season. (AAP)

May 17th, 2017

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I am looking at the recruitment announcements over recent weeks since new coach Ivan Cleary was appointed at the club. I can see a new team building already.

Before I get to that though, just a quick comment on the transfer of 5/8 Mitchell Moses to the Parramatta Eels this week.

This is a disappointing result for all concerned. I don’t buy into the notion that Mitchell should be so distracted by his contract situation that he could not perform for his current employers. There have been plenty of examples over the years where players have signed with rival clubs, sometimes 12 months or more before their current contract expires, yet they have been able to continue playing and giving 100% effort to their current club.

I see absolutely no reason, why Mitchell Moses, as a professional sportsperson, should not have been expected, and willing, to fulfil his duties under the current contract for season 2017.

Peter Sterling takes aim at Mitchell Moses

I feel most sorry for the fans who looked forward to this year with great anticipation. The club plans its season, especially around sponsorship, membership, and marketing, very reliant on the playing roster they have available to them for the 12-month period. There are many of Mitchell Moses’ teammates whose own personal careers and performances would have relied heavily on playing with a player of Mitchell’s talent. All this has now been thrown into disarray because Mitchell wants to head off and start his new contract with another club as soon as possible.

If that’s his attitude, then quite frankly the team, and the club, is better off without the distraction.

On to the future.

New coach Ivan Cleary has been very busy in the marketplace. Already the club has secured the services of experienced, representative-class players like Josh Reynolds, Ben Matulino, Russell Packer and Chris McQueen. My mail is that there will be more announcements this week on another two signings from rival clubs.

In some respects, it looks like Cleary is “putting the band back together” with his recruitment of Matulino and Packer. These two big boys were a major part of Cleary’s 2011 Grand Final team at the New Zealand Warriors. They now join former Warriors’ teammate Elijah Taylor at the West Tigers. I suggest it may not be the last player the Tigers recruit from across the Tasman.

Warriors prop Ben Matulino will join Wests Tigers in 2018 and add some much-needed grunt up front. (AAP)

I really like the signing of Josh Reynolds. He will be so good for the Tigers. His experience and competitive nature will complement young half-back Luke Brooks perfectly. His enthusiasm, spirit and courage are infectious. He will have a positive influence on his new teammates. This guy is a real winner.

I have always been a fan of Chris McQueen. He is a very tough player. He plays with great passion. As a former winger, he provides great mobility playing in the forward pack. He has given great service to both South Sydney and the Gold Coast Titans. I think this is a tremendous acquisition.

The hardest player to replace will be fullback James Tedesco. There is no player quite like him anywhere in the NRL. Proven fullbacks are also very expensive. I’m not sure how much room the Tigers have left in their salary cap after their recent buying spree, but it would seem more likely they will need to search for a youngster who is on the way up, and patiently develop him in this key position.

The Tigers currently have two outstanding young outside backs in the shape of David Nofoaluma and Moses Suli. These kids are tremendous athletes. I love watching them play.

Wests Tigers rookie Moses Suli has emerged as a genuine talent at the club this season. (AAP)

All in all, I can see a really competitive team building here. Despite the pain the fans have had to endure in recent times, I have no doubt there will be better days ahead.

One also hopes that the Wests Tigers club has learned a real lesson from the events of the last 18 months. Their aim should be that the club should never have to go through this pain again.

In the meantime, let’s hope the boys rally together and put some good football on the field for the remainder of the 2017 season. The fans deserve it. They need to cheer for someone.
The religious group known as the Blackburn Cult, the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, or the Great Eleven Club, was started in 1922 on Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles, California, and later formed a retreat in the Southern California Simi Valley. The group's founder, May Otis Blackburn, is said to have received revelations directly from angels, and, along with her daughter Ruth Wieland Rizzio, believed that she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to write books revealing the mysteries of Heaven and Earth, and life and death.[1][2]

Newspaper articles from the period reported strange rituals including the sacrifice of animals, sex scandals and attempts to resurrect a dead 16-year-old girl.[3] Police found the corpse of Willa Rhoads under the floor at the Rhoadses' residence, wrapped in spices and salt, and surrounded by the bodies of seven dead dogs.[2] Mr. and Mrs. Rhoads later confessed to the police that they had placed their daughter in the tomb fourteen months earlier at the suggestion of May Otis Blackburn.[2] The cult was also accused of killing a member in an oven, poisoning another during a "whirling dervish" ceremony, and making several other members disappear.[4]

Indicted for grand theft [ edit ]

In 1929, group leaders were indicted in Los Angeles for grand theft and investigated in connection with the disappearances of several members.[1] These indictments created a sensation after the background of the grand theft was revealed to the public.[3] May Otis Blackburn was charged with twelve counts of grand theft, and articles at that time referred to her as a "cult leader".[5]

According to Time magazine , the Blackburn Cult was also known as "The Great Eleven", and May Otis Blackburn was referred to as the "Heel of God".[6]

The cult collapsed after May Otis Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing 40,000 dollars from Clifford Dabney.[6][7]

Depicted in theatrical productions [ edit ]

In October 2007, actresses playing May Otis Blackburn and Ruth Rizzio appeared in the Ghost Tour in Strathearn Park, in Simi Valley, California. The actress playing Blackburn stated: "May Otis is really fun and flamboyant..She's a cult leader. Who wouldn't want to play a cult leader?"[8] The "Ghost Tour" in Robert P. Strathearn Historical Park had previously featured Blackburn in 1999.[9]

Subject of fictionalized history [ edit ]

In 2008, R.J. Baudé, son of the last surviving member of the Great Eleven, published a fact-based novel about the group, "The Blackburn Chronicles: A Tale of Murder, Money and Madness". "The Kept Girl," [10] Kim Cooper's novel about the cult, Raymond Chandler and the real-life Philip Marlowe, was published in 2014.

Non-fiction/Historical Accounts [ edit ]

In 2014, Samuel Fort published "Cult of the Great Eleven," a detailed historical account of the rise and fall of the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven.

References [ edit ]

Further reading [ edit ]
Innovation is a mindset — not just something you do once or twice a week — and Hollywood’s media companies have done a pretty poor job of it, a panel of New Media experts said in the final panel at TheGrill, TheWrap’s fourth annual Media Leadership Conference on Tuesday.

Los Angeles-based legacy companies have been slow to adopt the Silicon Valley way, said Rich Raddon, co-founder of Venice-based Zefr, which helps content owners and brands manage their business on YouTube.

“Not a lot of that culture has really rubbed off on SoCal media companies,” said Raddon, a former producer (“A Slipping Down Life”) and director of the Los Angeles Film Festival from 2000 to 2009. “I just found a strong affinity to how people were building business up there.”

Also read: TheGrill: Online-Video-Giant Maker’s Chief – We’ll Be the Next Viacom (Video)

The panel, titled “Innovators panel: Meet the Folks We’ll All Be Working For in 10 Years,” also included Tumblr’sDavid Hayes and Lowercase Capital partner Matt Mazzeo. It was moderated by TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw.

Raddon relayed the story of a major film studio that hosted a weekly “innovation group” – which was managed by, of all things, the company’s human-resources department.

(At right: Hayes, Mazzeo and Raddon)

“It’s hilarious,” he said. “Innovation is a mindset, not just a word.”

But there’s good news: A whole lot of companies who do get it are sprouting up all over town.

“This city is seeing this massive growth and explosion in tech companies,” said Mazzeo, whose Lowercase Capital advises and invests in companies at the junction of tech and media. “A lot of this is happening in mobile. It couldn’t be a more exciting time to be playing in both worlds right now.”

Also read: TheGrill: Market-Research Leader Bruzzese – Our Industry Is Broken (Video)

And there’s no bigger nexus point than YouTube — another thing the panelists don’t think Hollywood is getting its head around.

“This town has a misperception about what’s happened with YouTube, which just keeps going up and up,” said Raddon, citing its staggering growth toward 1 billion unique users per month.

The reason many traditionalists turn their nose up at YouTube, he said, is that it’s still not easy to monetize there — especially the platform’s wicked-fast growing overseas users.

“But you gotta have some vision here,” he said. “In the early days of cable, the big networks were sitting around doing the same thing … My kids know two things: They know YouTube and Neflix. They know a little about what Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel are.”

Also read: TheGrill: On the Scene at TheWrap’s Media Leadership Conference (Photos)

At the suggestion that emerging storytelling forms — short videos, gifs, the like — would be so disruptive as to put an end to the two-hour movie or 10-season TV show, Mazzeo bristled: “Our consumption patterns might change,” he said, “but the storytelling forms will survive. The people I deal with in tech may think, ‘Well, this is better.’ But they don’t think the other thing has to die.”

Hayes, entertainment evangelist at Tumblr and head of the blogging platform’s think-tank CANVAS, said people are simply finding different ways to use different platforms, and young people are already acclimated to those differences.

“They’re being trained at a young age to be satisfied by a three-minute video, or a three-second gif,” he said. “A lot of these platforms are being used to market story forms. We’ll soon see them be used to deliver those story forms.”
If you gasped when you opened your Nova Scotia Power bill this month, you are not alone.

The utility says as many as 100,000 customers may have bills that were estimated because of the large amount of snow this winter. Snow banks prevented the company's staff from actually reading many meters, so the power corporation estimated the bill.

"So in their cases, they received an estimated bill and that was based on their usage for the previous year," said Bev Ware, a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Power.

"The bills they are now receiving are based on what they actually did use."

Ware says usage was also higher because it was 10 per cent to 20 per cent colder this winter.

The Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board says it was given some early notice that meter reading was a problem, but didn't know so many customers were affected, says executive director Paul Allen.

However, he adds that estimated bills are allowed and the utility board has no jurisdiction so long as the correct rate is applied.

"I was shocked and upset and wondering why we owed that much," Wolfville resident Tammi Parnell said about her bill.

Parnell said her usual bill is $200. "This most recent bill, more than triple that."

At the Parker Street Food and Furniture Bank in Halifax, staff are hearing about higher-than-average bills, too, even though some people say they are barely using their heat.

"They would just turn the heat in one room or they would just bundle up , wear extra layers of clothing inside the home just to keep themselves warm," worker Cynthia Louis said.

The power company also said meters that were read in one billing period may not have been read correctly.

"We're now finding out with … meter readers going back and being able to get a close-up reading that those readings back in February and March were not accurate. They were under-read … but they were back from the meter at the time so it was difficult for them to see," Ware said.

Whatever the reason, people like Parnell are still trying to come to terms with their bill.

"A little stressed out," she said. "It's not good when you get a bill that big and you're not expecting it."

The power company said it is confident that their systems are working correctly and the right rates have been provided. However, it urges concerned customers to contact them and if there is an error, it will be corrected.
Everyone wants to feel intelligent. We watch Jeopardy!, test ourselves with New York Times crosswords, and check our RSS feeds each day for the news we need to know. Sometimes, we even start to feel pretty smart. But then it happens: Your friend references a book in classic “Amirite?” style, and you have no idea how to respond. Smiling and nodding is the obvious, safe choice, but that doesn’t prevent the paranoia. Your facade has cracked. In truth, it’s likely that no one noticed, and of the few who did, even fewer care that you aren’t familiar with the book. But you still feel the burn of not knowing what is, evidently, a prominent work of literature.

The truth is that even the nerdiest book nerds haven’t read everything in the literary canon. If you’re feeling particularly inferior to your bookish friends, though, reading the titles on this list will help. Although they are not, by any means, the most influential works in the canon — (and while I strongly encourage you to read Shakespeare, Milton, and Beowulf) — the 20 books included here are some of the most-talked-about today. Read them, and you probably won’t miss a bookish reference for a long, long time.

Image: Stocksy
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders -- (Flickr via Gage Skidmore/MSNBC screen grab)

Over a month into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to talk up his win last November with a tweet Saturday morning that was promptly mocked by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

As is his custom on Saturday mornings, Trump tweeted out a random comment first thing in the morning, writing, “Maybe the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN should have their own rally. It would be the biggest of them all!”

Sanders quickly shot Trump with a pithy, “They did. It wasn’t,” accompanied with photos showing the dismal turnout for the President’s inauguration.

You can see both tweets below:

Maybe the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN should have their own rally. It would be the biggest of them all! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2017

Sanders wasn’t the only one to point out Trump had a very poor showing on Inauguration Day:
A report released by legislative auditors Friday says the State Board of Elections needlessly exposed the full Social Security numbers of almost 600,000 voters to potential hacking, risking theft of those voters' identities.

The determination that election officials did not fully protect voters' personal information was one of several highly critical findings in the report. The audit also faulted state election officials' handling of issues including ballot security, disaster preparedness, contracting and balancing its books.

State lawmakers called for a hearing in response to the Office of Legislative Audits report, which prompted strong reaction from critics of the board and its longtime administrator, Linda H. Lamone.

"This audit is an A-to-Z criticism of the way the board operates," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland School of Law. He said the "damning" findings call for the establishment of an independent, bipartisan commission of computer experts to examine the board's handling of information technology issues.

Doug Mayer, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, said the report underscores some of the Republican governor's longtime concerns about a "lack of executive oversight" at the board, where the day-to-day management is outside the administration's control.

"This is a perfect example of why those concerns are valid," Mayer said. "Properly securing Maryland's election data is critically important and needs to be given the utmost priority."

Lamone said she agreed with most of the auditor's findings, but "virtually everything" they identified has already been addressed.

"We were working on a lot of these things even before the auditors came in," she said.

The audit found that the board needlessly retained the full nine-digit Social Security numbers of about 592,000 active and inactive voters in its data base — or almost 15 percent of the state's 4.1 million registered voters — when only the last four digits were needed. The report said the board then shared voters' personal information — including driver's license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers — with a third-party organization without ensuring that the data was safeguarded.

CAPTION Anton Black's family speaks about “Anton’s Law,” named after Anton Black, who died in law enforcement custody on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Sun video) Anton Black's family speaks about “Anton’s Law,” named after Anton Black, who died in law enforcement custody on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Sun video) CAPTION Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. launches a task force to look into sexual assault investigation in the county. (Alison Knezevich, Baltimore Sun video) Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. launches a task force to look into sexual assault investigation in the county. (Alison Knezevich, Baltimore Sun video)

The organization that received the data is the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit that helps state election officials around the country identify ineligible voters. While auditors did not question the board's cooperation with ERIC, they said state officials had not received sufficient assurances that ERIC and its outside contractor were adequately protecting data.

Auditors warned that such information is frequently the target of criminals attempting identity theft.

Aviel Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University who has frequently sounded alarms about election security, said the report "exposes a lack of best practices in the area of securing personal voter data and protecting the information in their databases."

"This report tells me that the [elections board] is way behind the high-tech industry in maintaining the availability and security of their information," Rubin said. He said the board "needs to get its act together and catch up with best practices in the industry."

Lamone said she's confident in the protections her agency has adopted to prevent hacking. She said officials do not ask for voters' full nine-digit Social Security numbers, but sometimes people voluntarily provide that information on registration forms.

The information the state provides to ERIC doesn't include full Social Security numbers and is encrypted before it is sent, Lamone said. "You can't get into ERIC data. There's no way" she said.

Lamone rejected Greenberger's call for an independent commission as unnecessary.

"I think we're doing everything we can here," she said.

Lamone was appointed elections administrator under Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening in 1997. Under current law, the administrator is appointed by the five-member state board, which the governor is allowed to fill with three members of his own party. Hogan's board has a 3-2 Republican majority, but state law requires a 4-1 vote for the board to take action. Lamone has kept her job with the support of the the General Assembly's Democratic leaders.

In addition to the finding on Social Security numbers, the audit identified several other lapses in the state elections process and in board operations. According to auditors:

•The board did not ensure the accuracy of its voter registration rolls and allowed too many people — its employees and those of local election boards, as well as contractors — to have access to that database when they did not need it for their job duties.

•Officials allowed voters to receive ballots solely by providing publicly available information such as name, address and date of birth. Auditors recommended they also require information such as the last four digits of the Social Security number to guard against voter fraud.

•The board could not document why it awarded two contracts worth $18.8 million without competition. Auditors also found other violations of state procurement rules.

•The agency ended its 2015 budget year with a deficit of $3.4 million that it could not explain.

Greenberger said the report's findings are consistent with his dealings with the board over the years. He said Lamone has run the board as a "personal fiefdom" and has dismissed criticism by outside information technology experts as partisan attacks by Republicans.

The board's problems have less to do with dishonesty than with defensiveness and incompetence, Greenberger said.

"It is one day going to play out during an election where the results will be called into question and there will be no adequate audit trail to determine who the winner of the election is," he said.

Two senators, one from each party and both critics of Lamone, called for the legislature's Joint Audit Committee to meet this summer to delve more deeply into the findings.

"There are certainly things [in the report] I'd think would be troublesome to our voters," said Sen. Gail Bates, a Howard County Republican.

Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat, said the agency has long been mismanaged.

"We've got a big election next year and voters have to have confidence that our State Board of Elections is performing in tip-top shape," she said. "This audit is clear evidence we're not there yet."
Best Answer: Several things can happen to the clothes. In reality they aren't considered "clothing" such as you buy at the store. They are technically costumes, even if it looks like what you find at walmart or American Eagle. After production wraps costumes are stored in case they need re-takes or re-shooting. After the release many times costumes end up in storage. There are large warehouses filled with costumes and clothes used in movies. Important pieces are held for display and publicity, but most end up in storage. Sometimes costume departments for other movies will recycle old costumes, re-making them for a new character. When the warehouses get too full the costumes will be culled, some sent to thrift stores, some will be auctioned off, some will be sent to film museums depending on the importance of the costume and the actor who wore it. Some actors have riders in their contracts that allow them to keep a few special costumes, usually ownership belongs to the production company. Costumes are considered an asset and something that can be sold to raise money for other productions.

For television programs all costumes are kept until the show wraps up production, then they are dispersed. When productions shuts down the actors are given first dibs at their favourite props and costumes. Julia Louis Dreyfuss kept her entire Elaine wardrobe from Seinfeld; Jason Alexander kept George's glasses, sneakers, velvet clothes and the Yankees sheets and blankets. The girls from Friends kept many items and auctioned off many others as part of a fundraiser. Important pieces are held for publicity and museums (I imagine Horatio Caine's sunglasses will end up in the Smithsonian, like Seinfeld's puffy shirt) and the rest are auctioned off (important pieces again, think Sex and The City) and the rest sent to thrift stores.

Stage costumes are not like real clothes in the materials used and the construction. A 18th century court dress may look authentic on stage, but it can be constructed on modern fabrics with invisible zippers to allow the actor to change quickly between scenes. Stage costumes are they are kept in storage and/or recycled into new costumes. The Stratford Festival in Canada re-uses costumes, laces, trims, shoes, wigs etc. There are a few important costumes that are kept for publicity. Every few years the costume department hold a garage sale of costumes, laces, shoes, and grab bags of leftover supplies. I have been to several of these sales and know people who work in the costume shop. They make everything from dresses to wigs to shoes.

It really depends on the costumer and the production company. There are cases where costumes are merely trashed, but they have come to realize that people are willing to spend lots of money on old costumes.

Source(s):

Linda S · 10 years ago
In an abstract from her essay published in Gastronomica, which calls itself The Journal of Critical Food Studies, a leftist professor posits that the reason Greek yogurt has become so popular is because it’s white. The author, one Perin Gurel, also intimates that white Americans had a prejudice against yogurt because it had Middle Eastern origins.

That’s not all; Gurel believes that yogurt was viewed as a “strange and foreign food” by Americans until the mid-twentieth century, at which point the dairy industry “adopted a postfeminist ethos,” seizing upon the “intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization.”

Gurel explains that not only were white females lured into buying yogurt, but the fact that yogurt had dreaded “connections to the Middle east” was obscured by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity.

According to statista.com:

Greek yogurt is … known as strained yogurt. Through the straining process, the excess watery whey is removed, which gives the yogurt a much thicker and creamier consistency … As of 2014, the category held a share of over 50 percent of the U.S. yogurt market, up from about 4 percent in 2008 … The Greek yogurt category experienced tremendous growth in the United States over the past few years. Dollar sales of Greek yogurt amounted to about 3.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, up from 391 million U.S. dollars in 2010.

Gurel received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 2010; she currently serves as Assistant Professor of American Studies; Concurrent Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In 2016 she wrote the multimedia essay “Representing Muslims and Islam in the Sanders campaign.” In 2012 she organized a conference titled, “Beyond Islamophobia: Islam and American Empire.”
Watch Coach Bloomgren's Introductory Press Conference / Photo Gallery

Contact: Chuck Pool , Rice Athletics (cpool@rice.edu)

HOUSTON-Rice Director of Athletics Joe Karlgaard announced Tuesday that Stanford Associate Head Coach and Offensive Coordinator Mike Bloomgren has agreed to a five-year contract to become the 19th head football coach at Rice University.

"The football program is important to our university and this community. Mike Bloomgren is a bright, driven, and relentless coach who fits perfectly with our vision for championships on the field, scholarship in the classroom, and service to others. I'm grateful to President Leebron for his support and assistance in recruiting the Bloomgrens to Rice. I can't wait for Mike, Lara, Tyler, and Parker to join us in Houston."

"I am excited and humbled to lead the football program at Rice," Bloomgren said. "In my seven years at Stanford, I have seen firsthand how elite college athletics and academics can not only coexist, but thrive together. I want to create an environment at Rice where every player's dreams are realized on and off the field"

Bloomgren comes to Rice after seven seasons with the Cardinal, first as the offensive line coach (2011-12) and then assuming the reigns of Stanford's pro style offensive attack in 2013, setting the stage for one of the most successful decades in the program's rich history. Stanford has won eight or more games in each of his seasons and reached the Pac-12 Football Championship four times, winning three titles.

Prior to 2017, Bloomgren had coached 12 NFL Draft selections and 11 All-America selections at Stanford, including 2015 Outland Trophy winner Joshua Garnett and NCAA all-purpose yardage record holder Christian McCaffrey.

The 2017 campaign has seen running back Bryce Love nearly match McCaffrey's production on his way to being named a finalist for both the Heisman Trophy and Doak Walker Award. Love burst out of the gate with 180 yards on 13 carries against Rice in season opener in Sydney, Australia and completed the regular season with 1,973 yards on the ground, second only to McCaffrey's school-record 2,019 in 2015.

Bloomgren's 2016 unit ended the season on a six-game winning streak in which the offense produced 290.5 rushing yards/game, the most by any Power 5 program over that stretch. McCaffrey, the eighth overall pick in the NFL Draft by the Carolina Panthers, earned All-America honors for the second straight season and was an All-Pac-12 first team running back. His 183.87 career all-purpose yards/game were most of any active FBS player at season's end, and his 6,987 career all-purpose yards were second-most of any active FBS player.

Bloomgren was instrumental in the breakout season posted in 2015 by McCaffrey, that season's Associated Press Player of the Year and Heisman Trophy finalist. McCaffrey, the program's single-season rushing leader, led the nation in all-purpose yards while breaking Barry Sanders' NCAA record.

Stanford amassed a school-record 3,131 rushing yards on 610 attempts that season, the most by the program. The offensive unit's 529 points ranked second-most in a season, its 33 rushing touchdowns, 223.7 rushing yards/game, 30 passing touchdowns, 37.8 points/game and 6,097 total yards of offense ranked third.

Stanford scored at least 30 points in a national-best 13 consecutive games and led the nation in time of possession (34:48), the seventh-best by any team in the past 20 years.

Four Cardinal heard their names called at the NFL Draft following the 2015 season, including first-round selection Garnett, Stanford's unanimous first team All-America -- and only the ninth in school history. Garnett was the program's first Outland Trophy winner as the nation's top interior lineman, and won the Morris Trophy, presented to the Pac-12 Lineman of the Year.

Bloomgren's linemen were named a finalist for the inaugural Joe Moore Award in 2015, given to the nation's top offensive line.

While facing six nationally ranked opponents in 2014, including four on the road, Bloomgren helped Stanford win eight games. The Cardinal scored at least 30 points in seven of 13 games on the season and increased its nation-best streak of scoring at least 10 points to 95 games. Stanford also set a record for the most points in a bowl game in program history with 45 in the Foster Farms Bowl win against Maryland.

Stanford amassed a program-best 2,904 rushing yards during the 2013 season, Bloomgren's first year at the offensive helm.

Individual honors are closely tied to Bloomgren. He has earned recognition for both his coaching and recruiting prowess. Rivals.com named Bloomgren one of its 2014 National Recruiters of the Year -- the latest such honor that began in 2012 when ESPN recognized him as its Pac-12 Recruiter of the Year. Rivals.com tabbed Bloomgren as one of the nation's top-25 recruiters in 2016. FootballScoop.com named Bloomgren its 2013 Offensive Line Coach of the Year following two years of eye-opening accomplishments.

Bloomgren joined the Cardinal staff as offensive line coach and run game coordinator in 2011 after spending four seasons with the New York Jets, where he served as assistant offensive coordinator (2010), offensive assistant (2009) and offensive quality control coach (2007-08).

In 2013, all five offensive linemen received All-Pac-12 honors, including first-team selection Yankey. Yankey was named Stanford's first two-time first-team All-American selection since Bob Whitfield (1990-91). One of four senior starters on the offensive line in 2013, Yankey was also selected as a semifinalist for the Outland Trophy and Lombardi Award.

Four of Bloomgren's five starting offensive linemen earned All-Pac-12 honors in 2012, including first-teamer Yankey.

Yankey was the winner of the league's 2012 Morris Trophy. The consensus All-American was Stanford's first winner of the award since 2002.

The Cardinal offensive line afforded 200-plus yards rushing in six games during the 2012 season, paving the way for record-breaking running back Stepfan Taylor. The Doak Walker Award semifinalist produced the best season of his career (109.29 yards/game).

Bloomgren's work with the offensive line in 2011, which included three first-year starters, played a pivotal role in providing protection for Heisman finalist Andrew Luck to complete over 70 percent of his passes and throw a school-record 37 touchdowns, in addition to compiling the third-highest rushing total in school annals. Stanford's ground game keyed an offense that ranked seventh nationally in scoring average at 43.2 points/game and eighth in total offense at 489.3 yards/game.

Bloomgren launched his coaching career as an undergraduate assistant for Bobby Bowden at Florida State, where the Seminoles captured a pair of Atlantic Coast Conference titles (1997-98) during his tenure. He served as co-offensive coordinator at Catawba College from 2002-04 and offensive coordinator at Delta State from 2006-06. A 1999 graduate of Florida State with a bachelor's degree in sports management, Bloomgren earned his master's degree in higher education from Alabama in 2001.

A native of Tallahassee, Florida, Mike and his wife, Lara, have two sons, Tyler and Parker.

The Bloomgren File

Hometown: Tallahassee, Florida

College: Florida State, 1999

Family: Wife - Lara; Sons -- Tyler and Parker

Coaching Career

1999-2001, Graduate Assistant, Alabama

2002-04, Catawba College, Co-Offensive Coordinator

2005-06, Delta State, Offensive Coordinator

2007-10, New York Jets

 Offensive Quality Control 2007-08

 Offensive Assistant 2009

 Assistant Offensive Line 2010

2011-17, Stanford

 Offensive Line, 2011-12

 Andrew Luck Director of Offense, 2013

 Andrew Luck Director of Offense/Associate Head Coach, 2014-17

2018, Rice University, Head Football Coach

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING

DAVID SHAW -- Head Coach, Stanford

"It's always important to go to the right place with right fit, particularly with your first (head coach) job. You want to have an opportunity to be successful. Your personality needs to fit the place. Your philosophy needs to fit the philosophy of the athletic department and the school and the fan base. Mike is one of those guys down the road that we'll say is one of the top guys in the profession."

KIRK HERBSTREIT-- ESPN College GameDay co-host and analyst

"Mike Bloomgren has been an integral part of one of the programs that I respect the most in the country! A true players coach in the sense that he demands the most out of you every day, but is also there for the players to learn and grow as people. His offensive scheme is versatile in his ability to adjust to his personnel."

REX RYAN -- ESPN NFL analyst, a former New York Jets Head Coach

"There are two things that jumped out to me about Mike -- his work ethic and just how sharp he was. Coaches put in a lot of hours and Mike just loved it. He was full of energy regardless of how long we were working, which impressed me. He brought a lot of out-of-the-box thinking that wasn't being done in the league, like Wildcat formations and direct snaps. I used to challenge him to come up with new stuff, which he did and then we implemented it a lot. It's no surprise he became a head coach at a young age and I think he's going to do some great things there at Rice. They're going to be a fun team to watch and I'm excited for Mike."

CAMERON FLEMING --New England Patriots OT (Cy Creek High School)

"Coach Bloomgren will be a great addition to the program at rice. He was a great motivator and leader for me and I'm sure he'll do even better down in Houston. I'm excited to see him build a strong program."
According to this report from Replays.net, this is how transfers have been standardized under the ACE Alliance in Chinese Dota 2. The latter half of the article reveals the transfer fees and related details of some of this year’s biggest moves.

If Team B wishes to buy Team A’s player C, then B must first approach A and confirm whether the player is available for transfer. If A agrees, only then is B allowed to approach the player C. If player C is open and willing, then Team B can lay out their transfer conditions and offer. If player C does not agree to these terms, then he will remain at his current club; if player C agrees, then all three parties, A, B, and C need to communicate with ACE via email and receive their confirmation. In the ensuing days, the involved parties need to come to the ACE offices in order to sort out paperwork and related processes, and then they are allowed to make official announcements regarding the news. If the new team and their new player decides to use existing contracts, then they perform a trade of contracts while at ACE. If they decide to sign a new contract, then the new contract will be signed and backup files stored with ACE. In the case later on that a party fails to uphold their end of a contract, then ACE will be abe to lay penalties according to existing policies.

Below are images from the transfer of KingJ from TongFu to RisingStars:

In addition, Replays.net also received information regarding the details of this year’s transfers, as below:

TongFu <–> RisingStars

1. KingJ transfers from TongFu to RisingStars

2. XTT is part of the transfer terms, and joins TongFu from Rstars, his contract is exchanged for KingJ’s

3. RStars and TongFu respectively pay to XTT and KingJ their owed prize moneys and promotional fees

TongFu <–> iG #1

1. Banana transfers from TongFu to iG

2. TongFu pays to banana all owed prize moneys and promotional fees

3. iG pays TongFu a transfer fee totaling 100,000 RMB for the rights to banana

TongFu <–> iG #2

1. iG and TongFu agree to collaborate on themed promotional product(s)

2. iG pays TongFu a transfer fee totaling 110,000 RMB for the rights to Hao

3. Zhou is part of the transfer terms, and joins TongFu from iG, his contract is exchanged for Hao’s

4. iG and TongFu respectively pay to Zhou and Hao their owed prize moneys and promotional fees

VG <–> RisingStars

1. CTY transfers from VG to RStars

2. RStars pays VG a transfer fee totaling 45,000 RMB for the rights to CTY

3. VG pays CTY’s August salary and previous promotional fees

LGD <–> RisingStars

1. xiaotuji’s contract is exchanged for Sylar’s

2. xiaotuji is traded for Sylar, each player’s official transfer fee consists of the other player’s transfer rights (Dotaland note: they were essentially traded 1 for 1)

3. LGD is to pay Sylar his promotional fees for China Joy, as well as DSL prize money

It is easy to see from all this, that the ACE Alliance has a certain amount of influence watching over transfers and related activities, helping clubs and players maintain their rights in the process. The current scene seems to allow both player trades as well as straight cash purchases of transfer rights, akin to something of a mix between what is commonly seen in the sports of basketball and soccer (football). If a new club is willing to spend millions and buy out an entire team, what is to stop them? Additionally, it was not hard to see during this reshuffle from the weibo posts of various team managers that, despite this structure, things were still very chaotic. We hope that ACE can make further improvements to the details and processes.

Source: http://dota2.replays.net/news/page/20130917/1852014.html

Follow DOTALAND on Twitter for instant updates: https://twitter.com/Dotaland

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Legalisation of no-fault divorce leads to 350,000 couples splitting in a year since 2010 in world's most populous Catholic country

The number of Brazilians divorcing has reached a record high, according to the country's IBGE statistics agency.

It said on Monday that there were more than 350,000 divorces last year – 46% more than in 2010 after Brazil's congress made it quicker and easier to divorce in the most populous Catholic nation on earth.

Before 2010, Brazilians had to be separated with a judge's approval for a year before they could seek a divorce. But after an amendment to the country's constitution in 2010, such a separation no longer became necessary. The agency said this had prompted the record number of divorces, which have been monitored in Brazil since 1984.

Currently, as long as there is agreement between the divorcees and there are no underage children or incapable persons involved, a divorce may be performed by a notary. Divorce only became legal in Brazil in 1977.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Heather R. Mizeur received some national exposure on the MSNBC network Wednesday -- thanks in part to the South American nation of Uruguay.

The MSNBC cable television network interviewed Mizeur after a segment on Uruguay's move this week to legalize and regulate the distribution -- not just the personal use -- of marijuana. Mizeur, a state delegate from Montgomery County who is seeking the Democratic nomination of governor, has proposed a similar law in Maryland.

Such as proposal is also under discussion in New York, MSNBC reported.

Introduced by host Chris Jansing as a "dark horse" candidate, Mizeur argued that "prohibition has not worked" and that "our marijuana laws have been enforced with racial bias." As has has in Maryland, Mizeur contended that the money raised by taxing marijuana could be used to finance an expansion of pre-kindergarten education.

Mizeur is facing Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown and Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, statewide officials with greater name recognition, in the June 24 primary.

Jansing gave Mizeur an opportunity to lay out much of her campaign platform for the liberal-leaning MSNBC audience.

"People are excited about my candidacy for governor of Maryland because I am an unapologetic progressive," she said.

Mizeur also laid out her plans to move beyond a widely supported increase of the minimum wage to $10.10 to adoption of a "living wage" of $16.70 by 2022.

"No family should have to work 40 hours a week and still live in poverty," she said.

Mizeur, 41, also talked about her selection of the Rev. Delman Coates of Prince George's County as her running mate, saying the combination of an openly gay woman and an African-American minister might strike some as a "very odd pairing." But she said the two share a passion for civil rights and shaking up the system.

"We're going to Annapolis to end politics as usual," Mizeur said.
UPDATE:

Large geomagnetic storm brewing means Northern Lights tonight The National Weather Service said the aurora should be visible tonight as far south as Missouri, where clear skies allow.

A strong magnetic storm is expected to hit Earth over the next two days. The strength of the magnetic storm means northern lights could be visible as far south as the Detroit and Chicago areas.

A large sunspot erupted September 4, 2017, throwing a coronal mass ejection (CME) toward the earth. A coronal mass ejection is a huge explosion of magnetic field and plasma from the Sun's corona. When CMEs impact the Earth's magnetosphere, they are responsible for geomagnetic storms and enhanced auroras, according to NOAA.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a Strong Magnetic Storm Watch for the nights of Sept. 6 and Sept. 7. This means northern lights will possibly be visible farther south than during a typical northern lights event.

Northern lights forecasts use a rating system called the kP index to gauge how likely northern lights will be visible at a certain latitude. Northern lights are typically visible as far south as a kP value of 7.

On the map above, I drew the expected location of the kP=7. So northern lights may be visible as far south as the Detroit area, Chicago, Cleveland, Des Moines and Syracuse, NY.

But you won't be able to see the northern lights in the big cities. You will have to get out into the countryside where it's completely dark.

To get updated info on the northern lights, go here.

There is a good factor pointing toward seeing the northern lights in the next two nights. Skies at night should generally be more clear than cloudy in the Great Lakes region. We will have afternoon showers pop up both today and Thursday. At night those showers should diminish. While the skies may not clear entirely in all locations, the spotty showers will just leave isolated clouds in most areas.

The negative to watching northern lights tonight and Thursday is a nearly full moon. The bright full moon we have been enjoying the past two nights will throw light up into the sky. The extra moonlight won't totally block out northern lights hopes, but could make them harder to see in marginal northern lights areas.

Get a nap in this evening, and head to a dark location toward midnight.

Any questions or comments, please post below.
Police dashcam video showing the arrest of a former Miami-Dade teacher suspected of driving drunk with her child in the backseat last month was exclusively obtained by NBC 6 Friday.

In the video, which is nearly two and a half hours long, Saryna Parker, a former 8th grade science teacher at South Dade Middle School, appears to be stumbling during a field sobriety test and slurring her words as she speaks, telling a Florida Highway Patrol trooper she wanted to kiss him.

"I want to kiss you. If you don't stop looking at me like that, I'm going to kiss you," Parker tells the trooper.

According to the arrest report from the incident, during the test, Parker was unsteady, swayed, failed to follow directions, stumbled, and at one point touched the trooper on the back and said "I feel like I want to kiss you."

'I Want to Kiss You': Video Shows Teacher During DUI Arrest

Police dashcam video showing the night a former Miami-Dade teacher suspected of driving drunk with her child in the backseat was arrested was exclusively obtained by NBC 6 Friday. (Published Friday, April 21, 2017)

Parker was placed under arrest, and as she sat in back of the patrol car, she "violently kicked me in the groin with her right leg then continued to kick my right rear passenger side door," the officer wrote in the report.

In the dashcam video, Parker can be heard admitting she kicked the trooper but says she was kicking the door. She can also be heard complaining about the students she taught.

"I’m so f---ing tired of dealing with these p---- a-- teenagers...let me go home for a while," Parker says in the video.

FHP officers responded to a report about a suspect crashing into a car on South Dixie Highway near Southwest 182nd Avenue in Homestead on March 19.

School board officials said Parker was a probationary teacher and has been fired. She will never be allowed to apply to Miami-Dade Schools again, officials said.

Parker was driving her Cadillac when she slammed into the back of a van, according to the arrest report. During the traffic investigation, the responding officer observed Parker slurring her speech and noticed the smell of alcohol on her breath, and saw a 10-year-old child in her backseat, the report said.

Want to Spend a Night in Jail? It Just Takes $40

Want to spend the night in the slammer? Minnesota's Chisago County Sheriff's Office can help make it happen. The department is letting people stay overnight inside the new Public Safety Center to see the facility and help deputies train before inmates arrive. It just costs $40 per person. (Published Friday, April 27, 2018)

The former teacher said she "wasn't driving" and said she needed to use the restroom, the report continued. The officer tried to grab her arm and she "violently pulled away" and started walking toward Burger King to use the bathroom, the report said.

The 43-year-old was booked into jail and later released on bond.

She faces charges of DUI, DUI with property damage, careless driving and battery on a police officer. Police initially charged her with child abuse for having her child in the car, but prosecutors did not pursue that charge.
Stacey Tillman, a 47-year-old woman from Sandusky, Ohio, says she has donated over $300 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure each year for the past nine years. The issue is close to her heart, she says, because her aunt had breast cancer.

This year, however, following the news that Komen has pulled breast exam funds from Planned Parenthood for political reasons, Tillman is sending her money straight to the family planning provider instead.

"I donated $250 this morning, and then I'll see what I can do in a couple months if I can get more," she told HuffPost in a phone interview. "I've had family members in financial difficulty that have used Planned Parenthood for pap smears and breast cancer screenings. They're getting my money now because they help the needy and the people who fell through the cracks."

After partnering with Planned Parenthood for the past five years to provide cancer screenings to low-income patients, Komen announced on Tuesday that it would sever ties with the family planning provider because it is under investigation in Congress. However, the groups that prompted that investigation are anti-abortion advocacy organizations that have long criticized Planned Parenthood over the fact that some of its clinics offer abortions.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) both criticized and revoked their support for Komen on Wednesday. "I was perplexed and troubled to see the decision by Susan G. Komen for the Cure to cut off funding for life-saving breast cancer screenings through Planned Parenthood because of a political witch hunt by House Republicans. I truly hope that they will reconsider this decision and put the needs of women first," Boxer said in a statement.

"I have been a big booster of the Susan G. Komen organization, but not anymore," Speier said on the House floor.

One of Komen's own affiliates withdrew its support as well. The Connecticut affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure said in a statement on Wednesday that it "shares" people's frustration over the decision and that it will continue funding Planned Parenthood of New England.

"The decision regarding the funding of Planned Parenthood was made by Susan G. Komen for the Cure National Headquarters," the group posted on its Facebook wall. "Susan G. Komen for the Cure Connecticut enjoys a great partnership with Planned Parenthood, and is currently funding Planned Parenthood of Southern New England. We understand, and share, in the frustration around this situation. We hope that any investigation prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Komen grants is promptly resolved."

Komen has faced a massive social media backlash since announcing the decision, with angry people flocking to its message boards and Facebook wall to announce that they will no longer donate to the breast cancer charity.

Many commenters on Facebook have complained that Komen is scrubbing some of the more negative comments from its wall, but a spokesperson for Komen said the organization is only deleting the profane ones.

"We have not and do not scrub negative comments from Facebook unless they include profanity," said Leslie Aun, vice president of communications for Komen. "There have been some serious misrepresentations of our position, which is unfortunate. The level of interest reflects the fact that people care deeply about breast cancer and women's health issues."

The main sentiment among the thousands of people posting online seems to be that regardless of one's position on the issue of abortion, it is wrong to politicize women's health. According to a new Polipulse analysis of online conversations about the issue, only 26 percent of people believe Komen made the right decision. Nearly a quarter of the people who expressed criticism of Komen's decision online said they were going to pull their donations from Komen.

In contrast, Planned Parenthood has seen a huge influx of financial donations in the 24 hours since Komen broke ties. While the organization has not officially released the new donation numbers yet, a source close to the issue said they've raised "hundreds of thousands" of dollars in individual donations during that period. That, combined with a donation of $250,000 from Texas oil executive Lee Fikes and his wife Amy for a "Breast Health Emergency Fund," could put the family planning provider on track to match or surpass the roughly $680,000 it received from Komen in 2011.

Planned Parenthood said it also saw a spike in people making appointments for breast examinations Wednesday.

"The silver lining is that more people than ever are aware that Planned Parenthood provides breast exams, and we're seeing more people calling us today to make an appointment," Tait Sye, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, told HuffPost. "Politics should not get in the way of women's health, and people respond powerfully when they see politics interfering with women's health."

UPDATE: 3:40 p.m. -- Planned Parenthood announced on Wednesday that it has received $400,000 from about 6,000 donors since Komen announced it was cutting funding to the organization on Tuesday afternoon.
Honeymoons don't last forever. But that doesn't mean the love affair has to end — and the love affair Canadians are having with Justin Trudeau's Liberals appears to be enduring in the polls.

The Liberals continue to hold the new support they captured after their majority victory in last fall's federal election, when they pulled votes away from both the Conservatives and New Democrats.

What do Canadians think of the leaders? Explore the latest numbers for the 5 major federal leaders in our new CBC Leader Meter.

Justin Trudeau's own popularity also remains high, with approval ratings well above those of both of his main rivals, interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose and outgoing NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, as well as the ratings he posted before last year's vote.

The CBC's new interactive tool, the Leader Meter, lets you track those numbers.

Over the last three months of polling, the Liberals have averaged 46.7 per cent support. That's an increase of 7.2 points over their performance in the Oct. 19 election and nearly even (up 0.1 points) from their average support during the previous quarter of federal polling calculated three months ago.

The Conservatives have averaged 29.1 per cent, also unchanged from where they were in the previous quarter but down 2.8 points from the last election.

The New Democrats, after taking 19.7 per cent of the vote last fall, have averaged just 13.6 per cent support. That's down 6.1 points from the last election and one point from the previous quarter.

The Greens have averaged 5.1 per cent support since March, while the Bloc Québécois has averaged 4.2 per cent.

The Liberals' support has held relatively steady across the board — notable considering that their polling numbers between December 2015 and February 2016 had all the hallmarks of the normal political honeymoon of a new government.

But the party has nevertheless seen further gains in some parts of the country, particularly in British Columbia. The party is up 10.3 points from the last election, leading in the province with 45.4 per cent support, and has gained 2.6 points over the last quarter alone.

The Liberals' most significant increase since the last election remains in Quebec, where the party has gained 12.2 points since the last election and sits at 47.9 per cent. That level of support is largely unchanged from where they were in the previous quarter.

In Ontario and the Prairies, the Liberals have also posted gains since both the election and the last quarter. They lead comfortably in Ontario with 50.7 per cent support and trail the Conservatives narrowly in Saskatchewan and Manitoba with 39.6 per cent.

But the Liberals may have reached a ceiling in Atlantic Canada. With 59.9 per cent support, the party is only up slightly over the 2015 election result that saw them sweep the region, and they are down 3.5 points from last quarter.

Trudeau, too, may have hit a ceiling. His average approval rating over the last three months (56.3 per cent) is down over three points from last quarter.

Perhaps the first hints that the love affair may one day sour.

Though the Conservatives are still polling below their standing last fall, they have nevertheless managed to hold on to the support they posted in the initial aftermath of losing power.

Since the election, the party's biggest losses have occurred in Alberta (down 4.5 points to 55.1 per cent) and in Ontario and Quebec, where the party is down 3.4 points. That puts them at 31.7 per cent in Ontario and 13.3 per cent in Quebec.

Despite the praise Stephen Harper had in his speech to the party's convention last week for the Conservatives' electoral gains in Quebec, that is one province where the party saw its support decrease for a second consecutive quarter.

But the Conservatives did see an increase over the last quarter in the province where they held that convention — the Tories were up about two points in British Columbia, to 27.2 per cent, though that is still down almost three points from the last election.

This most recent quarter was a difficult one for the New Democrats. Their provincial cousins lost elections in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the latter ending almost 17 years in office, and their federal leader lost a key leadership vote and will be replaced next year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this coincided with a drop in Tom Mulcair's approval ratings. His average approval rating was down more than eight points from the previous quarter, to 34.3 per cent.

The party continues to poll well below its results from the last election, down more than six points on the Prairies, eight points in Quebec and almost 10 points in British Columbia. That is where the NDP saw its biggest drop in support over the last three months as well, falling 3.9 points to 16.3 per cent.

B.C. will be holding a provincial election in less than a year that the provincial NDP is hoping to win.

The Bloc Québécois averaged 16.8 per cent support in Quebec over the last three months. That is a drop of 2.6 points from the last election — the party's worst — but up 2.2 points from last quarter.

The Greens saw no significant shift in support over the last three months. The party's best results came in British Columbia, where the Greens averaged 10.1 per cent. That was down marginally over the last three months, but up about two points since the last election. Everywhere else, the Greens, who traditionally poll above their electoral results, averaged less than 7 per cent support.

Leader Meter: CBC Politics' new interactive tool

The next federal election may be years away, but what Canadians think of how their political leaders are doing today matters — and the CBC's Leader Meter tracks just that.

The Leader Meter is an interactive feature tracking the latest public opinion polls related to leaders' approval and disapproval ratings. The Leader Meter lets you choose the data you want to look at, how you want to break it down, and how it compares to past party leaders and Canadian prime ministers.

You can check out the Leader Meter here. You can also read a full explanation on how to get the most out of this interactive tool here.

Follow CBCPolitics on Twitter @cbcpolitics

This article reviews trends in national public opinion surveys, and includes all polls conducted and published by different pollsters between March 1 and June 1, 2016. Methodology, sample size and margin of error if one can be stated vary from survey to survey and have not been individually verified.
Stevie Wonder will cancel his scheduled appearance at a US fundraiser for "friends" of the Israeli military after facing flack from pro-Palestinian activists, JTA reported Wednesday.

Just days after Israel's offensive in Gaza, it was announced this week that the singer was due to perform at this year's Friends of the Israel Defense Forces benefit, which takes place in Los Angeles on Dec. 6.

Grammy-winning producer and composer David Foster was scheduled to conduct an orchestra to accompany the headliner, according to Arutz Sheva. It is unclear who might now replace the R&B legend as the fundraiser's main attraction.

JTA wrote of Wonder's reported change of heart:

"Wonder’s representatives will claim that he did not know the nature of the group, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and that he believes such a performance would be incongruent with his status as a UN “Messenger of Peace,” according to a source who has read email exchanges between Wonder’s representatives and organizers of the event."

With tickets listed at $1,000 a head, the event is expected to raise millions of dollars for FIDF (one recent gala in New York raised $26 million, Ynet News reported).

The US-based organization describes its mission as helping to support "educational, social, cultural, and recreational programs and facilities for the young men and women soldiers of Israel who defend the Jewish homeland," as well as fallen soldiers' families.

The proceeds from the LA concert will go to the Negev Wellbeing and Educational Centers, an FIDF project to build sports facilities, a library and synagogues on the IDF's new training campus in the Negev desert.

The event's co-host, billionaire TV and movie producer Haim Saban, described it to Ynet as "our opportunity to thank the soldiers who defend the state."

The soldiers defended it most recently in Operation Pillar of Defense, the week-long offensive in Gaza that killed over 150 Palestinians, more than 100 of them civilians. Six Israelis died, four civilians and two soldiers.

The timing hasn't been lost on activists, who questioned why Stevie would have chosen now to befriend the IDF.

More than 4,000 people signed an online petition asking Wonder not to perform, "as a conscientious American advocate for human rights and dignity."

The petition, hosted by Change.org, compares Israel to South Africa in the time of apartheid, which Wonder himself was arrested for protesting in 1985.

Check out the photo gallery above to see other celebrities who have made friends with the Israeli military.
EL SEGUNDO, CA — At around 2:15 PM on the afternoon of September 30, 2011, defenseman Drew Doughty emerged from the dressing room for his first training camp skate. That moment was the first publicly visible sign that the Los Angeles Kings had become whole once again.

Late Thursday night, the Kings announced that they had reached a verbal agreement with their top defenseman, who missed virtually all of training camp as a contract holdout.

In the end, Kings President/General Manager Dean Lombardi sweetened the pot by offering Doughty an average of $200,000 more per year above his reported original offer of $6.8 million per season, the same average annual value of center Anze Kopitar’s contract.

For their part, Doughty and agent Don Meehan reportedly budged on the length of the contract, so the deal ended up at $7 million per season for eight years.

“The cap is a delicate balance,” Kings Assistant General Manager Ron Hextall told LAKings.com (Kings executives were not available for comment on September 30). “Every year, there’s moving parts just to try and stay under it. But we’re really excited to have Drew under contract, and, obviously, Kopitar, long-term, along with the rest of our guys.”

“We’re excited about the timing,” added Hextall. “It could have, obviously, been a little bit better at the start of camp, but we’re excited to have our team whole again.”

The 21-year-old native of London, Ontario met with the media before hitting the ice for a skate with assistant coach John Stevens.

“It sucked being at home, and it sucked going through this process, but I’m just really thankful that I’m here, and I’m going to be a member of the LA Kings for eight years,” said Doughty. “[The waiting] sucked, it really did. I didn’t plan to be back home in London for that long. I wanted to be here the whole time. There was never a question about leaving the Kings, or anything like that. But we had to get done what we had to get done, and it’s done before the season. That’s the most important part.”

“I’ve had a lot of stress,” added Doughty. “The season’s approaching. I was counting down the days until the season started. At first, I didn’t want to miss camp, either. I was counting down the days until camp started, but I ended up having to miss that.”

“I’m not happy about going through all that, but it’s done. I’m just happy that I’m here, happy to be a member of the LA Kings. I want to apologize to all those who had to patiently wait for me to get here, but, now that I’m here, I’m fully committed to making this team better.”

Doughty also addressed some of the criticism aimed at him due to his holdout.

“It was never a question of me not wanting to be with the Kings, or trying to ruin the team, or anything like that,” he stressed. “I apologize [for not] being here on time. Maybe some people think I didn’t go about doing things the right way. It’s part of the business. That’s in the past. Now I just have to focus on this season, [getting] this team to the Finals and winning it.”

Doughty’s absence has been the big story hanging over the Kings’ 2011 training camp. But the players took it all in stride.

“Everyone knew it was a matter of time, and they finally figured it out, a deal that worked for both parties,” said right wing and team captain Dustin Brown. “It’s good to have him back. Going through training camp, that was probably the biggest story, unfortunately—him not being here. But we’ve got him back now, and it’s just a matter of getting ready to go.”

“From a player’s standpoint, guys aren’t coming to the rink and saying, ‘oh wow…we’re going to have to start the regular season without [Doughty],’” added Brown. “That’s not the mentality of the group of guys who are in here. I think it was more, ‘let’s get ready to go.’”

“It was a real non-concern for players. I’m sure, for the coaches, management, ownership—they were all worrying about it. But, as a group of players, we did a pretty good job—the situation was what it was. It was more about getting ourselves ready, because had he not signed, we were going to have to play without him. But now that he has signed, it’s a big plus.”

Kings blue line corps member Matt Greene shared a similar view.

“I think everyone was confident that [an agreement] was going to happen, it was just a matter of time,” said Greene. “It’s good that they could finally reach an agreement and get this going, because he’s a big part of our team. It’s going to be nice having him to start the year.”

“He’ll be in shape, he’ll be fine, ready to go,” added Greene. “Missing training camp—nobody’s going to hold that against him. It’s something that happens. Everybody has either been in that situation, or knows somebody who has, so it’s not a distraction. There’s nothing against him for not being here. That’s just the way it worked out. We’ll welcome him with open arms today.”

Management was also keeping tabs on the reaction in the dressing room.

“I thought the whole group did a good job of staying focused,” said Hextall. “The coaching staff did an outstanding job getting the players that we had [here] ready to play. I think the guys were really good about it, they understand the business part of the game. Again, the organization’s focus, as a whole, obviously, in the back room, we had some stuff going on. Overall, our focus was terrific.”

Newcomer Mike Richards is rather familiar with Doughty since the two were teammates on Canada’s Gold Medal-winning team in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“He started as a sixth or seventh defenseman [for Team Canada], and just worked his way to the top,” Richards noted. “He’s a confident, skilled hockey player. When you have those two [attributes], you make for a dangerous player on the ice. He’s just got so much skill, and the confidence to go along with it. But, even though he’s got all that skill, he doesn’t put his team in difficult positions if something doesn’t go right.”

“He’s a good player, we’ll obviously welcome him to the team,” Richards added. “It’s nice to see that he’s taken that step, and will be here for awhile. He’ll help with our defense in a big way.”

Having signed a lengthy contract of his own, Richards shared his own perspectives.

“You’re more relieved when it’s done, knowing that you’re going to be an NHL player for the next X amount of years that you’ve signed for,” he explained. “You’re excited to get started.”

“For him, it’s more getting excited to get back to the team, where he’s wanted to be all along.” he elaborated. “It’s unfortunate that the business side sometimes gets in the way, but I think everyone’s excited to have him back.”

Aside from Doughty, head coach Terry Murray may be the happiest person of all about having his best defenseman back in the fold.

“Drew Doughty is back,” Murray beamed. “I’m going to give him a big hug when I see him. It’s ‘welcome back, and get going.’”

“I’m real happy for him, and I’m real happy for the organization that this got done,” Murray added. “Mr. Anschutz and Tim Leiweke, they obviously stepped up big time here with a very important player to our team, and I know Dean [Lombardi] and Hexy [Hextall] have been working very hard over the summer, and through the training camp, to get this finalized.”

“Now we get everything back to being about the LA Kings, and the team. We move on.”

Although the players were all saying the right things, Doughty’s situation had to be, at the very least, a bit of a distraction.

“No question,” said Murray. “It was in the front of my mind the whole training camp. He’s a very important player, a very good player. You miss him.”

“You know everybody’s working very hard towards getting it resolved, and that’s the most important thing that you can hope for, that there’s a lot of communication going on,” added Murray. “Now that it’s done, we’ll bring him along very quickly, and get him ready to play the first game of the season.”

“As a coach, you’re just hoping it happens, that he’s able to get back, and get some quality practice time with the team before the season starts.”

Doughty said that his strength and conditioning has improved over last season, and that he is already rarin’ to go.

“I’ve been skating back home pretty hard, so I think I can jump right into it,” said Doughty. “But whenever they want me to play, I’m available to play, and I want to get back in action as soon as I can.”

“I feel stronger, and I feel better conditioned as well,” added Doughty. “I’m a little bit slimmer, but, at the same time, I have a little more muscle, and my body fat is lower. I worked really hard in the gym, and I was on the ice as well. I feel good. I’m a little bit lighter than I usually am…about 203 [pounds], and I usually play at 210.”

Doughty is not expected to be in the lineup when the Kings face the Colorado Avalanche in the annual Frozen Fury pre-season game at the MGM Grand Garden Arena tonight in Las Vegas, but will skate with players not in tonight’s lineup. Going forward, Murray will put Doughty on a fast track towards getting into the lineup.

“It’s gas pedal right to the floor boards out there in practice,” Murray stressed. “You’re going to push him right through, and get the amount of work that you feel, as a coaching staff, a player needs in order to get him up to playing speed as quickly as possible.”

“[It will be the] ‘Lamborghini’ approach,” Murray added. “Now we can get a week or practice time before the season starts.”

With the big contract, Doughty now has to prove that he is worthy of it over the term of the deal, and, after heading in the other direction last season, he will need to make the mental adjustments necessary to improve.

“Last year was a little bit of a down year for Drew, when you look at the numbers and the performance from the year before,” said Hextall. “But I think, as a second year player, to be runner-up for the Norris Trophy, and to really raise [his] game to that level, I think, last year—there’s a human tendency to think that you’re going to be that player every year.”

“I think Drew probably learned the lesson that you’ve got to push through every year, you’ve got to push through every summer, you’ve got to work hard, and get yourself in the best shape possible, so there’s some good lessons there,” added Hextall. “In saying that, Drew was still a pretty darn good player for us last year. I think he’s one of the elite, young defensemen in the league, and we expect him to be one of the elite defensemen in the league for many years.”

Doughty acknowledged that he took a step backwards last season, and that he needs to be better.

“I just want to improve every year,” he said. “I’ve been with this team for a long time. I want to win many Stanley Cup Championships. That Norris Trophy would be amazing to win. I know a lot of people didn’t think my last season was great, but I know I’m going to be a lot better this season.”

Winners And Losers?

As the Doughty Saga wore on during the off-season and through training camp, the contract terms that were being negotiated leaked out, and everyone began taking sides.

In the end, Lombardi and the Kings sweetened the deal, offering an average of $200,000 per year over the life of the contract, as reported earlier.

But in order to get that payout, Doughty and Meehan had to accept what they reportedly did not want…a long-term deal, one that keeps him in the fold for four years beyond the age of 25, when he can become an unrestricted free agent (he will have played seven seasons in the league at that time).

Looking at the terms of the deal, it makes you think, ‘why didn’t Doughty and Meehan make that offer much earlier in the process?’

After all, even with the extra $200,000 per year above the annual average value of Kopitar’s contract, one would have to think that Lombardi would have jumped at such a proposal, and the whole squabble could have been avoided.

For his part, Doughty has moved on.

“I don’t know if I need to talk about [the negotiations, the process, or the specifics of the contract] anymore,” he said. “It’s in the past now. I’m just really focused and really happy about being here. [Everything about the contract] is in the past, and I’m happy to be a part of this organization for a long time, and just really excited to be here, and [to] be back.”

Brown noted that the ordeal had to be tough on Doughty.

“I think, for him, [reaching a deal] was sigh of relief,” said Brown. “I think what a lot of people forget is that he’s 21 years old, and [is] in a situation that not a lot of 21-year-olds have to deal with. Whatever your opinion of how it went down [might be], he definitely wanted to be here from day one, and what happens in negotiations—a lot of people don’t understand. He had to deal with it pretty much by himself, seeing how he wasn’t around the guys at all.”

But the guys were with him, anyway.

“I probably talked to him two or three times a week, either text or voice, so I was probably in contact with him since the beginning of June, just seeing how things were going, and talking to him about what was going on here, once training camp got started, and trying to give him different perspectives,” Brown explained. “When you’re in a negotiation like that, it’s very hard to step outside. Sometimes, you need someone just to bounce ideas off of. Sometimes, he asked for ideas and opinions, so I just tried to be there for him.”

Doughty said that he knew he had the support of his teammates.

“They know it’s part of the business, and they supported me the whole time,” he noted. “They made sure that I knew that if I ever needed someone to talk to, they were there for me.”

But…who won, and who lost?

Given that both parties got something they wanted, there were no clear winners or losers. However, the advantage goes to Lombardi and the Kings, who did not have to break the bank when they sweetened their previous offer. More importantly, Lombardi stood firm on requiring a long-term commitment from Doughty—being able to buy out a handful of Doughty’s unrestricted free agent years and locking him up until he is 29 years old is the most critical aspect of the deal.

“He’s a young man, a very gifted young man,” said Murray. “He’s blessed with a lot of skill, a lot of talent. He’s a critical part of our organization. We’re all very happy that he’s back on board with an extended contract, an eight-year deal.”

“That shows the commitment that Mr. Anschutz is making to this team, that he’d sign a young guy to [a contract of] that length,” added Murray. “It’s tremendous, on his part. Now, it’s our job, as a coaching staff, to get the team to say, ‘thank you,’ by being a good team, play well, and play the kind of game that our fans want to see.”

Before too long, Doughty is going to “celebrate” his new contract with his teammates…by treating them to a meal…or two.

“I’m sure he’ll be paying for the first team dinner whenever the guys get together,” said Murray.

“He’s buying more than lunch, that’s for sure,” said Brown.

“That’s a definite,” said Doughty. “I know the boys won’t let that one slide. I think I [owe] it to them to take them to more than one dinner.”

In Other News…

On September 30, the Kings signed veteran right wing Trent Hunter to a one-year, $600,000, one-way contract.

Hunter, 31, was in the Kings’ training camp on a professional tryout contract. The 6-3, 210-pound native of Red Deer, Alberta has scored 99 goals and has added 130 assists for 229 points with 201 penalty minutes in 459 career NHL regular season games with the New York Islanders.

Hunter has twice reached the twenty-goal plateau. His best season was in 2003-04, when he scored 25 goals and tallied 26 assists for 51 points in 77 regular season games.

The Kings also assigned center prospect Andrei Loktionov to the Manchester Monarchs of the American Hockey League, their primary minor league affiliate.

Additional training camp roster cuts are expected to be announced on October 1.

Raw audio interviews

(Extraneous material and dead air have been removed)

Matt Greene (1:43)

Mike Richards (2:49)

Dustin Brown (5:11)

Terry Murray (8:09)

Drew Doughty (5:37)

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NOTE: this website was build using Miraj. The source code is available at: miraj-project/homepage . Many other simple examples with commented code are available at miraj-project/demos/hello-world

Components can also be easily defined as one-off elements for use in a single page. Both page and components can be defined in the same project.

Miraj also makes it very easy to define and share component libraries. Multiple components may be defined across multiple namespaces; a deflibrary macro then assembles any combination of components into a library namespace, which is independent of the defining namespaces. Miraj can automatically generate a demo page for previewing/testing components under development.

Things get a little more complicated when you add web components. Miraj allows the programmer to define and use Polymer-based components in idiomatic Clojure, without having to worry about the directory structures, file names, and href values required to make the generated HTML, Javascript and CSS files work together.

Providing Clojure functions for HTML elements is relatively trivial. Miraj also provides macros that make page and component definitions look similar to the deftype and defrecord constructions of Clojure.

Clojurescript already eliminates the need to program in Javascript; Miraj does the same for HTML. (A genuine Clojure face for CSS programming remains a future project).

Miraj eliminates mixed-language programming, allowing the programmer to define pages and components in Clojure. Miraj compiles this Clojure code into HTML, Javascript, and CSS.

An HTML page is analogous to a Clojure program of one function, main. In particular, the <link> and <script> elements in the <head> element are analogous to the :require and :import directives of Clojure's ns macro: they tell the runtime to find, fetch, and load the referenced resources.

The goal of the Miraj Project is to create a pure Clojure, 100% functional programming model for web application development, including first-class support for defining and using Web Components ( Polymer only for this version).

Pass HTML metadata as a Clojure map; Miraj will validate the map against Clojure.spec specifications (which may be found in miraj_spec.clj and miraj/x/ , and then transform it into the appropriate elements in <head>.

BigInt and BigDecimal end up looking like Int and Decimal:

With a few exceptions, clojure attribute values go through normal Clojure evaluation and then are serialized as strings. You can use expressions as attribute values:

Use the Unicode character \uFEFF, 'ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE', to force display of the delimiters without Polymer interpretation:

if you are using Polymer, you must escape opening double bracesand bracketsif you want to display them in a string, since Polymer treats these as special "binding annotations" (see polymer for more info). I.e. if you put something inside double braces or brackets, it will be interpreted as a property and will be displayed as null if it has no value:

Character entity references like € require special handling, since & is automatically escaped. Use the Unicode literal (for example, \u20AC for the Euro sign, €). You can embed character literals directly, or you can use ordinary Clojure definitions or bindings to get names:

HTML5 empty elements must not be self-closing; they must have a close tag. Miraj understands empty elements:

HTML5 void elements cannot have any content; they also cannot be "self-closing"; they may only have a start tag with no '/'. Miraj understands void elements:

The miraj.html library wraps the lower-level miraj.co-dom library, providing one function per HTML5 element, as well as some additional goodies.

See the Hello World demos for many examples.

Polymer

Currently Miraj only supports Polymer version 1; support for the recently-released version 2 is in development.

Miraj provides a library, miraj.polymer, that supports features specific to Polymer. For example, it supports Polymer bindings, helper elements, and Event protocols.

Polymer Component Libraries In addition, Miraj provides a collection of pre-built libraries for the collection of components built by the Polymer Project. These libraries wrap the native Polymer implementations, which can be found at webcomponents.org Warning: only the iron and paper libraries are fully up to date; the remaining libraries are outdated, but will soon be upgraded. miraj.polymer.iron "Basic building blocks for creating an application." (iron-elements)

miraj.polymer.paper Material design UI elements. (paper-elements)

miraj.polymer.gold "Elements built for e-commerce-specific use-cases, like checkout flows." (gold-elements)

miraj.polymer.google

miraj.polymer.layout

miraj.polymer.molecules

miraj.polymer.neon

miraj.polymer.platinum

Polymer Assets The assets that implement Polymer components are package in miraj.polymer.assets ; this library contains everything you would get if you installed using bower, packaged as a jarfile so the assets become available. via the classpath. Each of the miraj.polymer.* libraries has a dependency on this library, so the user never needs to import it directly. To serve your component-based application statically, or using a non-Java server, you must copy the assets your app needs to a folder on the server's search path. The boot-miraj/assetize task will copy the contents of the miraj.polymer.assets jar to the filesystem. Alternatively, you can use bower to install the components you need, but the path to them must be miraj/polymer/assets.

Using Polymer Components To use a Polymer component in a webpage, include the library as a dependency in your boot/leiningen project file, and then :require it in your Clojure namespace, just like any other library: (ns foo.bar ...) (defpage baz (:require [miraj.polymer.paper :as paper :refer [button card]]) ...) See the Polymer hello-world demo for more detailed examples. Miraj generally follows a simple naming convention for Polymer components: <foo-bar> becomes miraj.polymer.foo/bar. For example, paper-button maps to miraj.polymer.paper/button. In some cases, another ns segment is used; for example, the function for <paper-input-container> is miraj.polymer.paper.input/container . (Documentation is incomplete, but the library source code is easily understandable.) Data Binding Helper Elements Polymer's data binding helper elements –<dom-if>, <dom-repeat>, etc. – are implemented in miraj.polymer . Some of the names have been changed to be more consistent with Clojure practice; for example, for <array-selector> we use miraj.polymer/selection. See the source code for the complete list.
Renovations began this week to transform the Baltimore Visitor Center into an event space that the city's tourism bureau hopes is used by as many local residents as tourists.

An $800,000 project is underway to remove the permanent brochure racks from the Inner Harbor building and open its main room to create a functional event space. The glass building will still function primarily as an information source for visitors, but it will also allow for alternative uses such as convention receptions and private parties.

"It’s not just for tourists anymore — locals can use it,” said Tom Noonan, CEO of Visit Baltimore.

When the center opened in 2004, visitors were primarily getting their information about tourist attractions through physical brochures, so the space was constructed with a series of permanent racks for them. Now that information is primarily accessed through mobile devices, those racks are defunct.

After the renovations are complete, the building brochures and tourist information will be kept in carts on wheels, so they can be moved out to create an open space. Noonan estimates the building could accommodate up to 500 people, though he hasn't been given a cap yet from the fire department.

Rental fees for the space have not been determined, but Noonan said those proceeds will go to the Visit Baltimore Education & Training Foundation, which provides scholarships for local students seeking higher education in hospitality.

In addition to opening the building up as event venue, the renovation, which is set to wrap up by March, will also upgrade the televisions and other technology in the center.

"It kind of gives the building a second life which it really needs,” Noonan said.

The revamp is part of a series of changes underway at the Inner Harbor. The USS Constellation Museum is being transformed to a new water taxi terminal, according to the Baltimore City Department of Transportation. Additionally, the Harborplace pavilions along Pratt and Light streets are slated for an overhaul, and new vendors like Yard House are already moving into retail spaces there. Rash Field is in the midst of a redesign, too.
{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/0\/0f\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-1-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-1-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/0\/0f\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-1-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-1-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 1 Obtain the lasso in the single player game. There isn't a true method or action to hang someone per se, but to hang someone using this article's method, you will need the lasso. The lasso is a length of rope you can equip to hogtie victims, break in wild horses or subdue criminals. It is only available in the single-player game, and can only be unlocked during the quest "Wild Horses, Tamed Passions". Afterwards, you will be able to use it fully. There isn't a true method or action to hang someone, but to hang someone using this article's method, you will need the lasso. The lasso is a length of rope you can equip to hogtie victims, break in wild horses or subdue criminals. It is only available in the single-player game, and can only be unlocked during the quest "Wild Horses, Tamed Passions". Afterwards, you will be able to use it fully.

{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/d\/d0\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-2-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-2-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/d\/d0\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-2-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-2-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 2 Practice lassoing people in the world. Simply draw, aim and fire the lasso as you would a normal weapon. The reticule will point where the lasso will fire, and if you are close enough, it will lasso the target. Beware, however, the lasso does cause some damage to the target and therefore will count as assault if you are spotted by lawmen, in addition to any counts of kidnapping you will incur. Practice on criminals or gang members instead.

{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/5\/5e\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-3-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-3-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/5\/5e\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-3-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-3-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 3 Find a suitable area to hang someone. Unlike in real life, where a tree or gallows would be suitable, due to the game's mechanics, you will need to find a low bridge, cliff or balcony. There are several cliffs around the Red Dead Redemption world, although there are fewer Unlike in real life, where a tree or gallows would be suitable, due to the game's mechanics, you will need to find a low bridge, cliff or balcony. There are several cliffs around the Red Dead Redemption world, although there are fewer bridges . A good choice for one would be the bridge to the Tumbleweed gang hideout - it is low enough to hang people from and easily accessible. Balconies or ledges can be found in most towns.

{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/2\/2a\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-4-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-4-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/2\/2a\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-4-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-4-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 4 Get on your horse and find a victim to lasso. Ideally, they should be close to the area you have picked so that by the time you reach it, they haven't been dragged so far that they die. Alternatively, if you are using the bridge to Tumbleweed, you merely have to wait for a victim to pass by underneath. Ideally, they should be close to the area you have picked so that by the time you reach it, they haven't been dragged so far that they die. Alternatively, if you are using the bridge to Tumbleweed, you merely have to wait for a victim to pass by underneath.

{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/7\/73\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-5-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-5-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/7\/73\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-5-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-5-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 5 Lasso your target and take them to the hanging spot. With your previous practice, this should be easy. Now it is a matter of dragging the victim to the hanging spot, making sure not to accidentally let go of the rope before you reach it. Try not to go through too dense a bush, as it will kill your victim faster before you reach your destination. If you are using the Tumbleweed bridge or similar, again, you will not have to move far, or even be on your horse to lasso and hang the target; you can simply lasso and enjoy.

{"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/e\/ed\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-6-Version-2.jpg\/v4-460px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-6-Version-2.jpg","bigUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/e\/ed\/Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-6-Version-2.jpg\/v4-760px-Hang-Someone-in-Red-Dead-Redemption-Step-6-Version-2.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":760,"bigHeight":570} 6 Drop your victim over the edge of the cliff, ledge or bridge you are on. This can be done by riding diagonally at the cliff or similar, and then turning and riding parallel to it. Your victim should swing off the cliff, and if you come to stop, they should be hanging in mid-air off the ledge. Make sure to keep the rope held firmly. This step can be skipped if you are using the Tumbleweed bridge method, as they will already be hanging as soon as you lasso them if you lasso them as they pass underneath.
House Republican appropriators are scaling down an emergency funding bill to address the surge of child immigrants crossing the border.

Just three days before the House’s August recess is set to begin, Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) is in the process of drafting limited legislation that would provide less than $1 billion in funds and through only Sept. 30, aides said.

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That’s a far cry from the $3.7 billion requested by the White House, and less than half the amount in $2.7 billion bill Senate Democrats have written.

The differences suggest it will be tough to get a final bill to President Obama’s desk and that Republican leaders are more focused on winning approval from House conservatives to ensure a bill is approved by the lower chamber.

As recently as last week, Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) said the legislation would likely provide about $1.5 billion and last through the end of 2014.

Republicans are making the changes to try to win over conservatives who are reluctant to give the Obama administration any new funding. Most Democrats are expected to oppose the measure.

The last-minute tweaks open what could be a frantic final week on the border bill before lawmakers leave town.

Under House Republicans’ own rules, legislation must be publicly available for at least three calendar days before a floor vote. That means a bill must be released by Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. at the latest for a vote by Thursday, the last day the House is scheduled to be in session.

House GOP leaders could break the rule, but that might spark disapproval from conservatives, who are wary of bringing up a bill to address the surge of unaccompanied child minors crossing the border in the first place. Leadership would likely get heat from members who want sufficient time to review a lengthy appropriations bill.

“I don’t like big bills,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert Louis (Louie) Buller GohmertRepublicans force House subcommittee to adjourn during hearing on climate change Trump met with group led by Ginni Thomas at White House: report House passes bill expressing support for NATO MORE (R-Texas). “The one thing I’ve learned in my time here in the House is that, when you hear the word ‘comprehensive,’ what it means in a loose translation is, ‘we got some really bad provisions that would never pass, so we need a big, comprehensive law so we can hide the bad laws in it.’ ”

GOP leaders held their cards close to the vest on Monday. A spokesman for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who takes over as majority leader at the end of the week, said conversations about legislation continued through the weekend. But congressional aides would not offer a timeframe of when the House GOP bill might be released.

While the House bill would be much smaller than what Obama requested, the shortened timeframe could still address the more immediate aspects of the child migrant issue.

The Department of Homeland Security has said it expects Immigration and Customs Enforcement to run out of money in mid-August. It has projected the same for Customs and Border Protection by mid-September.

The House bill would ensure those departments get immediate funding.

Rogers said he will be presenting a plan before the GOP conference at its weekly meeting at 9 a.m. Tuesday.

The chairman said the bill could be released Tuesday for a vote by Thursday.

“I hope we file tomorrow,” Rogers said Monday night. “It’s practically ready to go.”

Rogers said Congress only needed to approve extra funding for the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Funding beyond that date could be part of the regular appropriations process for fiscal 2015.

“Well, we can handle whatever is needed next in the regular bills,” Rogers said. “We really don’t need to do the fiscal year [2015].”

And with Senate Democrats struggling to line up enough support for their competing border proposal, the House GOP has an opportunity to distinguish itself as potentially the lone group to get something done.

But that won’t be easy, given the reluctance some Republicans will have in voting for any border bill.

From the beginning, a conservative bloc of lawmakers has urged leadership to ignore Obama’s funding request and simply pass a resolution underscoring their opinion that the president encouraged children to come to the U.S. with lax immigration policies and that the administration has the power already to address the matter.

Rep. Trent Franks Harold (Trent) Trent FranksArizona New Members 2019 Cook shifts 8 House races toward Dems Freedom Caucus members see openings in leadership MORE (R-Ariz.) introduced a resolution to do just that Friday afternoon. If passed, the nonbinding resolution would express the sense of the House that the president’s immigration policies have effectively “enticed” children to migrate from Central America, under the belief they would be free to stay if they made it over the border.

The resolution only had one co-sponsor as of Monday. If that number grows, it could be an indication that Republicans will have trouble pulling enough support for new funding, even when paired with policy changes to strengthen the border.

Meanwhile, nearly all Democrats have remained resolute in opposing the GOP bill.

Opposition among Democrats to changing a 2008 human trafficking law many Republicans blame for the influx of immigrant children has hardened. While Republicans are confident some Democrats will come around to the bill if it reaches the floor, so far, only a sparse handful of Democrats have said they are even considering supporting it.— This story was posted at 2:14 p.m. and updated at 7:25 p.m. and 8:41 p.m.
Our Chief Justice thinks that if the evidence of gerrymandering is too sophisticated for laymen to grasp, the court should ignore it.

Chief Justice John Roberts in Jackson, Miss., on Sept. 27, 2017. (Photo11: Rogelio V. Solis, AP)

For 12 years, Chief Justice John Roberts has worked overtime peddling the dubious conceit that he and his life-tenured colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court are above politics and determined to remain so.

Yet Roberts himself is a consummate politician — a strategist who worries about appearances and harbors a ward heeler's contempt for the intelligence of the average voter. And his cynicism was on full display last week when justices took up the politically fraught problem of gerrymandering.

Plaintiffs in a case known as Gill v Whitford want the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin legislators violated the U.S. Constitution when they drew district boundaries that systematically diluted the electoral clout of their state's Democratic voters.

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A lower court ordered Wisconsin to draw a fairer map after concluding that evidence and voting data submitted by the plaintiffs proved Republicans had configured districts designed to preserve their party’s legislative majority even when Democrats win a majority of the popular vote.

Roberts, who knows a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs will jeopardize Republican gerrymanders in more than a dozen other states, wants his colleagues to stay out of a partisan process even simpatico conservatives like Justice Samuel Alito concede is “distasteful.” The chief justice says the public will lose respect for the courts if he and his colleagues stick their noses into all that distastefulness.

But what if a majority party uses its mapmaking prowess to effectively disenfranchise the opposing party's voters? And what if those aggrieved voters can use the same technological advances their opponents exploited to prove an election was rigged, and even to quantify the advantage its rivals gained by manipulating a state's political boundaries?

That's exactly what has happened in the Wisconsin case, as one of the country's premier scientists explained in a remarkable friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Mapping chromosomes and rigged elections

It's rare for disinterested third parties to play a decisive role in landmark Supreme Court cases. But the arguments filed by Eric Lander, a geneticist and mathematician who oversees the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, may prove an exception.

Lander was one of the principal leaders of the decade-long effort to map the human genome, and he has advised the White House and the Pentagon on innovative uses of technology for national defense. In a brief that several justices cited during Tuesday's oral arguments, Lander says the sort of data-crunching the federal government uses to assess whether a nuclear weapon will detonate properly or whether Miami is safely outside the path of a hurricane can be used to prove when political boundaries have been manipulated to guarantee one party the largest possible electoral advantage.

Lander's argument is a crucial one, because lawsuits challenging the fairness of gerrymandered political districts have foundered on the high court's doubts that challengers could propose an objective standard for evaluating partisan bias.

Lander says technological advances that allow mapmakers to project likely electoral outcomes in thousands of different scenarios mean that a party that controls the redistricting process can pick the map that yields the most extreme partisan advantage. But he adds that the same analytical methods allow courts to discover when district lines have been manipulated to produce the maximum distortion of the electorate's will, whether by amplifying the impact of one party's voters or minimizing its opponents' ability to muster an electoral majority in most districts.

By comparing the district lines a state has adopted with all the other possible configurations that comply with state and federal law, courts can determine not only whether a given map handicaps one party's voters, but also how much. Using these reliable analytical tools, Lander says, deciding which of several possible maps yields electoral outcomes most consistent with the majority's druthers becomes "a mathematical question to which there is a right answer" — exactly the sort of objective test judges worried about the corrosive effects of gerrymandering have been seeking.

Gobbledygook?

Chief Justice Roberts, of course, doesn't see it that way. During oral arguments last week, he dismissed the evidence Lander and other mathematical analysts have submitted as proof Wisconsin's legislative elections are rigged as "sociological gobbledygook."

In another exchange with the plaintiffs' attorneys, the chief justice appeared to concede that the evidence he disparaged might be persuasive after all, once you took the time to digest it, but hinted that few voters had the patience or smarts to do so.

"The intelligent man on the street is going to say that's a bunch of baloney," Roberts insisted. If justices blow the whistle on Republican cheating, he believes, the public will inevitably conclude that they're simply shilling for Democrats — "And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and the integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country."

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Roberts' argument amounts to a rejection of rational inquiry itself: If the evidence that Wisconsin has violated its citizens' constitutional rights is too sophisticated for laymen to grasp at first glance, he says, the court would be better off to ignore it.

This is the same cynically anti-intellectual rationale cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry have marshaled to discredit the evidence of climate change. Until "the intelligent man on the street" has a keener understanding of the role greenhouse gases play in global warming, why should elected officials kowtow to experts who do?

Of course, the same logic could be marshaled to discount the warnings of hurricane forecasters or military strategists trying to anticipate the likely consequences of a military confrontation in the Middle East or on the Korean peninsula. If we don't understand their calculations, why should we pay any attention to them?

The answer, of course, is that democratic government, like many other aspects of daily life, requires a reasonable deference to those with superior expertise: the surgeon who does hundreds of bypass operations a year, the repair technician who diagnoses malfunctioning furnaces for a living, or the pilot with 10,000 hours of in-flight service under her belt.

Roberts is right to be worried about the credibility of the judiciary, and its capacity to command the confidence of citizens across the political spectrum. But he should be at least as concerned about the credibility of representative democracy itself.

As Paul Smith, who represents the plaintiffs challenging Wisconsin's legislative map argues, the stakes in Gill v. Whitford are larger than the public's perception of Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

"If you let this go, if you say … we're not going to have a judicial remedy for this problem, in 2020 you're going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen," Smith warned Roberts near the end of Tuesday's oral arguments. "Voters everywhere are going to be like voters in Wisconsin, and (say): No, it really doesn't matter whether I vote."

Brian Dickerson is a columnist for The Detroit Free Press, where this piece first appeared.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

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The tension is high in the starry trailer for “When We Rise,” Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black’s hotly-anticipated dramatization of the LGBTQ rights movement across several decades.

The eight-hour, seven-episode ABC miniseries stars Guy Pearce as activist Cleve Jones and Mary Louise Parker as women’s rights champion Roma Guy. Also featured in the cast are Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell, Denis O’Hare and David Hyde Pierce, among others.

“It’s been the honor of my life to research and craft these stories of family, diversity and equality over the past three years,” Black said. “To have collaborators of this caliber sign on to help bring these stories to life is a tremendous vote of confidence, and I hope a testament to the relevancy and necessity of our continued march toward justice for all.”

The trailer’s release on Monday couldn’t feel more timely in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise ascension to the U.S. presidency, which has left the future of queer rights in question.
Blackhawks, Wild Unveil Stadium Series Jerseys

The Chicago Blackhawks and Minnesota Wild have both unveiled their 2016 Stadium Series uniforms, they will be worn for their game against each other outdoors at TCF Bank Stadium in Minnesota on February 21, 2016.

The Blackhawks jersey is white with the Blackhawks modern primary logo on the chest, a black shoulder yoke with those giant player numbers now moved up to the shoulders.

Things start to look pretty good when you get to the sleeves — we see three large black/red stripes with the Blackhawks standard shoulder logo in the middle of them. A nod to how that patch was placed in the 1950s (and in last year’s Winter Classic) but the stripes were never that large. Hey, that’s not a bad thing, I actually quite like this part of the jersey.

On the collar (because this is a thing now) there are four Chicago-flag stars. Also note that the collar is only on the left side of the jersey.

An official explanation of the Blackhawks uniform below… yup, they really went with “City of Big Shoulders” for the reason for that shoulder yoke.

Minnesota will be decked out in green from head to toe, the big shoulders (so, is Minnesota the “state of big shoulders”?) are in wheat or beige.

The standard primary logo is on the chest, with a red and beige stripe on the arms. Giant player numbers on the sleeves, no not on the shoulders. On the left shoulder is their “State of Hockey” patch — first time this has appeared on a uniform I believe, the other has the Stadium Series logo. Speaking of which, that patch looks to be absent on the Blackhawks jersey. Huh.

So it’s the Template Bowl, which re-colouring do you like better? Sound off in the comments.
The GDP-growth figure released today, at 3.5%, was slightly higher than expected, but camouflages the mounting economic cost of the 2014 coup. Thailand’s output gap is now among the biggest in Asia; the economy is being kept afloat by government spending and foreign tourists’ cash. But last week’s bombings may deter visitors, and autocratic rule is stifling economic progress. Household debt is at a historic high; low agricultural prices have depressed farm incomes. The country’s old-style route to prosperity is blocked: exports will fall for the fourth consecutive year in 2016. Thailand’s economy is bigger than those of fast-growing Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia combined. But its population is ageing and economic policy is deeply conservative. Future growth will have to come from capital accumulation or increases in productivity. Yet the new constitution puts the army in charge, making it responsible for the economy, education and innovation. What could possibly go wrong?
It's been almost a week since I posted this CDr to the WFMU blog, and since then I have been ransacked by e-mails and comments crying "hoax" or "bubble boy," from everyone from random passers-by to the higher-ups at WFMU. Rather than address all the theories being espoused by readers from around the globe, I simply want to aver that this is indeed a true story, and is in no way meant to be a self-promotion tactic. Any alterations to the WFMU blog entry post-publication -- or my own personal blog -- were done in an attempt to quell the uprising of cynics. Had I known that my actions would only add fuel to the fire, I would have simply let things stand as they were. Clearly I've learned a valuable lesson in controversy control.

Usually when I find CD-rs out in the world, they've been tossed out of car windows or left on the counters of stupid hipster coffeeshops. The last place I ever expected to find an unlabeled CD-r filled with music would be in the middle of the fucking desert. But nearly two years ago I was hiking in Joshua Tree and I came across a completely surreal sight: an old-school 5 1/4" computer floppy disk. It appeared to have been tossed casually near the side of the trail I was on, housed in a simple plastic baggie. I reached into the bag and pulled out the floppy disc. I noticed that the magnetic tape inside the plastic case had been replaced by a recordable compact disc. The disc had a creepy message scrawled on it which read, . I don't believe in ghosts or extraterrestrials or anything, but standing in the middle of nowhere reading that line was enough to send me into a miniature freak out. What's more, a folded-up piece of paper was also buried inside the plastic cover. A treasure map. Browned edges and everything. It featured a pirate ship (?), a series of footsteps through mountains and palm trees (?), one red X, and ten blue X's. One of of the X's appeard to be floating in the middle of a body of water.

Whoa.

I listened to the recording on my drive back to LA that night. It was indescribably weird. The dedication to the floppy disk case, chicken scratch message, and treasure map implied that someone with way too much time on his or her hands crafted it. The insanity of the recording -- with one or two kind of pretty moments -- mirrored the obsessively constructed feel of the package. I didn't know if I was listening to the work of a mad genius or a deranged psychopath. The sounds are a combination of heavily processed human voices and schizophrenic space music. The 11 tracks are very short, with only four "tunes" lasting longer than three minutes. Most are in the thirty-second to two-minute range in length. I wouldn't call it "rock," but it's guitar-centric. I also wouldn't say that it is very good, but it made for an interesting listen.

When I got home I popped the CD into my computer. I thought that maybe in this age of iTunes and CDDB maybe my computer would recognize the content of the disk. All that came up in iTunes was a series of songs names. In place of artist and title was "???". The song titles made no sense to me at all. The final track is a 14-minute long jam in E called "Matthew 24:14". Google tells me that that bible verse says: "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come"

I have played this CD for record scum collector friends and pop culture junkies in the hopes that someone might recognize something about it, from a riff to a clip from some television show or movie. The only constant is that no one knows what to make of it. I've spent a lot of time needlessly wondering what the fuck this is. What the fuck was that treasure map for? Has anyone else ever found something like this? SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK?!

The most frustrating part of this whole thing is that the only identifying mark was a tiny, hand-scrawled e-mail address at the bottom of the back cover for the floppy disk: andernestborgnineasdominic@gmail.com. I could have gotten all CSI on this shit and tried to figure out how to find who registers a Gmail address or taken fingerprints from the package. I didn't. In the end I figured contact information wouldn't have been included if it wasn't meant to be found. I tried to send an e-mail saying that I enjoyed the album -- just to maybe receive some kind of response -- but I never got one. That's annoying. The only rationale I can think of is that a bizarre work of art conceived and executed such as this wouldn't have the same impact if the creator(s) wanted to be discovered. Or maybe someone responsible lost his or her mind (or maybe the Gmail password) in the time it took me to find it. The only thing I can say is: What. The. Fuck. ???

Artist: ???

Title: ???

Tracklist:

01. Breath (MP3)

02. Wound Midnight (MP3)

03. Long Stem Road (MP3)

04. Noah's Dork (MP3)

05. Used (MP3)

06. Iranbow (MP3)

07. Monied vs. Landed (MP3)

08. The Seventh (Clubbed) Seal (MP3)

09. Gloomsday (MP3)

10. Shooting Scars (MP3)

11. Matthew 24:14 (MP3)
I’ve always managed to dodge the bullet and avoid the addictive pull of Pokémon. Leave it to a button-mashing brawler with plastic figurine accessories to finally get me hooked. At first glance, Pokémon Rumble U isn’t much to look at. With its simplistic controls and repetitive gameplay, you might feel inclined to dismiss it as yet another cash-in of the popular Nintendo franchise. But despite its faults, there’s actually much more to Rumble U than meets the eye, making this a satisfying and fun little title for fans of the series and newcomers alike.

The gameplay is nothing to rave about. It’s incredibly basic. Using either the Gamepad or Wii Remote, you move your character around tiny arenas and attack using one of two buttons as countless hordes of Pokémon charge you head on. If you and your team of four Pokémon (human co-op or CPU controlled) survive the onslaught, then you’re left to battle the stage’s giant-sized boss Pokémon. Upon victory, you’re ranked according to the points you’ve collected and are presented with all the Pokémon that you’ve managed to catch for the round. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Rinse and repeat. There’s very little room or need to strategize a plan of attack. It really boils down to how powerful your Pokémon are and whether or not you’re lucky enough to unlock more of them.[singlepic id=15820 w=320 h=240 float=right]

You may have already guessed it, but most of the appeal does not derive from the monotonous gameplay. While I do admittedly enjoy a mindless brawler from time to time, the real fun in this game comes from the satisfaction of completing challenges to unlock new levels, hoarding coins to upgrade your character (if you purchase the optional figurines) and of course collecting Pokémon.

I’m not gonna lie, it really is all about the Pokémon, all 649 of them. There’s something about these odd little creatures that just makes you need to collect them. I’m sorry, but it happens. I don’t know if it’s because they’re each so uniquely designed with creative names like Leafeon and Heatran or if its because each Pokémon has different skills and power levels, but every time you find a new one, there is a slight yet noticeable release of endorphins into the bloodstream, leaving you temporarily warm and gooey inside. I imagine this sense of satisfaction is even more magnified for diehard fans of the series as they constantly dream of catching their favorite elusive Pokémon to add to their collection.

[singlepic id=15819 w=320 h=240 float=left]And if that wasn’t bad enough, Pokémon Rumble U introdces a new, real world element to further prey on us hapless addicts. The Near Field Communication (NFC) figurines are probably the most unique and appealing aspect of this title. Pokémon Rumble U is the first game to ever use the Wii U’s NFC scanner that comes already built in every gamepad. I honestly didn’t know it was there before this game came along. I always thought it was just some funny symbol on the bottom left of the controller for aesthetic design. When you place one of the separately sold figurines ($3.99 a pop at Gamestop) onto the gamepad, the coinciding character pops up on the screen. It’s similar to the technology used in Skylanders and, more recently, Disney Infinity. The base of the figure acts as a sort of memory card for the character, storing stats and upgrades.

The developers say you don’t need to buy these NFC figures to play the game, and while that is essentially true, without at least one of these little guys you’ll be cheating yourself out of the most rewarding experience in the game. Unlike the two previous Pokémon Rumble titles, in Rumble U the only characters that you’re able to level up are these separately purchased NFC figures. And since all upgrades are purchased in the game using the coins you collect from matches, there really is no other point to collecting them except to occasionally pay for continues. Trust me, I tried playing the game without an NFC and it just wasn’t any fun. There was no incentive to play. It felt utterly boring and unmotivated

That’s when I decided to drag myself off the couch and face the lines at Gamestop. They had the Pokéball dispenser prominently displayed at the front desk next to the gift cards. There were two dozen red and white capsules spilling from the boxes, each containing a random and unknown Pokémon just waiting to be revealed. You have no idea what Pokémon you’re getting until you buy it and open it. Nintendo is getting a lot of flak for making the pokéballs randomized, but I know it’s all part of the plan and just another addictive element to the game. I was surprised to find myself actually getting excited about this thing. Would I get a rare character with special abilities? What would it look like? The checkout guy gave me a knowing look and told me these little balls were selling like hotcakes. Feeling uncomfortable from the whole situation, I left as quickly as I could and then, just like one of those guys playing scratch offs in the gas station parking lot, I opened my pokéball and tore through the inside bag.[singlepic id=15822 w=320 h=240 float=right]

My Pokémon is a black fox with red hair called Zoroark. He’s not the coolest dude with the best powers on the block, but he came to me and he’s mine. And from that point on I was officially hooked. I finally had something to spend all those coins on. I was going to make Zoroark the strongest Pokémon in the world. I’d start by leveling up his HP and attack traits. I figure he’s specialized in Dark moves so maybe I’ll…Oh dear God what have I become? They got me. I’m hooked on Pokémon and I didn’t even see it coming.

Strange how much a good motivator can improve a game’s overall appeal. Suddenly the arena battles weren’t so pointless; I was working towards something. Collecting Pokémon started to matter because the more powerful ones could help me beat challenges to get more points to upgrade Zoroark. My Zoroark. My precious…

Beyond the storyline mode that can be beat in roughly six hours of playtime, there are tons of little motivators built in to keep you coming back for more and, just like the worst of addictions, the more you use it, the more this game tightens its sinister grip around you. I must warn you, if you do have an addictive personality, turn back now and save yourself from countless hours of monotonous button mashing. You’ll find yourself hunting down elusive Pokémon to add to your insane collection or trying over and over to complete challenges with ridiculous requirements. Every level has a list of challenges with specifics that’ll keep you searching for the right Pokémon or executing the correct number of moves before you can unlock bonus capsules that sometimes contain Pokémon for your collection. Some challenges ask for you to use only Pokémon with a power level below 200 or to only use Pokémon with names beginning with “O.” There are even challenges that use the Wii U’s internal clock that require you to beat the game on a Monday or in the evening before it can be unlocked. Such requirements may seem excessive and tedious but if you really care about completing the collection, you’ll do just about anything, raising the replay value to fully beating the game somewhere in the week to month range (meaning 300 to 600 hours, and that’s a safe estimate) It’s a good time, but seriously, if you are an addictive personality, consider yourself warned.

[singlepic id=15821 w=320 h=240 float=left]Pokémon Rumble U is a game of firsts. It’s the first Pokémon title for the Wii U, which also makes it the first one with HD graphics. It’s the first to use Wii U’s NFC, and it’s the first game to allow in game screen captures that you can post directly into the Miiverse social network for instant likes and comments. It’s a pretty cool feature – with the touch of a button you can take a picture of your game and share it with the Pokémon online community. There’s a lot of new stuff being unveiled in this title and it feels more like an introduction of things to come rather than a stand-alone game, which probably explains it’s low pricing of $17.99.

The graphics are flashy and fun to look at, but sometimes there is so much going on in the screen that it’s easy to lose track of your character. I can’t tell you how many times I had no idea what I was doing so I just kept mashing the attack buttons.

The couch play co-op is an awesome addition, but I was very disappointed that they missed the opportunity to make a VS. battle mode. I mean, what could be more fun than two friends battling their custom built Pokémon in a one-on-one battle? I think they missed the boat on that one. It’s also saddening that they didn’t provide any online capabilities for the game.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that this isn’t a super quality game, but it’s loads of fun and it’s good at what it does. Pokémon Rumble U is designed to keep you locked in and coming back for more. It’s a harmless diversion with a built in sense of accomplishment that I may not fully endorse (I’m not about to hunt down all 18 of the NFC figurines), but I certainly can appreciate the fun here. I’ll definitely continue upgrading my Zoroark. My girlfriend even got a Pikachu that she’s leveling up alongside me in co-op. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll even get around to catching all 649 Pokémon. It could happen.

Stefan started gaming the day his dad brought home a shiny, brand new commodore 64. He's been hooked ever since. Whether he's leveling up his ninja in Final Fantasy Tactics, cruising the streets of San Andreas or working on his Terran build order, videogames are never far from his mind. He is currently on the lookout for an appropriate 12 step program to address his electronic addiction.
Is Vincent Gray going to run for D.C. mayor? Should he run? If he does, can he win?

As to the first question, only Gray knows. Early signs suggest he would like to make a bid for the job he lost April 1, 2014, when now-Mayor Muriel E. Bowser defeated him in the Democratic primary.

This much is known: Gray has been taking soundings around town, testing the mood of the city, gauging voter interest. Gray, who represents Ward 7 on the D.C. Council, reportedly has already assembled a skeletal crew that is poised to blossom into full election- ­campaign mode if he gives a green light. It's a tossup at this point. Look for a decision at the beginning of the year, six months before the June 19 primary election.

"Should he run?" calls for an entirely different assessment.

Gray, 75, is still smarting from the voters' rejection of his reelection bid. He lays his loss at the feet of Bowser and then-U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr., who, with much fanfare, launched a corruption probe into Gray's 2010 mayoral election campaign.

Two years before the April 2014 election, then-Ward 4 council member Bowser was one of three lawmakers to call for Gray to resign because of Machen's probe.

The investigation dragged on for three years. The political roof fell in on Gray when D.C. businessman Jeffrey E. Thompson entered federal court on March 10, 2014, and pleaded guilty to illegally giving more than $2 million to Gray's 2010 campaign. Thompson said Gray knew about that "shadow campaign."

The media took it from there.

A March 10 Post headline screamed: "Gray knew of 'shadow campaign,' Thompson prosecutors say; mayor says it's all a lie." Other news organizations followed suit with headlines and extended coverage of their own.

That same month, Bowser said at a debate, "I found out that [Gray] didn't actually win the Democratic primary [in 2010 against Mayor Adrian M. Fenty] fair and square, so . . . I could not support somebody who would be almost indicted."

There stood Gray, three weeks before the April 1 primary: uncharged, but publicly accused of involvement in unlawful behavior, with no opportunity to confront his accusers or review the evidence against him in a court of law. Instead, he found himself in the court of public opinion.

It was no contest on primary Election Day 2014.

A year later, another decision was reached: The U.S. Attorney's Office, under the new management of Channing D. Phillips, concluded its investigation into the 2010 campaign with no charges filed against Gray, citing likely insufficient evidence.

"Justice delayed is justice denied," Gray said following Phillips's announcement. But it was Machen, not Bowser, who torpedoed Gray. Besides, revenge is a poor reason to seek office.

So should he run?

Having a passion to get the old job back is not enough. Gray would have to make the case that Bowser needs to be replaced and that he's the one to do it. That's a tall order, according to a Post poll in June, which showed that 67 percent of D.C. residents approve of the mayor's job performance, although there's some softness in that number.

Only 20 percent strongly approved of the job she was doing while 48 percent gave her negative marks on curbing the influence of big-money donors in the John A. Wilson Building.

And, happiness isn't spread across the city.

Management of the city's only public hospital, United Medical Center, is disgraceful. Allegations of high school students barely able to read and write being allowed to graduate are, if true, alarming. City-provided paths from dependency to self-sufficiency, under Bowser's Health and Human Services Department, are as steep and clumsy as ever.

And her three-year-old administration has hardly been scandal-free: high-ranking Bowser officials getting preferential treatment in the school lottery; a cabinet member misusing staff for personal business; lingering pay-for-play suspicions.

None of that translates into support for Gray, who, despite his denials, must still dispel lingering suspicions about his role in the illegal 2010 shadow campaign.

The burden is on Gray not only to make the case for denying Bowser another term in office; he also needs to convince voters that he alone can make the city a better place for all residents.

So, can Gray win if he jumps into the race?

Dislodging an incumbent is an uphill battle, especially against such a well-financed, politically astute leader as Bowser. The task is even more formidable when voters overall seem generally satisfied with the city's direction.

A seasoned strategist, who requested anonymity unless and until Gray declares, sees it this way: In an off-year election, about 100,000 ballots will get cast. Gray wins handily in Wards 7 and 8 and carries Ward 5. He gets votes in Wards 1, 2, 3 and 6 but not enough to win. He and Bowser fight to the finish in battleground Ward 4, where she resides. If, with a volunteer, grass-roots campaign, Gray scores more than 50,000 votes, he squeaks out a win.

A tall order, indeed.

Read more from Colbert King's archive.
Common Weal director Robin McAlpine argues that universalism is intertwined with Scotland's political identity, and should be protected

IF you want to understand what is different about political culture in Scotland as compared to England and Wales, I'd suggest that the best place to start looking is the question of universalism.

It is also why I believe that Scotland gives up any ground on the issue of universalism at substantial risk to its very political identity.

There are two broad ways to look at social provision, universalism or selectivity. Universalism means that you decide that something should exist, that it is a core part of your society and that you should therefore ensure it is provided to all.

It is so dispiriting that this debate has been opened up by comments by the Scottish Government's new 'poverty tsar' Naomi Eisenstadt.

The NHS and universal school education are the defining examples of universalism. The alternative - selectivity - instead emphasises that there are things that it is probably important that people have access to but that our collective responsibility is limited only to those in dire need who can't get access to those things by other means.

The prime example of a selectivity approach is the kind of benefit eligibility tests run by the likes of Atos. These are not variations of each other - these are fundamentally different political philosophies.

The case for universalism is rock solid and is supported by almost any detailed look at the data. You can look across many countries at many times over many policy areas and you will find the same thing.

When you provide a service that includes everyone, that service becomes a good service, is widely supported and becomes relied on by everyone. But because everyone starts from a different position, the impact of universal services is different for different people with the positive impact on the poor being particularly high.

So for example, if you make childcare free for all, yes this may partially subsidise the childcare needs of the affluent middle classes, but the impact on them (a bit more disposable income) is limited.

Universalism means that you decide that something should exist, that it is a core part of your society and that you should therefore ensure it is provided to all.

The same policy applied to a family with only one adult working in a low income job may well be to allow the second adult to take a job, which could conceivably double the household income.

The positive impact on the poorer household of exactly the same policy is massively bigger. That's how universalism created the era of greatest economic equality Britain has ever seen and why rolling it back has reversed those gains.

But why not just target the funding to those on whom the impact is biggest (the selectivity argument)? So only give the childcare support to the poor. The problem with this is measurable - it just doesn't work properly in practice. There are a number of reasons for this (I was one of four authors of a report which has the links to all the data to explain this) .

Here I'll just raise three. First, it's incredibly inefficient because immediately a chunk of the money that would be spent on the service is instead spent on assessment and other bureaucracy.

Second, because these services then become services only for the poor (who have a low propensity to vote), politicians have little incentive to support them properly, particularly when budgets are being cut (you only need to look at the assault on social services taking place in England just now to see this).

And third, because these are then seen as 'emergency' services, we are as a society much less invested in whether they are actually any good or not - the middle classes whom politicians shape policy to woo not longer have any vested interest and so bare-bones services are what result.

Academic study after academic study demonstrate that when you increase universalism social equality increases and when you increase selectivity, social equality decreases.

Academic study after academic study demonstrate that when you increase universalism social equality increases and when you increase selectivity, social equality decreases.

Imagine the impact on society if most of us were in a private healthcare insurance scheme but a proportion of the poorest in our society were relegated to a 'safety net-only' healthcare system for the poor. What do you think would be the result? Better lives for the poorest?

But selectivity keeps coming back into our political debate because it is inextricably linked to another political philosophy, one which is currently known as 'austerity'.

In this world view, governments have a fixed budget and must then 'spend wisely' by targeting their spending at those in 'most need'. But in fact what this political philosophy is really saying is 'we can't mess with the interests of the wealthy through tax so the rest of society will just have to put up with what little we can afford'. Selectivity is a smokescreen for a political philosophy of inequality and low tax.

There is a beautifully simple alternative philosophy, one which has underpinned my entire political world view - 'from the cradle to the grave, from each according to ability to pay to each according to need'.

It is a politics which places security for all in society ahead of the pursuit of extraordinary wealth for the few. And it works - it works incredibly well. If in doubt all you need to do is compare anywhere with a universal healthcare system to anywhere without one.

Where selectivity believes that 'fairness' comes from how you spend, universalism believes that effectiveness comes from how you spend - fairness comes from how you raise the money you spend. Spending via universalism is measurably more effective in almost every way, so that's how we should spend.

It is so incredibly important that we stand our ground and fight the fight for universalism. As soon as we start to give in to the 'something for nothing' arguments, the 'logic' starts to effect everything.

To make it fair we have to pay for it through properly progressive taxation. It is an incredibly simply formula which, in the decades after the Second World War, resulted in a more rapid improvement of the lives of the poor than almost anything else achieved in our history.

This is why it is so incredibly important that we stand our ground and fight the fight for universalism. As soon as we start to give in to the 'something for nothing' arguments, the 'logic' starts to effect everything.

Why should someone on minimum wage subsidise a winter heating payment for a millionaire? Well why should someone on minimum wage pay for the healthcare of a millionaire? Why should middle class children get a free university education when they can afford to pay? Well why should they get fifth and sixth year at high school for free either when lots of poorer children have left school? And so on.

This is why it is so dispiriting that this debate has been opened up by comments by the Scottish Government's new 'poverty tsar' Naomi Eisenstadt. This article began by arguing that this is one of the defining differences between Scottish politics and the politics of England and Wales.

In Scotland there is a strong consensus in favour of universalism in the 'mainstream' (including government and its institutions and academis). In London there is a strong consensus in favour of selectivity, a consequence of Blair making it a core part of New Labour philosophy.

From what I can tell, Naomi Eisenstadt is a well-intentioned, intelligent and thoughtful person. But she seems to come from a different political culture, one where euphemisms like 'failing schools' and 'living within our means' are the norm (although I'm sure she'd never use them). These concepts are not the norm in Scotland and we should fight to make sure that they do not become the norm.

This does not mean there are no difficult questions. I have said many times that when we produced the Book of Ideas we tried to find ways to fund a replacement of the benefits being cut by Osborne in a universalist way and concluded that with the limited resources Scotland can raise and the lack of policy control, it is virtually impossible.

From the cradle to the grave, from each according to ability to pay to each according to need. Let us keep that most enlightened of social philosophies front and centre in Scottish politics.

There are always 'tough choices'. But in making those choices we should never talk down or attack the fundamental philosophies on which progressive Scottish politics are based - the most recent person to attempt this was Johann Lamont and it went very badly for her indeed.

I'm not an insular person when it comes to policy. For quite a few years now I've been involved with projects which look round the world to see where we can find best practice.

In saying that we should fight against the anti-universalist philosophies which dominate Westminster policy debate from taking root in Scotland, I say it not because they don't work and because when they get a toe-hold they change the very nature of your politics.

Rather, I would (as so often) point north to suggest that universalism is at the very heart of the success of the Nordic countries. So by all means let's go looking for the best learning we can find on how to deliver public services. But let's look towards those who do it better than us, not worse.

And, above all, let's not cede political philosophy in the face of the ideological attacks coming from George Osborne. Universalism works and works well. It is redistributive and has done more to help the poor and vulnerable than any other social policy in a hundred years.

From the cradle to the grave, from each according to ability to pay to each according to need. Let us keep that most enlightened of social philosophies front and centre in Scottish politics.

Our next step should not be to introduce fees for university students or means-tested charges for seeing your GP, it should be the creation of a genuinely brilliant universal childcare system to which every citizen of Scotland with children has an automatic right (with a modest tax rise to pay for it if need be).

When it works, when it turns out to be transformational, when it is shown to be wildly popular - that'll be one more nail in the coffin of a politics Scotland has resisted for decades.

Picture courtesy of YouTube
Turkish Cymbal Making

23.2.2017 by Engin Altunlu

As the resident “Turk” of the Bbop team, I thought that it could only be relevant for me to talk about the history of the renowned Turkish cymbals. Throughout the world of music and the many musical styles which exist today, Turkish cymbals remain highly respected for their unique and diverse sound. The production in many companies is still carried out in the traditional way.

The History:

Cymbal production began in Turkey in the 1200s. The cymbals created at the time were created for just one purpose: the marching band of the Ottoman Army. These cymbals were crafted by Armenian master artisans. The secret to their production has remained just that, a secret, ever since. The man behind the formula for the perfect cymbal was Avedis Zilciyan (Zildjian): “Zilci”, means “Master creator of cymbals” in Turkish and “Yan” means “the son of” in Armenian. Thus, “the son of the cymbal master”. In 1623, with the permission of Sultan Murat IV, the now world-renowned company Zildjian was founded. Towards the end of the 7th century, Westerners had discovered the existence of these cymbals and began to incorporate them into their orchestras. During the 1780s, the cymbals began to be used in Military bands as well as Haydn’s and Mozart’s Orchestras.

In 1851, Avedis Zildjian’s son, Kerope Zildjian (whose name is found in the K-series) began to show cymbals in expositions, helping the company's transition into the European market. In 1909, with the aid of the Ottoman Empire, the company was able to build a second factory elsewhere. The cymbals produced bore the description “Made in Turkey, Istanbul” and later in modern times, were used by some of the world’s most famous musicians such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Cream, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Guns N’ Roses and many more.

This craft passed through the generations until when, after the death of the final grandson Mikal Zildjian, the world awaited the end of the legend and its secret cymbal formula. It was however, the 9 year old apprentices of the final artisan who saved the legacy. They knew everything! Their names were Mehmet Tamdeger and Agop Tomurcuk, and the company was to be called Istanbul. Thanks to them alone, the legend could continue to live until today in Istanbul. In 1981, the company started to reproduce the traditional cymbals in an Istanbul studio. After Agop’s death in 1996, Mehmet continued making these but it was Agop’s son who then stepped in. He claimed his father’s section of the company and the Agop cymbals and like that the company was divided in to: Istanbul Mehmet and Istanbul Agop. These days, Turkish Cymabls are produced (in the traditional way and with the traditional formula) only by the companies Istanbul Mehmet-Agop, Bosphorus, Turkish, Pasha, Sabian, Amedia, Masterwork, Diril.

If we return to Zildjian, the son of Michael Zildjian left to the United States in 1929 and opened a cymbal factory. These however, were not handmade like the originals. It was the grandson of Mikael, Bob Zildjian who became the creator of the well known brand Sabian.

Creation:

The first phase of production is the "mixing”. The cymbals are made of bronze (B20) which is an alloy (80% copper / 20% tin). This is one of the most frequently used formulas. It is at this stage also the "secret process" takes place as it has for centuries, which gives the bronze its strength, durability and flexibility. This is truly a guarded practise and only the master builders know the secret. Once I had the good fortune of visiting the studio in Istanbul. There was one small section of the process which they don’t let you see!

The second phase is called the “casting”; the molten alloy in the melting pot is poured directly into molds. The quantity of alloy can be different for each mold depending on the type of cymbal. After pouring, the alloy hardens in the cold. The pieces are then very carefully removed from their molds and grouped according to their weight. Now, these folded pieces are ready for the next step, reheating.

The castings are now ready to be heated to around 700-800 Celsius in a kiln. Each casting is heated uniformly by a qualified master of the art. They are now soft and ready to pass through a rolling machine. These form round metallic disks which are called “blanks”.

The blanks cool down and are then sent to the presser. At this phase the blanks are still very fragile and oversized. After having marked the centre of the blank, they are put back in the kiln in order to soften the metal and make it more pliable so that the pressing machine can perform its job more effectively. The blanks are then placed out into cool air, and the combination of cold/hot hardens the metal to a new level. Now the B20 is stronger, more durable and has a better sound than ever before. After cutting the correct shape from the blanks, the off-cuts are sent back to the melting pot for recycling.

The next phase in the process is the “hammering”. This is the most important procedure of the whole production in terms of honing the cymbals' sound and can only be performed by qualified artisans using centuries-old hammering techniques and wisdom. These techniques are responsible for the dark, complex and musical qualities in traditional Turkish cymbals. The process of hammering requires mastering the art, competence and endless hard work. The contours, shape and profile of the cymbals are created just from hammer blows. It is worth noting that, for example, a 16” Crash requires around 1500 hits to be completed. This gives all cymbals a slightly unique sound, even within the same series or size.

Now we pass on to the phase which is called “lathing”. This is once again a very important phase of cymbal production and can affect the sound of the cymbal directly. Lathing cuts the circular grooves into the cymbal and permits the vibrations to move easily across its surface.

Finally, we come to the testing and labelling phase! After this long and arduous process, in order to assure their quality, the cymbals are tested by professional drummers. The tests all take place in a studio to decide if the cymbal was built well enough. If they pass this test then they are ready to sell.

Here is a video of cymbal making in the Istanbul Mehmet workshop:

Brands:

Of course there are many cymbal companies in existence, however, I will focus on those which produce cymbals respecting the traditional processes.

Zildjian

Zildjian is a trace of Anatolia in the United States. Founded by Avedis in 1623, Zildjian is one of the oldest companies in the whole world. Know-how, the secret process and luxury instruments have made Zildjian one of the most reputable brands in the whole world for drummers and percussionists. The most well know series include: ZBT Series, A Custom, A Zildjian, K Custom, Z3, FX Series

Istanbul Agop

Istanbul cymbals are well recognised by their "Traditional" series, specifically ‘Istanbul Agop’. Istanbul Agop is a brand which continues to this day to produce cymbals the traditional way. They are also hugely respected by the drumming and percussion community for the unique sound of their cymbals. Some popular Agop cymbals have included:

• Istanbul Agop Signature 21″ ou 22″ Ride

• Mel Lewis Signature Series 22″ Ride

• 8" Xist Power Splash

• 20" Mantra Crash

Istanbul Mehmet

Another company to continue the heritage of the Zilciyan family in Istanbul. Here are some well known models by Istanbul Mehmet cymbals:

• MC Jazz Hi-Hats

• Origin dark Rides

• Legend Dark HI-Hats

• Mikael Z Ride

Turkish Cymbals

I had heard about this brand in the past but I really got to meet the team of Turkish Cymbals thanks to the chance meeting of Özgür Can Öney, the drummer of Manga (the rock group which achieved 2nd place in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2010) during a visit to Musikmesse 2015. He was there to present Turkish Cymbals, a company who has become world renowned for their quality in the world of rock and jazz. We chatted a little about their production and the company in general. Turkish Cymbals has a different formula and has obtained some older artisans who had previously worked in other companies throughout Istanbul. Here are some well-known series:

• Crash Ride C-RCR

• Crash Paper Thin

• China AP-CH

• Ride Bell RBR-BBL

• HI-HAT J-H

Sabian

Sabian was created in 1981 in Canada by Robert Zildjian, the son of Avedis Zildjian III. Sabian take their name from the creates children, Sally, Bill and Andy. Some Sabian series include:

• Neil Peart’s Signature Paragon 16’’

• AA séries Vintage Bright

• XSR séries

• Artisan Séries
The DNI report was more about slamming RT (Russia Today) propaganda than it was about proving the Russians hacked. The report doesn’t put much emphasis on Russians hacking elections, it focuses on Russians “influencing” them. What they ignore is the US media propaganda influencing elections.

As you read this, keep in mind that no intelligence report refutes the content of the email leaks. Also note that since the first leak, our media has sought to cover up, ignore, and denigrate the findings.

In these emails, you will find the American media operates as an arm of the Democrat Party. Wikileaks’ releases prove America’s trusted institutions and the media are lackeys of the left.

Nearly 400 Newsmakers Received 80 Sets of Clinton Talking Points

Email #5636 from donor-advisor Mary Pat Bonner to John Podesta shows the Hillary Clinton campaign worked with at least 372 news makers to shape an anti-Trump narrative across all mainstream media.

Bonner is the link between Team Clinton and CTR.

The pro-Hillary SuperPAC, Correct the Record (CTR) “has identified 372 surrogates including influential and frequent pundits on broadcast and cable news for Presidential 2016 politics and provided them around 80 sets of talking points.”

CTR Controlled the Media

CTR’s website explains their goal is to amplify Clinton’s “accomplishments”, smear Trump, and peddle phony narratives. One of those talking points was and is, “Russia is interfering in our elections to help Trump.”

Consider all of this as you look at the documentation showing hundreds of media members using pro-Hillary talking points obtained from CTR. Those documents can be accessed here.

Some of the findings:

The collusion included media relations. There were 900 interviews to counter-punch Republicans and kill negative stories before publication. Team Clinton provided the nearly 400 media surrogates with 80 sets of talking points.

CTR hosted 24 media training sessions across the country for 200 surrogates.

Correct The Record also distributed media advisories to 960 members of the national media and 10,756 regional reporters in 28 states. Talking points and memos are also distributed regularly to 369 televisions producers and bookers.

Media Told Americans Not to Read Wikileaks Emails

The media desperately attempted to keep Americans from reading the emails by claiming it was illegal to read them, if not immoral.

Sound advice on @wikileaks, from the #FakeNews. I’d be interested to hear Chris Cuomo’s legal theory that he can see this info but we can’t. pic.twitter.com/VHEyjf8jC3 — Rep. Steven Smith (@RepStevenSmith) December 8, 2016

Ten Most Damning Emails of US Media

The free thought project listed 10 of the most damning emails proving the media is controlled and scripted:
Supreme Court Justices to abolish Texas Death Penalty - they want an evening off

(ACPA-Houston, TX) Texas is reeling at news that the death penalty is facing the possibility of being declared unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justices, sick of missing Friday night poker and evenings at the symphony, plan to use an upcoming appeal as an excuse to abolish executions. "I'll miss the overtime," said Justice Scalia, "but not the bleeding heart lawyers with their last gasp appeals."

Shock and Dismay

As details of the plan leaked out, groans of shock and dismay were recorded across the lone star state as Texans started to come to terms with the news that their beloved death penalty might be taken away.

"This all started with the abolition of execution for the retarded," said Dwight Johnson of Walker County, "that dang Yankee Supreme Court should stay out of our business."

Death row guards concerned for their jobs have decided to take action. Union spokesman Jim Austen stated that, "we are going to start a grassroots nationwide campaign to encourage other states to have more executions."

Arguing that the death penalty is a time honored tradition, he was quick to point out that, "the death penalty is just like freedom of religion - use it or lose it."

Over in Houston, the Mayor is particularly concerned that mass layoffs could follow in the prosecutor's office and he has weighed in his support for the guards union. "You love the yellow rose of Texas, now it's time to love the Death Rows of Texas," he said in an impassioned plea for support from other cities nationwide.

Meanwhile traffic came to a standstill in downtown Huntsville, home of the Texas death chamber, when several members of the strapdown team staged an impromptu strap-in.

Trade War looms

On the financial front, markets reacted to the news by dumping shares of chemical companies specializing in the manufacture of sodium thiopental. Lean times are ahead unless these companies can break into the burgeoning but restricted Chinese death penalty market. The US is expected to raise the issue in upcoming WTO talks.

Also read about the Atlanta woman who loves PBS pledge marathons Trying to improve: After Trayvon Martin, Alabama to introduce "Hoodies For Hispanics" program. or click here for all our satire news stories
Officials doubted someone could have walked away from the crash The wreckage of a plane found near the town of Mammoth Lakes in California does belong to missing US adventurer Steve Fossett, officials say. A number plate confirmed the plane as the Bellanca Super Decathlon piloted by the 63-year-old millionaire. Body parts are reported to have been found inside. The search began after a hiker found items thought to belong to Mr Fossett. He vanished in September last year on a solo flight that took off 90 miles (145km) away in neighbouring Nevada. Click here to see a map of the area A wide-ranging search operation conducted since then had failed to find any trace of Mr Fossett or his plane and he was officially declared dead in February. Fuselage shattered Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said the wreckage had been spotted late on Wednesday during an aerial search of a stretch of the Sierra Nevada mountains near Mammoth Lakes. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement A ground team later confirmed the identity of the plane, which seemed to have struck the mountain head-on, Mr Anderson said. "The crash looked so severe I doubt if someone would have walked away from it," he said. Most of the fuselage had disintegrated, with engine parts scattered several hundred feet away. Mr Anderson initially said no human remains had been found at the crash site. "It's quite often if you don't find remains within a few days, because of animals, you'll find nothing at all," he said. SOME OF FOSSETT'S RECORDS 1998/2002: Long-distance for solo ballooning 2001/2002: Duration for solo ballooning 2002: First solo round-the-world balloon flight First balloon crossings of Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, South Atlantic, South Pacific, Indian Oceans Seven fastest speed sailing titles 13 World Sailing Speed Record Council titles 2001: Fastest transatlantic sailing 2004: Fastest round-the-world sailing Round-the-world titles for medium airplanes US transcontinental titles for non-military aircraft

In pictures: Steve Fossett Profile: Steve Fossett But reports later said that some remains had been found in the aircraft and would be sent for DNA analysis. Fifty people and five dog teams would carry out an extensive search of the site for Mr Fossett's remains, he added. On Thursday British entrepreneur Richard Branson paid tribute to his friend and fellow adventurer. "The most important thing is that the family know what's happened," he said. "He led an extraordinary, absolutely remarkable life, and now we can remember him for what he was and move on." The National Transportation Safety Board will be responsible for examining the wreckage. But a local official said snow was expected over the weekend, potentially hampering the investigation. The wreckage was located two days after identity documents bearing Mr Fossett's name - including a pilot's licence - as well as cash and a sweatshirt were found by hiker Preston Morrow. Mr Morrow had been returning from a mountain walk when he spotted the items in dirt and pine needles west of Mammoth Lakes. An employee at a sporting goods store, Mr Morrow said he handed them over to police after unsuccessful attempts to contact the Fossett family. The BBC's Rajesh Mirchandani, in Los Angeles, says the items were found outside the vast area searched after Mr Fossett went missing - and also in a different direction to that in which he was thought to have flown. Mr Fossett took off from the ranch of hotel magnate Barron Hilton, south of Yerington, Nevada, on 3 September 2007 on a flight that was expected to last three hours. In 2002, he became the first person to circle the globe solo in a balloon and had about 100 other world records to his name.

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Joseph Erlanger (January 5, 1874 – December 5, 1965) was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.

Biography [ edit ]

Erlanger was born on January 5, 1874, at San Francisco, California. His family was Jewish and his parents both immigrated from the Kingdom of Württemberg, Germany and met in California during the Gold Rush. Joseph was the sixth of seven children born to the couple. He completed his Bachelor of science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1895. He then completed his M.D. in 1899 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where he finished second in his class.

Upon graduating, Erlanger interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital under William Osler and worked in a physiology laboratory. Erlanger also gave lectures at the school on digestion and metabolism. Erlanger also had an interest in cardiology, specifically the way that excitation transferred from the atrium to the ventricle and researched with Arthur Hirschfelder. Erlanger developed and patented a new type of sphygmomanometer that could measure blood pressure from the brachial artery. While working at Johns Hopkins in 1901, Erlanger published a paper on the digestive systems of canines. This paper caught the attention of William Henry Howell, a physiology professor at Johns Hopkins. Howell recruited Erlanger as an Assistant Professor. Erlanger was promoted to Associate Professor some time before 1906.

In 1906, Erlanger accepted a position as the first chair of physiology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1910, he left to take a position as professor at Washington University in St. Louis; the St. Louis position offered Erlanger more funding for his projects. Herbert Spencer Gasser, Erlanger's former student at Wisconsin, joined Erlanger's laboratory soon after the move. During World War I, the pair contributed to the research effort examining the effects of shock. As part of this work, Erlanger was able to produce heart block in an animal model by clamping the bundle of His and tightening it.[4] Together, they managed to amplify the action potential of a bullfrog sciatic nerve in 1922 and published the results in the American Journal of Physiology. It is uncertain why the pair had such a sudden shift in interest to neuroscience, as Erlanger was already widely respected in the cardiology field.

Erlanger and Gasser were able to modify a Western Electric oscilloscope to run at low voltages. Prior to this modification, the only method available to measure neural activity was the electroencephalograph, which could only show large-scale electrical activity. With this technology, they were able to observe that action potentials occurred in two phases—a spike (initial surge) followed by an after-spike (a sequence of slow changes in potential). They discovered that neurons were found in many forms, each with their own potential for excitability. With this research, the pair discovered that the velocity of action potentials was directly proportional to the diameter of the nerve fiber. The partnership ended in 1931, when Gasser accepted a position at Cornell University. In 1944, they won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for these discoveries.

He died of heart disease on December 5, 1965 at St. Louis, Missouri. The Joseph Erlanger House in St. Louis was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 8, 1976 as a building of national significance.[9] On January 22, 2009, the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon after him.[citation needed]

Citations [ edit ]

References [ edit ]
In Laissez-Faire in Tokyo Land Use I pointed to Japan’s constitutional protection of property rights and it’s relatively laissez-faire approach to land use to explain why housing prices in Japan have not risen in past decades, as they have elsewhere in the developed world. A very useful post at Urban kchoze offers more detail on Japan’s zoning system. Here are some of the key points.

Japan has 12 basic zones, far fewer than is typical in an American city. The zones can be ordered in terms of nuisance or potential externality from low-rise residential to high-rise residential to commercial zone on through to light industrial and industrial. But, and this is key, in the US zones tend to be exclusive but in Japan the zones limit the maximum nuisance in a zone. So, for example, a factory can’t be built in a residential neighborhood but housing can be built in a light industrial zone.

…[the] Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning. …[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail everything to have a decent city. Because if they forget to zone for enough commercial zones or schools, people can’t simply build what is lacking, they’d need to change the zoning, and therefore confront the NIMBYs. And since urban planning departments, especially in small cities, are largely awful, a lot of needed uses are forgotten in neighborhoods, leading to them being built on the outskirts of the city, requiring car travel to get to them from residential areas. Meanwhile, Japanese zoning gives much more flexibility to builders, private promoters but also school boards and the cities themselves. So the need for hyper-competent planning is much reduced, as Japanese planning departments can simply zone large higher-use zones in the center of neighborhoods, since the lower-uses are still allowed. If there is more land than needed for commercial uses in a commercial zone, for example, then you can still build residential uses there, until commercial promoters actually come to need the space and buy the buildings from current residents.

In addition, residential means residential without discrimination as to the type or form of resident:

…In Japan…residential is residential. If a building is used to provide a place to live to people, it’s residential, that’s all. Whether it’s rented, owned, houses one or many households, it doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t mean that people can build 10-story apartment blocs in the middle of single-family houses (at least, not normally). As I mentioned, there are maximum ratios of building to land areas and FAR that restricts how high and how dense residential buildings may be. So in low-rise zones, these ratios mean that multifamily homes must also have only one to three stories, like the single-family homes around them. So in neighborhoods full of small single-family homes, you will often see small apartment buildings full of what we would call small studio apartments: one room with a toilet.>

In short, as the author concludes, Japan’s zoning laws are more rational, more efficient and fairer than those used in the United States.

More details in the post. Hat tip: Sandy Ikeda.
Virginia State Parks will offer free parking on Jan. 1, 2018, giving visitors the opportunity to enjoy special hikes or self-guided hikes on more than 500 miles of trails across 37 state parks.

In addition, Virginia State Parks will hold the First Day Hikes Photo Contest and the New Year Challenge. Each contest has a $500 gift certificate as the top prize, as well as other prizes.

In the Richmond area, Pocahontas State Park hosts a New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day hike that begins Dec. 31 at 11 p.m. and ends with a New Years bonfire and a sparkling cider toast. On New Year’s Day, Pocahontas will offer five other hikes, including a stroller-friendly hike, an advanced hike, a First Day Run, an orienteering hike, as well as a hike for family and friends.

Other parks with multiple hikes and difficulties include Bear Creek Lake, Holliday Lake and Twin Lakes state parks.

Some of the more unique hikes include Grayson Highlands State Park, with the possibility of seeing wild ponies. Guaranteed to be colder than other parks, hikers flock to the park for the challenge, the view of snow-topped mountains and the ponies.

New River Trail State Park will feature a hike and bike on the new mountain biking trail. At False Cape State Park, hikers will take the Terragator, the beach transport vehicle, down the beach and then hike to the North Carolina border.

Hikers can see bison at Wilderness Road State Park and amazing geological formations at Natural Tunnel and Natural Bridge state parks. The hike at Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park includes a tour of the historic town of Big Stone Gap.

Virginia State Parks welcomes bikes and horseback riders at parks with those facilities. Leashed dogs are welcome everywhere except False Cape State Park. Details for all hikes can be found here: http://bit.ly/VSPFDH2018.

For more information about Virginia State Parks activities and amenities or to make a reservation for one of the more than 1,800 campsites or 300 climate-controlled cabins, call the Virginia State Parks Customer Care Center at 800-933-7275 or visit www.virginiastateparks.gov.
Mandalay Bay & MGM Ban OnSite Investigator – Armed Guards & FBI Agent Throw Him Out Of His Room

An independent onsite investigator by the name of Nick Falco decided to stay at the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino and investigate things pertaining to the Las Vegas shooting. He was subsequently banned from the hotel, as well as MGM for life and escorted out of his hotel room by armed guards and an FBI agent.

The actions of Falco and the hotel occurred within 24 hours of his arrival.

Falco tweeted out his investigation (his tweets require approval to be seen, but I have linked them below), along with the ban he received from Mandalay Bay & MGM.

“I questioned the #LasVegas shooting narrative. I went to Mandalay Bay to check for myself. After 24 hours I was banned for life from MGM,” tweeted Falco, providing the following picture to prove his ban: https://t.co/AEdgzRGfG8.

Falco spoke with Intellihub and sought to confirm certain things, including the validity of the receipt that was leaked online from Stephen Paddock’s room.

Intellihub reports:

Falco told Intellihub exclusively that he received a phone call from the front desk of Mandalay Bay shortly before 7:30 p.m. in which a female operator instructed him to answer his hotel room door where four men (two armed guards, a security guy, and an FBI agent) simultaneously met him. Falco was then told to pack up his belongings before the FBI agent conducted a subsequent inspection of his room. Soon after the independent investigator says that he was escorted over to the main entrance of the Mandalay Bay where a security guard stood him in front of a camera and verbally read him the trespass. During Falco’s visit, he was able to prove that the leaked online version of Stephen Paddock’s room service receipt was, in fact, “authentic” after comparing it to a receipt he himself received after ordering room service Saturday morning.

Here’s the series of tweets from Falco with links to each tweet.

2. I stayed at Mandalay Paddocks room service receipt was leaked online. It is authentic.https://t.co/us9zDGoU57 Here’s mine- ONE guest pic.twitter.com/JEAyuEzpKM — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017 3. There’s 1000s of surveillance cameras in gaming area, mostly visible There’s a surveillance camera in each main elevator. You cant hide pic.twitter.com/qXeOlORYUb — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017

He did shoot down theories that Paddock used his wife/girlfriend’s ID to access the service elevator saying, “Service elevators aren’t prohibited from guests. No signs. No locks.”

4. Some People have said Paddock used service elevator w his girlfriends ID- this is FALSE There are No locks, No signs, No keys required pic.twitter.com/rjE5sdr6yD — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017 5. Police said Paddock used service elevators.

Why? To bypass security? Service elevators arent prohibited from guests. No signs. No locks pic.twitter.com/kHVYc8WPLK — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017 6. There are visible surveillance cameras in all service elevators. There was no reason for Paddock to use these to get around security. pic.twitter.com/xNFWYtMF3i — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017

Falco also pointed out that the freight elevator is quite a distance from Paddock’s room.

7. Red dot is service elevator. Main elevators are in middle. I’m pointing to Paddocks room Why did Paddock use service elevator? It’s far pic.twitter.com/FSrVnTuY5a — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017 9. There is an exit staircase right next to Paddock’s room. No locks, no alarms, no signs & most importantly? No Cameras. pic.twitter.com/GF0JoXJaq3 — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017

Falco goes on to say that there was no need for a second window as the vantage point Paddock would have had over the venue didn’t require it.

8. I had clear view of Paddocks room, concert & fuel tanks Shooter didnt need 2nd window to shoot people & fuel tanks Why break 2 windows? pic.twitter.com/Tq5giT76In — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017

Additionally, Falco told Intellhub that he is no conspiracy theorist, just someone checking out the facts.

And take note of MGM’s privacy policy which Falco notes in tweet number 12 of 14.

I don’t think that is far-fetched considering the wealth of information Wikileaks has provided the American people on the illegal activities of the CIA in our own country.

Falco then concludes his series of tweets by asking, “I was evicted after less than 24 hours but a shooter w 23 rifles was at their hotel for 7 days & they didn’t know?”

13. I was evicted after less than 24 hours but a shooter w 23 rifles was at their hotel for 7 days & they didn’t know? This guy? Really? pic.twitter.com/ZUGpLqeqMe — Nick (@Nick_Falco) October 15, 2017

It seems to me that Nick Falco has provided a plethora of evidence, just in his being banned from the hotel that attorney Brian Claypool may have a proper theory concerning Mandalay Bay and MGM simply being negligent of a high roller like Stephen Paddock, which put lives in danger, grave danger.
No. 1 seed Virginia (21-11) will host No. 8 seed Norfolk State (21-11) in the National Invitation Tournament on Tuesday, March 19. Tipoff at John Paul Jones Arena is set for 9 p.m.

The Virginia-Norfolk State game will be televised on ESPNU and broadcast on the Virginia Sports Radio Network.

The winner will advance to the second round against the winner of St. John's and Saint Joseph's. Second-round games are scheduled for March 21-25.

Virginia is making its 13th NIT appearance and first under fourth-year head coach Tony Bennett. The Cavaliers claimed NIT championships in 1980 and 1992 and are appearing in the tournament for the first time since 2006. Virginia is 15-10 all-time in the NIT.

The Cavaliers are 1-0 all-time against Norfolk State, defeating the Spartans, 50-49, on Dec. 20, 2010. Virginia is 19-0 all-time against Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference opponents, including a 75-57 win over Morgan State at JPJ on Dec. 19, 2012.

The Cavaliers are coming off a disappointing 75-56 loss against NC State in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals. Akil Mitchell (Charlotte, N.C.) led Virginia in scoring and rebounding for the fourth consecutive game with 19 points and eight rebounds. Joe Harris (Chelan, Wash.) added 13 points and Jontel Evans (Hampton, Va.) had a game-high seven assists.

All-ACC performers Harris (first team), Mitchell (third team) and Evans (All-Defensive) lead the Cavaliers into postseason action. Harris ranks fourth in the ACC in scoring at 16.9 ppg and Mitchell ranks third in rebounding at 8.9 rpg. Evans leads Virginia with 114 assists.

The Cavaliers, who earned an at-large bid into the NIT, rank in the top 12 nationally in five defensive categories, highlighted by their fourth-ranked scoring defense at 55.1 points per game. Offensively Virginia is averaging 64 points per game overall, shooting 45.6 percent from the field and 38.5 percent from 3-point land.

Freshman Justin Anderson (Montross, Va.) leads Virginia rookies in scoring, rebounding, assists and blocked shots. Sophomore Paul Jesperson (Merrill, Wis.) has made at least one 3-pointer in 12 consecutive games.

Freshman Mike Tobey, who made his second career start against NC State, is averaging 10.3 points and 5.3 rebounds in the last three games.

Bennett sports a 74-52 record, including a 1-0 mark against Norfolk State, in four seasons at Virginia. Bennett, who guided the Cavaliers to their first NCAA Tournament since 2006-07 last season, is the first Virginia coach to post back-to-back 20-win seasons since Jeff Jones in 1991-92 and 1992-93. Bennett has a 3-4 postseason record as a Division I head coach.

Norfolk State earned the MEAC's automatic bid to the NIT by winning the conference's regular season title with a 16-0 mark. The Spartans were upset by Bethune-Cookman, 70-68, in overtime in the MEAC Tournament quarterfinals. Norfolk State is making its second straight postseason appearance since moving to Division I in 1997. No. 15 seed Norfolk State upset No. 2 seed Missouri, 86-84, in the 2012 NCAA Tournament.

Guard Pendarvis Williams leads the Spartans in scoring at 14.1 points per game. Guard Malcolm Hawkins averages 11.8 ppg and forward Rob Johnson has chipped in 9.3 ppg and 4.8 rpg. Center Brandon Goode leads the team with 5.4 rebounds per game.

Head coach Anthony Evans has a 99-93 record in six seasons at Norfolk State. He guided the Spartans to the 2012 NCAA Tournament.

Tickets for Virginia's first-round NIT game are on sale. Reserved tickets are $10 each. Fans may also purchase tickets through the Virginia Athletics Ticket Office by telephone and in person. The ticket office is located in Bryant Hall at Scott Stadium and open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Telephone purchases can be made by calling 800-542-UVA1 (8821) or locally at 434-924-UVA1 (8821).

Parking will be free of charge and available on a first-come, first-served basis in the John Paul Jones Arena, University Hall and McCue Center parking lots and the Emmet/Ivy Parking Garage. The John Paul Jones Arena Garage will be reserved for permit holders. The University Hall and John Paul Jones Arena parking lots are also available for baseball fans attending Tuesday's game against Yale that starts at 5 p.m.

Should Virginia advance in the NIT and host a second and/or third-round game, tickets will be sold for $10 each and available for purchase shortly after the second-round opponent is determined.

Tickets will not be available for sale through the Virginia Athletics Ticket Office for away games in the NIT.
Lea Michele broke the news on Monday that she would be appearing on the seventh and final season of FX’s Sons of Amarchy by excitedly tweeting, “I’ll be appearing on an episode of my favorite show @SonsofAnarchy! Thank you so much @Harparbar & @sutterink #SOAFX” Earlier today Lea was photographed on the Sons of Anarchy set filming a scene with show matriarch Katey Sagal in which Lea was wearing a waitress uniform and both ladies were smoking cigarettes and chatting on a bench.

Click to enlarge:

The scene jibes with details about Lea’s character Gertie released by the network, which describe her as a single mom working as a waitress at a truck stop. Gertie “connects with Gemma,” played by Katey Sagal, “during a difficult time.” I assume we are seeing Gertie and Gemma connecting during a difficult time in the photos. 🙂

To wrap things up, here are Lea’s still-excited tweets from the last few days while filming SOA:

Day two at @SonsofAnarchy today… pretty easy getting up at 6am when I'm this excited! pic.twitter.com/sSX4g2zVOi — Lea Michele (@msleamichele) July 29, 2014
Things break down, whether due to accidents, negligence, or just plain wear and tear. Instead of shelling out for an expensive repair or replacement, though, you can often fix the problem yourself for much less. Here are 10 repairs you should never pay for.

Image from Refat/Shutterstock

10. Bicycles

Bicycles are quick to break down, especially if you don't treat them properly, but that doesn't mean you need to take it in for repairs every few months. Most of the fixes you can easily do yourself at home. Check out The Bicycle Tutor for instructions on how to perform pretty much any fix you could ever need, and if you need a repair stand, you can always make one of those for yourself too.

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9. Headphones

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It always seems inevitable that your headphone cords are going to start fraying, the 'buds will detach themselves, and you'll be stuck buying another pair. Instead of buying new 'phones, though, you can easily fix those stripped wires with a bit of Plasti Dip. Alternatively, if it's the actual connector that's causing problems, you can replace that yourself in a jiffy as well. And, in the future, make sure you wrap your headphones correctly instead of just waiting for the inevitable—we've featured a ton of different ways to do this, so there's no excuse to just let them get ruined!

8. Plumbing

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There are certainly times where you want a licensed plumber on the job, but you don't need to call them for every little clog and leak you get. We've shown you how to unclog almost any drain, from the sink to the shower to the toilet. If you're feeling in the mood for a MacGyver trick, we've also mentioned how to fix your toilet with aluminum foil, use food coloring to diagnose a leak, use a stethoscope to locate a leak, and how to make your own homemade Drano without the harsh chemicals.

How to Unclog a Drain There are few more annoying home repairs that demand your immediate attention like clogged drains.… Read more Read

7. Clothing

Finding the perfect tailor is great for your nice suits and pants, but when it comes to the minor sewing projects, you shouldn't have to bother them—just fix them yourself at home. Learn the basics of sewing and you'll be ready to take on all sorts of DIY clothing projects—from sewing a button back on to fixing size issues in your new favorite button-down shirt.

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6. Laptop Power Cords

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You may keep your laptop in perfect condition, but that power cord probably still takes a lot of abuse—from the constant coiling and packing to people tripping over it in the coffee shop. Once the ends start to fray, many people would head off to the store to buy a new one, but not you. If it's of the Apple variety, you know you can just open it up and add a new cable, and then learn how to wrap it properly in the future. However, for an easier fix, you can patch up just about any power cord with a bit of Sugru—heck, you could even throw the Sugru on before it frays to give it some extra protection.

5. Phones and Other Mobile Gadgets

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No matter how careful you handle your phone, accidents happen, but you can save some cash by fixing it yourself. Repairing an iPhone screen is rather easy (heck, even a 10 year old can do it), and so is replacing its dead battery. If your iPod isn't booting, you might be able to fix it with just a business card, and even older non-smartphones are fairly easy to fix. No matter what gadget you have, you can head over to repair site iFixit to see a full teardown guide. You might have to buy a replacement screen, battery, or other part online, but it'll be a lot cheaper than buying a new one. Photo by Lars Plougmann.

4. LCD Monitors and TVs

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There's nothing worse than turning on your computer only to see a dead pixel right in the middle of the screen, ready to eat away at you until you go crazy and buy a new monitor. Luckily, these pixels are often just stuck, not dead, and you can fix them with computer programs, by massaging it away, or, if it really is dead, you can bring it back to life with a damp cloth. If you've burned an image into your LCD instead, you can fix that too with a white screen saver. If it does come time to replace it, do what you have to do—but if it's a laptop monitor, you might want to try replacing the screen yourself instead of sending it in for repairs (or buying a whole new laptop). Photo by whyohwhyohwhyoh.

3. Cars

While you aren't equipped to fix more complicated automobile problems, you can easily pull off lots of the low-level maintenance stuff yourself, without taking a costly trip to the dealership. Learn how to change a tire yourself, and check out VehicleFixer for videos on how to change the oil, replace your brake pads, and more. If you have a small dent in your car, you may even be able to fix that with a can of compressed air and a hairdryer. Note that while these are all things you can do yourself, minor jobs are also useful for testing out new mechanics—so don't be afraid to hand that brake job over once in a while if you're trying out someone new.

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2. Your House

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The walls and floor of your house are subject to wear and tear just like everything else, but much of it you can fix right on the spot. Repairing wall damage is easy, and you can always fill in floor holes with a melted crayon, fix stripped screw holes with a golf tee, and even fix cracks in your furniture with mayonnaise. If you want to get a few DIY skills for the future, we can't recommend volunteering enough—working on a site with someone like Habitat for Humanity is a great way to learn more about home repair while doing something good in the process. Of course, when the problem is serious enough that you need to call a contractor, make sure you don't get hosed in the process. Photo by Sharon Pruitt.

1. Computers

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As many of you may know, rarely should you need to take your computer into the Geek Squad to get it fixed up. Whether it's your computer, your roommate's, or another friend's, we've got a guide to repairing just about any problem they could have, as well as diagnosing a computer that's just plain slow. If it's a hardware problem, you can always head to iFixit for instructions on how to repair Macs, or open up that PC and see what might be causing the problem. Some hardware can even be fixed at home, like if your CPU pins are bent or if your video card's solder points have become loose. Whatever the issue, make sure you read up on computer maintenance when you're done, so you can avoid the problem in the future.

In the end, doing it yourself is great, but it's also good to know when a project is over your head and it's time to call someone else. In addition, sometimes it actually is better to replace your gear instead of fix it, so make sure you aren't on a fool's errand trying to fix a gadget that's just reached its time to die. Got your own favorite repair project that you did on your own, or a skill any DIYer should know how to do? Share it with us in the comments.
So i opened up my gift that came earlier on tonight. The postman just left it outside my f---ing door for anyone to take, but luckily i live in a decent are. Well anyway, when i picked it up it was actually really light in a relatively large box, so I was thinking about some million handkerchiefs or something or the infamous 4 paperclips Well anyway, I went up to the study as the things I put in my likes might not be entirely visible to my parents if really fulfilled, so you know, just some viewer privacy just in case it's a bong or a crop. Well i opened the thing, and was blinded by the colours. it took me a while to actually realise what it was, but then i figured it out and turned it upside down. It's actually really awesome. I have no idea how the ss figured out i might enjoy kids toys, but i guess r/teenagers does say enough. Well anyway, take a look at my awesome gift in action in the video below :) Thanks so much mr anonymous, i will enjoy this gift a lot... once the circumstances you told me will happen. I might just get drunk with my mum and my step dad just so that I can enjoy this gift fully. Thanks again, Jonáš :)
A Royal Marine taking part in a selection process for the SAS died after he fell down a gorge which he did not realise was there because it was marked on a map in Welsh.

An inquest into the death of 25-year-old marine Ashley Hicks, heard that he plunged more than 100ft down a steep gorge, in the dark, near Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia in October 2012 during an "escape and evasion" exercise.

Later the same night a second soldier suffered a broken leg after falling 30ft on to a ledge in the same gorge.

The coroner said the marine's death was avoidable as she recorded a verdict of accidental death.

"Had the gorge been identified in the recce procedure it would have been out of bounds and he wouldn't have been there," Nicola Jones, the coroner said.

She added: "Crucially there will be more attempts to gain local specialist knowledge of unacceptable hazards on training grounds.

"The failure to identify this gorge as an unduly hazardous location is clearly the most significant contributing factor to Ashley slipping and falling."

The coroner said the word "ceunant" (gorge) appeared on the planning map and asked why no one had identified it, as it was the local language.

"It's unlikely they would obtain translation of the words. We tend to operate in symbology," Soldier AA, the assistant chief of staff at the Ministry of Defence responsible for specialist units, told the inquest.

A service inquiry had been carried out following the incidentand Soldier AA was one of three panel members. The panel felt the planning and reconnaissance of the area was not as comprehensive as it could have been.

He told the hearing that Google maps were now used "to try to fly the terrain."

He added :"We are quite proud of our map-reading ability. On this occasion that ability wasn't good enough to prevent the non-identification of this hazard. We have taken steps to make sure that doesn't happen again. One of these steps is to take advice."

He added :"We now know what 'gorge' in Welsh looks like."

Another officer, known as 'Soldier R' and in charge of selecting new recruits said :"We can't eliminate all risk." He said in a statement that procedures had been reviewed.

"Escape, evasion and survival are inherent skills a soldier must demonstrate to join this specialist unit," he added.

Around 250 students took part in each course and the inquest heard the pass rate was between nine and 13 per cent.

Marine Hicks, of Solihull, was in the top ten of students. The exercise scenario was that soldiers had been in a helicopter downed in hostile territory. A "hunter" force of 100 "enemy" soldiers were seeking them.

Soldier R said:"He was a good candidate for whom we had the highest expectations. We would expect rather than hope someone of Ashley's quality would pass the course."
Anti-White Narrat ive: Slurs

Slurs are names, labels, definitions, or descriptions of any segment of the diverse white American peoples that demonstrate the state of mind of the speaker as one of bullying, deception, hating, bigotry, dehumanization, or supremacy. Here are six principal themes to use in an attackback. Supremacists Attackback by charging the specific slanderer (not his or her demographic affinity group) with claiming supremacy in naming the other. The defamers are supremacists. Tell them so. Bullies Call them bullies seeking to push diverse white American youth around. It's true and it's powerful. Haters

Point out that the slur shows a hate-filled mind. Call them haters. Liars

Call them liars for smothering the diversity and nationality, as well as the continental and regional origins, of those slurred. Bigots And the proponents of the anti-white narrative with its slurs are bigots. Tell them so. Dehumanizing

In addition, expose them as dehumanizing with slurs that use animal, insect, plant, color, or food names, or by referring to diverse white American youth with a negative label ("non-Hispanic whites") or with a single point of color label ("whites"), always without diversity and nationality. Our all-time favorite dehumanizing hate speech was by the much-lionized critic Susan Sontag who wrote that the white race is the cancer of human history." [Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57] Susan Sontag was part of the Graetz legacy. He launched a propaganda campaign of "scourging" and "flogging" the majority demographic in his home country (Germany) in 1868, as well as a parallel propaganda campaign "to shatter Christianity."

WARNING: Here are some concepts not to use in an attackback. (1) Do not attack the entire demographic affinity group to which the slanderer belongs. We can't do it because we are fighting an attack on our entire demographic affinity group. (2) Do not use "rational" arguments based on logic (logic is dead in public discourse), the double standard (it's applauded by our adversaries), racism (it's been defined in a biased way), history (they twist it), fairness (not going to happen), and dictionary definitions (they distract from the state of mind of the slanderer). 3) Do not use "irrational" arguments based on being offended on the grounds that it is infantile and subjective. Attackback on objective grounds that explain that the slanderer opened his or her mind to us to determine as to whether the slanderer was lying, bigoted, a supremacist, a hater, a bully, or a dehumanizer. We have an entire section on the attackback in this syllabus.

CASE STUDIES OF EXAMPLES: Anglo - This is an italicized Spanish-language epithet and claim of supremacy over diverse white Americans -- not shorthand for the English-language ethnic name Anglo-Saxon. It's also an expression of hatred. Goyim - This is a claim of supremacy over the diverse white Americans by claiming the right to label them and an attempt to smother white American diversity and nationality. The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted asylum in July 2003 to a Southwest Asian who claimed being called goy as an aspect of his persecution abroad. Ram HaCohen explained goyim on 4/10/10 by saying "no matter how Jewish-friendly (and Israel-friendly) a nation has been historically, Israelis are encouraged to view all non-Jews ("Goyim" is the pejorative term used uncritically by most Hebrew speakers) as inherently anti-Semitic and therefore anti-Israeli." Gringo - This label is a claim of supremacy over white Euro-Americans; an expression of hatred; and a targeting term for violence. This was an important signifying slur during the huge Mexican May Day marches on 5/1/06.

Haole - This is a claim to supremacy in Hawaii over the diverse white Americans by claiming the right to name and label them; and an expression of hatred.

Non-Hispanic Whites - This is an expression of hatred by the dominant media culture, and an attempt to smother white American diversity and nationality. This term is sometimes defended as a US Census term but the haters who make that claim never use the parallel census terms -- non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic Asian, and non-Hispanic Indian.

Redneck - This label is an expression of hatred for diverse white American rural dwelling people like mechanics, farmers, merchants, and farm workers, especially by the urban-coastal class. See Al Sharpton explain redneck and cracker. Begin at 50 on the video. Shiksa - This is a claim to supremacy over, and an act of bullying, the diverse white European American women by claiming the right to name and label them. See Israel Shahak's definition of shiksa, 1994, page 26 -- "unclean animal; loathsome creature, abomination." Even Commentary magazine recognizes the vicious nature of shiksa. Typical White Person - A serious expression of hostility to white Americans' diversity, nationality, and right to self-name; and a disgraceful slander by then US Senator Obama on 3/20/08, just two days after his speech on race in Philadelphia on 3/18/08. White Boy - This is an expression of hatred for white American men, and an attempt to smother white Euro-American men's diversity, nationality, and continental origins. California State Assembly Member Paul Fong of Cupertino is most well-known locally for using this term to describe European American men. This term was used in 2012 to label Tucker Carlson by an employee of Fox News TV.

White Skin Privilege - This is a Big Lie by extremists in academia, entertainment, and media claiming that all white Euro-Americans are equally successful in all walks of life, similar to the term "model minority." This label is based on a claim to supremacy in naming; it is an example of bullying; it is based on raw hatred; it is a Big Lie; and it is profoundly dehumanizing. See the 1997 book by Jim Goad for a look at the lives of subordinated and blue-collar diverse white American peoples in the land of "white privilege." For a longer review of "white skin privilege" go here. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by US Senator James Webb of Virginia on 7/22/10 on this very topic with good arguments if incompletely addressed. White Trash - A term that is officially a race crime in England. You People - This is a variant on "your people," "those people," and "these people." The San Jose Mercury News had a major melt down over these terms on its editorial page on 6/1/03, but the paper engages in similar identifying labels all the time. It was a challenge to understand why it can be categorized as a slur, but the reason is that "you people" is a label or name which denies those so labeled their diversity and their nationality, as well as their right to name themselves. This slur has been frequently applied to the diverse white American peoples, but the best documented example of its use (against another demographic affinity group) was Ross Perot's use of it before a convention of African Americans in 1992.
This week, like much of July, a heat wave is cooking America with extreme temperatures, affecting energy production as well as causing fires and water shortages, sucking electricity like crazy to power the cooling necessary to avoid discomfort and even death. According to the National Weather Service, 122 million Americans are under heat alerts.

Fortunately, nuclear power hasn’t minded, scoring record capacity factors of 96% and up with no increase in price. Other energy sources do not fare so well.

It’s all about diversity. Whether in biology, in culture, in training, or in technology, when conditions change a system survives if there is sufficient diversity to adapt. Otherwise it dies. This is no less true for electricity production. Having a diverse group of energy systems is key to a society surviving changes in demographics and changes in government, geological processes and natural disasters, disruption in supplies from war, or extreme weather changes.

This concept is in full display this month as this heat wave continues to sweep across America. Just like during the polar vortex, when nuclear stepped up to relieve natural gas and coal when they failed to deliver on the demand, nuclear also performs wonderfully during extreme weather at the other end of the thermometer.

This kind of constant baseload power during the hottest part of the day is essential to keep our air conditioning going and for stabilizing the grid against blackouts. Nuclear plants are the backbone of the electricity grid, operating all the time even under the most extreme weather conditions.

Unfortunately, much of the electricity needed to combat this heat wave is concentrated during peak hours of the afternoon when wind turbines are not turning (see figure 2). Instead, peaker plants have to come online. Peaker plants operate only to make up the difference between base load and peak load (see figure 3). Our current energy grid makes these plants necessary, but they come at a steep price. Peaker plants are usually natural gas, but can also use coal, jet fuel, oil and diesel. In Washington State, hydropower serves as the peaker in a different way.

Peakers usually run for short periods of time and so are less efficient and dirtier than conventional base load fossil fuel plants. Though natural gas is certainly cleaner than coal, natural gas does have some environmental issues from fracking, to pipelines, to fugitive emissions of methane. And lots of CO2 emissions, if you care about that.

In unregulated markets like the Northeast and California, these peakers can gouge the buyer, tripling and quadrupling the price of electricity, especially during a heat wave when gas supplies are stretched thin.

Not nuclear. These plants just churn out power at the same low price, whatever the conditions.

But gas has come to be the essential fuel in America, forced to back up renewables, replacing coal and load-following the rest of the grid. However, electric utilities are struggling to meet peak demand in hot summer weather because of limits on their natural gas supply, especially in southern California, where it has been forced to replace so much nuclear power lost from the premature closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. The situation will get worse if the Diablo Canyon nuclear plants close prematurely as planned.

At the beginning of July, citing natural gas capacity problems, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) issued the first Flex Alert in two years as western America baked under triple-digit heat. Up until this summer, California had avoided the gas availability and pipeline delivery problems that plague other power grids during extreme weather, particularly in New England and the Midwest.

But when temperatures rise above 90°F, it takes more MWs to serve the same number of buildings, leading to strain on generators. A combination of voluntary demand response programs and calls for voluntary public conservation kept demand below dangerous levels.

This time.

The California grid also faces limited hydropower imports from the Pacific Northwest because of extreme heat up here, reducing the state’s ability to handle this crisis.

“SoCalGas told us they had gas congestion and capacity issues,” said ISO spokesman Steven Greenlee, which led to a decision to issue the public call for conservation. Day-ahead wholesale power prices had risen 51% in northern California and 44% in southern California in response to the heat wave.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, utilities across the western United States withdrew 1 billion cubic feet of gas from storage to satisfy power demand during this heat wave, during a period when they typically inject 11 billion cubic feet into storage.

During peak-hours in California, gas supplied over 60% of California's electric load while solar and wind supplied less than 15%. The largest solar plant in the United States, California’s Ivanpah, recovering from a solar fire in May and struggling with bad performance overall, isn’t helping much in this heat. After receiving $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy and $535 million from the U.S. Treasury, Ivanpah is still unable to meet its promised 940,000 MWhs per year and is failing to even meet it's power purchase agreement.

“We got lucky in that there was some monsoon cloud cover from the desert southwest that came into California and kept temperatures lower, but it also added to the variability of solar resources that we had to contend with," said Greenlee.

Luck and more gas pipelines…if we close anymore nuclear plants, that’s what we’ll be depending on in the future.
FIRST: Thank you for helping us hit the first stretch goal! We will add wireless communication capability between the STEM Base and the host.

NOW, THE UPDATE: The STEM System represents an evolution from the earlier generation of Sixense technology used in the Razer Hydra. The STEM System features lower latency (even with wireless trackers), longer range and better tracking performance at all ranges. To help explain the technology behind these improvements, here is a video with Igor Khalfin, PhD, a member of our Advisory Board and one of the world's foremost authorities in high-precision tracking, guidance and navigation systems. (Dr. Khalfin’s bio is below the video.)

Igor Khalfin, PhD

Dr. Khalfin has over 30 years of experience in the aerospace/defense industries and academia, holds 5 patents in electromagnetic tracking and has published over 40 scientific papers on related topics. His expertise includes optoelectronics, electromagnetics, imaging systems and sensors, remote sensing, applied physics, signal processing, and nonlinear systems. Dr. Khalfin is currently employed with Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, where he leads the projects on spacecraft control systems. His prior experience includes senior engineering positions at Rockwell Collins, Polhemus, State University of New York, and University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He holds a PhD in physics from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
The percentage of working-age Canadians who aren’t working – who aren’t even looking for a job – is at a historic high years after the economy supposedly bounced back from the recession. The labour participation rate for Canadian men in their working prime – ages 25 through 54 – is the lowest it’s been since Statistics Canada started collecting that data.

Women’s participation rate, rising since the 1950s, has been largely stagnant since 2006.

Canadians want to work. They’re settling for temp, seasonal or part-time jobs, without the stability of a pension or benefits, to stay in the workforce.

But for many, the numbers just don’t add up. They go back to school; they settle for seasonal, contract work; some just throw in the towel.

Read the series

Government response: What the feds had to say about Canadians’ labour instability trap

‘Like banging your head against a wall’

Jillanne Mignon quit her job because she couldn’t afford it.

She was working a decent gig for the city of Winnipeg’s 311 service – a job she’d left her university program to take so she could support her toddler son, Michael.

But even with that salary, she found herself in a cycle of debt just to pay for child care.

“When there’s a subsidy, there’s no spaces. When there are spaces, there’s no subsidy. …

“When you have people depending on you and you can’t give them all that you want, it’s nightmarish.”

Watch: Mark McAllister looks into why so many Canadians have stopped looking for work.

Ultimately, she realized it just didn’t make sense.

“I’m going to work to pay for childcare because I don’t want to be on welfare. “But then it’s better if I go on welfare because then I don’t have to worry about childcare because welfare won’t force me to go to work until my kid is six. So I’m tired. And I don’t know what I want to do.

“It’s like banging your head against a wall.”

So she quit her job. Moved to Toronto, where the combination of family support and all-day kindergarten helped with child care.

Swallowed her pride and went on welfare.

“When you have student loans and you still have to go on welfare, that hurts. Because you’ve tried to educate yourself so you don’t have to be dependent on the government for social assistance,” she said.

It sounds like an inconceivable decision, to abandon a decent job in favour of a penurious social-assistance program that’s become (inaccurately, evidence shows) associated with sloth and system-scammers.

But that’s the reality for a growing number of Canadians.

Job market dropouts

The percentage of Canadians over 15 who are working or actively looking for work is 66.1, its lowest point since 2001. (For both men and women aged 25-54, it’s 86.1 – the lowest since 2002. For men 25-54 it’s 90.4, the lowest since at least 1976.)

Ontario’s participation rate for the same age group, 65.9, hasn’t been this bad since 1998. In British Columbia, under two-thirds of the working-age population is in the job market – the lowest percentage since at least 1990.

“It is indicative of a weak economy, no question,” said Mike Moffatt, an economist with the Mowat Centre and the Ivey School of Business.

While it isn’t unusual for job market participation to drop in a downturn, recoveries are supposed to have the opposite effect, as more people re-enter an invigorated labour market. If the percentage of people working or looking for work continues to drop, as it has, something’s wrong.

Moffatt sees the historic low participation rates as part of a decades-long trend, hastened by the financial crisis.

“It’s a trend, unfortunately, I expect to see continue with globalization and automation: It’s getting tough for men, particularly ones that don’t have levels of higher education,” he said.

It’s “problematic not just for the individuals, but it causes an ever-shrinking tax base if you have smaller proportions of adults in the labour force. “It absolutely is worrisome.”

A government that wants to reverse that trend, then, would have to both encourage men and women to join and remain in the labour market, and ensure they have the skills they need to do so. And while both federal and provincial governments have touted “job creation” partnerships with businesses, economists have argued it makes more sense to focus on the individuals who need jobs and marketable skills.

“People want to be in the workforce. I don’t think anyone wants to stay at home and feel useless,” said David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“The question is, how do we provide circumstances where there’s employment for them?”

A fraying safety net

Mignon has a plan: In Toronto, on welfare, she spent nine months researching the job market to qualify for Second Career funding so she could go back to school and get back in the workforce.

“I worked for that money,” she says.

And now, if she can keep up the commute from her Parkdale apartment to Scarborough for classes at Centennial College, she can make it work.

But it isn’t easy.

Every dollar of the money she’s getting to pay her tuition is being deducted from the welfare cheque she needs to pay rent, feed and clothe herself and Michael, who is now five-going-on-six and adjusting to Grade One and the prospect of homework.

“Social assistance is now saying, ‘Well this [Second Career funding] is an income,” she said. “It’s taxed. They’re going to take it off my cheque, dollar for dollar.

“I’m basically being penalized [for going back to school].”

Ontario Community and Social Services spokesperson Kristen Tedesco confirmed that Second Career funding gets deducted from welfare cheques. But she added that “A recipient’s payment can fluctuate for a variety of reasons. … We encourage Ontario Works clients to contact their caseworker immediately with any payment support issues.”

(Mignon assures that she has: “I have a very big mouth,” she said, laughing. “I’ve realized if you don’t advocate for yourself, they’re just going to step on you.” For now, she says, she’s making it work.)

At the same time, there are strict limits on anything Mignon can save: Put too much aside, and your welfare gets clawed back.

The asset limit on how much Mignon and her son can save, given the assistance they’re getting right now, is $3,000.

“They’ve basically said, ‘We are going to keep you in poverty by not allowing you to save enough money to get out of poverty.’”

Upping that asset limit by a few thousand, she said, could change everything.

“If you have $10,000, you have a stable stand. Maybe a bank will lend you $500. Maybe you can move to a better neighbourhood; if there’s an emergency, if you need your wisdom teeth out, you can afford that,” she said. “You can say … ‘Let me see what my options are.’”

“But $3,000? $3,000 gets you nowhere quick.”

Economists and advocates who study the social assistance cycle argue having savings, or being allowed to accumulate them without losing income assistance, would help keep people from falling back into poverty.

“You have to impoverish yourself to have access to” welfare, says Mary Marrone, director of legal services at Ontario’s Income Security Advocacy Centre, This makes it much more difficult to pull yourself back out.

“People are living on a razor’s edge. … You haven’t had a chance to build up any savings.”

The goal of social assistance programs, Marrone argues, should be to get people into sustainable financial situations so they stay off social assistance, rather than simply get them out of the program as soon as possible.

When social assistance becomes ‘a trap’

About 45 per cent of people who leave Ontario Works to rejoin the job market are back on welfare within two years, the province’s Tedesco said.

Frances Lankin, the former head of Toronto’s United Way, co-authored a report on how to reform Ontario’s social assistance framework. She says there’s too much focus and too many resources devoted to policing the program rather than helping people get off assistance, and stay off.

“It’s not a joy, being on welfare,” she said. “Social assistance can become a trap.

“So if minimum wage is very low and if the jobs available have no prospect of becoming decent, middle-income jobs … let’s say you’re a single parent with a kid with asthma, all of a sudden you’ve got a moral decision: Do you go back to work and get a job that pays a fraction more … but has no drug coverage to pay for the asthma drugs for your kid? That’s not a decision that, ‘Oh, I am lazy and don’t want to work.’”

At the same time, Lankin said, people in that position are faced with fewer options.

“A number of the supports outside social assistance have become frayed over time. And people can’t live on the margins. So they fall into social assistance quicker and it’s harder to get back out.”

On bad days, Mignon is overwhelmed with the juggling her life entails, swamped by self-doubt. Graduation feels far away, the prospect of subsequent employment iffy.

On good days, she has plans: Getting Michael into a better school. Moving – maybe someday to a white-picket home in the suburbs around Toronto, with a backyard for Michael.

Graduating from Centennial and working in community economic development.

“I know what it’s like to be on both ends of the spectrum – to have financial security and to be very, very, very insecure, financially,” she said.

“I think that, as Canadians, we kind of have rose-coloured glasses on where our economy really is.”

Tell us your story: Have you given up on the job market? Have you been trapped by social assistance? We’d love to hear from you.

Note: We may use your response in this or other stories. While we may give you a shout to follow up we won’t publish your contact info.
This is the bizarre moment an Asian woman praised Pauline Hanson by comparing her to both Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

The woman's gushing praise of the controversial One Nation leader was captured in an interview with ABC's The Link presenter Stan Grant.

He spoke to residents of New South Wales in a segment that aired on Friday night asking them what they think of Ms Hanson.

While one man dismissed her as 'too anti-everything,' an Asian woman – who was not named – was filmed in a shopping centre as she heaped praise on Senator Hanson.

This woman heaped praise Pauline Hanson in an interview with The Link - comparing her to Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler

'Pauline Hanson is straightforward,' she said.

'She's sincere, she's not a hypocrite. If she doesn't like you, I don't like you.'

The woman continued to compliment Ms Hanson by comparing her qualities with two other nationalistic politicians she admires - the current President of the United States and the leader of Nazi Germany.

Speaking about why she likes Ms Hanson, the woman continued: 'Just like Trump. I like Trump. Donald Trump is sincere.

'He's sincere, straightforward. If he tells you you're not okay, you're not okay – not okay for America. You're destroying our country.'

The unnamed woman described the One Nation leader as 'sincere' and 'straightforward'

While some called Ms Hanson (pictured) 'too anti-everything', the woman continued to compliment her

Asked if she would like to hear more Trump-inspired rhetoric in Australia, she replied: 'Yes, yes.'

She added: 'See like that speech he had yesterday, that was great. Yes, it sounded like Hitler, but you know, Hitler loved Germany.'

Later on the programme, American political analyst and author Thomas Frank said the woman's comments were 'alarming'.

'Oh my goodness, well, it sounds like you're going to get your own Donald Trump here soon,' he told Mr Grant.

'That's a little bit alarming.

'Everything those people said, you take out the accent and some of the slang and that's exactly the kind of thing you heard from Americans during the last election cycle.'

The woman compared Ms Hanson to other nationalistic politicians Donald Trump (pictured left) and Adolf Hitler (right)

Ms Hanson has said that Australians are calling out for a 'strong leader' like Vladimir Putin

Meanwhile, Ms Hanson herself recently praised a controversial leader – Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She insisted that Australians are calling out for a 'strong leader' like Putin in an interview on Insiders.

'I listened to a speech he gave in Parliament,' she told Insiders host Barrie Cassidy.

'Even the people here in Australia were saying, 'I wish we had a leader like that here, I wish someone would stand up and fight for this country.'

'That's what people expect.'
What makes a great leader? Knowledge, smarts and vision, to be sure. To that, Daniel Goleman, author of “Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence,” would add the ability to identify and monitor emotions — your own and others’ — and to manage relationships. Qualities associated with such “emotional intelligence” distinguish the best leaders in the corporate world, according to Mr. Goleman, a former New York Times science reporter, a psychologist and co-director of a consortium at Rutgers University to foster research on the role emotional intelligence plays in excellence. He shares his short list of the competencies.

1. SELF-AWARENESS

Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and limitations; you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone else on the team.

Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what makes you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger.

2. SELF-MANAGEMENT

Resilience: You stay calm under pressure and recover quickly from upsets. You don’t brood or panic. In a crisis, people look to the leader for reassurance; if the leader is calm, they can be, too.
CSU (Photo: CSU)

The CSU volleyball team notched another road sweep Thursday night in one of its best all-around performances of the season.

The Rams swept New Mexico 3-0 (25-19, 25-20, 25-21) to move to 10-5 and 4-0 in Mountain West play.

The Colorado State University offense was nearly unstoppable on Thursday. The Rams hit .389 with the five main attackers all hitting .350 or better as freshman setter Katie Oleksak dished out 39 assists.

“That’s a tribute to her distribution,” CSU coach Tom Hilbert said. “We’re getting more comfortable. We’re growing through this offensively. We’ve got talented players in every spot. (Oleksak’s) finding ways to get it to them and quickly.”

CSU HOMECOMING: TV, ticket and game day info

Jasmine Hanna hit .423 and led the team with 12 kills. Sanja Cizmic, Kirstie Hillyer and Alexandra Poletto all had eight kills each, with Poletto adding seven blocks. Olivia Nicholson added seven kills.

New Mexico (10-8, 1-4 MW) hit just .074 and the Rams out-blocked the hosts 12-3. Other than serving (CSU had 11 serving errors and New Mexico had 10 aces), it was the best performance of the season from CSU.

The serving kept UNM in sets and Hilbert said that needs to be cleaned up ahead of a big showdown Saturday at UNLV.

“The biggest test is Saturday,” Hilbert said. “I’m excited for that one.”

Follow sports reporter Kevin Lytle at twitter.com/Kevin_Lytle and at facebook.com/KevinSLytle.

CSU 3, New Mexico 0

CSU 25 25 25 — 3

UNM 19 20 21 — 0

Next up: CSU at UNLV, 4 p.m. Saturday at Cox Pavilion
How to choose the right IT Ops certs to stay competitive

Mention certifications in the IT world and you find three camps. There are those who are all for them, which generally includes those who create, administer, and grant certified status. There are many who say that certification is a fool's game because it rests on rote memorization and doesn't really prove ability.

And then there those who don't care about the debate—they just want to remain employable. This article is for you. As the computing world shifts and moves ever faster toward greater virtualization, cloud computing, and software-defined everything, you need new skills and knowledge to stay ahead and remain competitive. So here's an overview of infrastructure-related certifications and the specific areas that you should consider.

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Certification pros and cons

Not everyone likes the idea of certification. Many say certifications show that someone passed a series of tests, not that he or she is good at actually doing the work of an IT infrastructure professional. The post-nominal letters literally spelling out a certification also don't address someone's work ethic, compatibility with a given corporate culture, inventiveness, or other characteristics that are critical in hiring.

It's a good point. Memorizing all the possible settings for a piece of hardware or software may save some time but fails to determine whether someone would be a good infrastructure employee.

Among the arguments for gaining certifications, the biggest is the HR department angle. The dynamics of hiring employees are difficult at many companies. Hiring managers tell HR professionals the characteristics they want in candidates for a given position. The HR staff looks for all the specific requirements the hiring managers mentioned, including certifications, for two reasons.

One reason is that no one in corporate America wants to be caught making a blatant mistake. If HR focuses on what the manager wanted, their actions are safe.

Another reason is the ability to reject candidates. This isn't a game or hard-heartedness so much as an action of self-preservation. An ad could bring in hundreds of résumés, and someone has to go through them. If they make certifications a requirement, then they can eliminate anyone who doesn't meet the profile. Of course, there will be some highly experienced people who could perform the job without having the certification, but the HR staff won't have the expertise to tell, and they don't want to pass along unknown quantities and turn the interview stage into a wild goose chase.

Even if it seems unfair or narrow, you'll likely need certifications to safeguard your future as an infrastructure professional who has access to the widest job market.

[ Webinar: 5 Things Every SecOps Team Wants Their NetOps Team to Know ]

Future-proofing your certifications portfolio

The question is what types of certifications you will need in this changing realm of computing and infrastructure. Paradoxically, that means starting with what you need for traditional computing.

New approaches to computing don't eradicate all the investment in hardware and software that has taken place over the years. There's still a need for data centers at many companies, whether it's because of particularly strong security or regulatory requirements. Companies need networks, otherwise there's no way to connect to a cloud, or anything else.

But now there are multiple cloud services in use. Increasingly, aspects of infrastructure are falling into the "software-defined" camp, so much of the work is now done through scripting and not necessarily changing cabling among sets of equipment. Automation is decreasing the time it takes to deploy and reconfigure resources while also reducing the number of infrastructure professionals that may be needed by a company, which means that greater job safety comes with knowing how to create automation, not performing manual steps.

"In these new areas, certifications are becoming more and more important," said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive of Accenture Technology Services. "We believe people need to change their skill sets and stay relevant." For example, his company has spent $841 million on skill development for people across different skill areas, including certification and training.

And then there is the issue of being able to migrate among different career options. "You don't want to box in," said P.K. Agarwal, regional dean and CEO of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley. "Everything is moving fast. What if this brand X is the darling tomorrow? I like the idea of certifications that also say you understand this industry and the subject of cloud."

Choosing the 'right' certifications

But, still, what certifications should you have? Ultimately, this is a matter of personal preference and your own career strategy. Certifications can become a time sink. You could pile one on after another until you retire, but it's not as though they are free to pick up.

Part of your decision is recognizing that there are two types of certifications. One is a more general type that says you are knowledgeable in a specific area of infrastructure. The tests check for skills that work independent of specific vendors, which is important. Computing is frequently heterogeneous.

Then there are the vendor-specific certifications, created and administered by the vendors themselves. Often, they can be self-serving.

"Every vendor is going to find a way to keep you as a captive customer so you cannot leave them," Agarwal said. Ones with greater market share—Cisco in networking is a great example—want to keep professionals close at hand because those are the people who have a lot of influence in what equipment and software companies will purchase going forward.

But the certifications continue to expand, making decisions difficult. "There are nine CCNA exams [now]," said Kimberley Parsons Trommler, now a product evangelist but formerly a senior systems engineer also involved in certification and training for Paessler, a provider of network and IT monitoring products. "It makes it very difficult for someone just starting out to know what they should do. And it makes it complicated for the employer. They probably need routing and switching and security, but people applying will probably have only one of those. Which is more relevant to the position they're trying to fill?"

What if you want to keep your options open and be able to work for a company that uses networking equipment from a different vendor—for example, Jupiter or Brocade? Trying to cover all possibilities is wildly impractical. There are also entirely new types of certifications coming out that you may need to consider, even though they initially don't seem to be about infrastructure.

"As we move toward software-defined everything, the capabilities that companies require are more aligned with dev practices and less aligned with operational practices," said Chris Ciborowski, CEO of Nebulaworks. And yet developers don't understand all the needs of deployment at scale. "If you're going to be a scripting or tool developer, you have to understand those things and translate the tools and monitoring solutions the developers need to use," he said.

For example, Jenkins is a popular open-source continuous integration automation tool that can merge all development work into a mainline body of code. CloudBees offers a platform-as-a-service delivery of Jenkins and created the first certification for the technology.

"Some products are so important for the market that it means something for them to be certified," said Francois Dechery, CloudBees' vice president of customer success. "You cannot be certified on our certification without being knowledgeable and having hands-on experience with Jenkins."

Then there are technologies that may not currently have certifications but might soon. Docker, for example, automates application deployment inside of software containers in a virtual hosting environment.

Developing your certification strategy: Seek balance

In short, this is a game with a bewildering number of choices and high personal stakes. Your decisions have to depend on developing a personal strategy in the context of technology and market trends. However, here are some principles that will come into play:

You need a balance between vendor-specific certifications and those that cover concepts in a vendor-neutral way.

Another balance you need is between proven areas that have become a baseline requirement for many employers and those that represent the future and can act as competitive differentiation in the market.

A third type of balance to seek is across the spectrum of resource types. You're looking at your future as an infrastructure pro, so be sure you can navigate from an in-house data center, across whatever network architecture you might face, to a cloud, and then across cloud services if necessary.

Remember that software increasingly controls configuration of infrastructure hardware, including virtual resources, so don't neglect important development skills. (Check out my guide to coding bootcamps.)

What follows are some of the top certification categories for the expanding concept of infrastructure along with specific ones for in-demand technologies. Popularity was largely the driving factor in choosing specific certifications, with more advanced versions of certification taking precedence over lower-level ones. However, remember that a less-sought certification can still be the difference between an interview invitation and radio silence on the company's part if that business has standardized on a given vendor's technology.

Also remember that a given certification may require that a candidate has previously passed other specific tests. Prices are in US dollars; testing costs in other countries may vary.

Cloud certifications

Cloud is the future of computing—not all computing, but so much that you won't be able to avoid it.

Certification: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional (AWS-CSA)

Vendor: Amazon

Structure: Multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions in a 170-minute exam available in English or Japanese. Amazon sets passing scores by statistical analysis and does not make those scores public.

Recertification: Two years

Cost: Practice exam, $40. Exam, $300

Description: Shows advanced skills and experience designing distributed applications and systems on Amazon's AWS cloud platform. Should have the AWS-CSA - Associate certification and at least two years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture. Understand best practices on design across applications and projects.

Certification: CompTIA Cloud+

Vendor: CompTIA

Structure: Ninety-minute test with 100 multiple-choice questions. Passing score is 750 on a 100-to-900 scale.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $285

Description: Shows vendor-neutral expertise in implementing and maintaining cloud services. "[C]overs competency in cloud models, virtualization, infrastructure, security, resource management and business continuity." Should have two to three years of networking, storage, or IT data center administration and be familiar with any hypervisor technology.

Certification: MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect

Vendor: Microsoft

Structure: A series of three tests. An exam can contain any of a number of question types, including short answer, multiple choice, case studies, and more. Microsoft regularly introduces new testing techniques and updates content.

Recertification: Two years

Cost: $495 (three tests, $165 each)

Description: Certifies the ability to manage the "full breadth of architecting, developing, and administering Azure solutions."

Certification: MCSE: Private Cloud

Vendor: Microsoft

Structure: A series of five tests. An exam can contain any of a number of question types, including short answer, multiple choice, case studies, and more. Microsoft regularly introduces new testing techniques and updates content.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $825 (five tests, $165 each)

Description: Certifies that the person can manage and implement Microsoft private cloud computing technologies.

Certification: Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA)

Vendor: OpenStack Foundation

Structure: A hands-on, 2.5-hour test. Candidates must provide own hardware running a Chrome or Chromium browser and should have at least six months of OpenStack experience.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $300

Description: Demonstrates that a person who passes "has the skills required to provide day-to-day operation and management of an OpenStack cloud."

Data center

Even with companies taking advantage of public clouds, there are still data centers for processes considered mission-critical or too sensitive to run on shared services.

Certification: MCSE: Server Infrastructure

Vendor: Microsoft

Structure: A series of five tests. An exam can contain any of a number of question types, including short answer, multiple choice, case studies, and more. Microsoft regularly introduces new testing techniques and updates content.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $825 (five tests, $165 each)

Description: Holder has the skills "to run a highly efficient and modern data center, with expertise in identity management, systems management, virtualization, storage, and networking."

Certification: Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)

Vendor: Red Hat

Structure: Two tests that are hands-on, practical exams.

Recertification: Generally three years, but requirements can change depending on version of Red Hat used in original certification and current version.

Cost: $800 (two tests, $400 each)

Description: Highest level of Red Hat certification.

Certification: CompTIA Server+

Vendor: CompTIA

Structure: Ninety-minute test with 100 multiple-choice questions. Passing score is 750 on a 100-to-900 scale.

Recertification: No required recertification.

Cost: $285

Description: Addresses such topics as system hardware and software, disaster recovery, configuration, documentation, best practices, and troubleshooting.

Certification: Data Center Design Consultant (DCDC)

Vendor: BICSI

Structure: Two-hour exam with 100 multiple-choice questions.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $645 for non-members for application and exam fees ($395 for members)

Description: Covers mechanical, electrical, and telecommunications systems in addition to data center requirements, including reliability, security, and building requirements.

Network certifications

You have to tie together various parts of a company's infrastructure, and that requires networking.

Certification: Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE)

Vendor: Cisco

Structure: Two-hour written exam (between 90 and 110 questions) and eight-hour practical exam.

Recertification: Two years

Cost: $2,000 (written exam, $400; practical exam, $1,600)

Description: Demonstration of wide-ranging and high-level skills in all aspects of network engineering. Multiple specialty variations are available.

Certification: Juniper Networks Certified Expert Enterprise Routing and Switching (JNCIE-ENT)

Vendor: Juniper

Structure: Hands-on practical exam.

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $300

Description: Requires JNCIP-ENT certification as a prerequisite. Designed to "validate the networking professionals’ ability to deploy, configure, manage and troubleshoot Junos-based enterprise routing and switching platforms."

Certification: CompTIA Network+

Vendor: CompTIA

Structure: Ninety-minute test with maximum of 90 multiple-choice questions, drag-and-drops, and performance-based assessment. Passing score is 720 on a 100-to-900 scale.

Recertification: No required recertification.

Cost: $285

Description: Examines the "the essential knowledge and skills needed to confidently design, configure, manage and troubleshoot any wired and wireless networks." Requires a CompTIA A+ certification and nine months of networking experience.

Virtualization certifications

Server and desktop virtualization have become popular ways to centralize administrative control of resources.

Certification: VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP6-DCV)

Vendor: VMware

Structure: Depends on background. If you are new to VMware certification, you would need to attend a training course and pass two examinations: the 90-minute, 65-question vSphere 6 Foundations Exam, and the 100-minute, 85-question VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization Exam.

Recertification: Two years.

Cost: $345 ($120 for foundations exam, $225 for VCP6-DCV exam)

Description: "Validates that you know how to administer and troubleshoot vSphere V6 infrastructures, leveraging best practices to provide a scalable and reliable virtualization platform for your company."

Certification: Citrix Certified Professional - Virtualization (CCP-V)

Vendor: Citrix

Structure: One test

Recertification: Three years

Cost: $300

Description: Requires previous CCA-V certification. Focused on desktop virtualization, not server.

As noted above, there are many certification choices you can make. What would you add or drop from the list? What do you think in general about certifications?

Image credit: Flickr
Amazon has launched a new cheaper version of its Echo Dot voice-controlled device today.

The launch comes six months after Amazon first introduced two new Echo devices — one of which was the $90 Echo Dot, which has a line-out port to connect to third-party speakers. It has been sold out in recent months, which may have been a deliberate move by Amazon to pave the way for the new Dot that is coming to market today.

Priced at $50 (£50 / €60 in the U.K. / Germany), the new version is similar to the existing incarnation in most respects, but it has been trimmed by a few millimeters and now packs a more powerful processor, meaning it should be capable of performing more labor-intensive tasks.

What’s perhaps most interesting, apart from the price, is that it can be bought just like beer — in six-packs and 12-packs.

Image Credit: Paul Sawers / VentureBeat

The six-pack effectively gets you half-a-dozen Dots for the price of five, while with the bigger box you get 12 for the price of 10.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has introduced beer-style bulk-buying to its products — it did the exact same thing for its quad-core Fire tablet launch last September. But it helps to illustrate what Amazon is striving for here — it wants consumers to embed the Echo and its Alexa-powered brain in every room of their house.

The new Echo Dot comes out on the same day that Amazon announced its flagship smart Echo speaker is finally launching outside of the U.S, kicking off with the U.K. and Germany today.
393352 06: (L to R) Actors Sarah Chalke, Zach Braff, and Donald Faison poses for a publicity photo for the television show 'Scrubs.' (Photo Courtesy of NBC/Getty Images)

Donald Faison, who played Dr. Christopher Turk on the show "Scrubs," celebrates his birthday today, June 22.

As "Scrubs" still has a lasting fan base -- the writers would call their cult following "Our Nerds" -- The Huffington Post has gathered 11 things from old interviews that you didn't know about your favorite gang of doctors, and they'll make you want to yell, "Eagle!"

1. The main cast went skinny dipping together on Faison's birthday.

Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke and Faison appeared on AOL's "Outside the Box" series and were asked by a fan about the weirdest or most memorable moment they'd had on or off the set.

Faison told a story about the three of them going to the Bahamas for his birthday, where they went swimming in the ocean. While they waded in the waves, they could look into the distance and see a lightning storm adding beautiful touches of light to the horizon.

Originally, Faison was just going to stop there, but then Braff said Faison should mention they were skinny dipping, as well. Chalke said she kept her swimsuit on, but Braff claimed that he and Faison were swimming naked together, "just like J.D. and Turk would."

2. J.D. and Turk were based on real doctors, one of which was "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence's best friend in college.

Image: "Scrubs"

In 2004, Bill Lawrence and Braff appeared on NPR's Fresh Air to talk about their still relatively new show at the time, along with the upcoming release of Braff's "Garden State." Lawrence talked about how the show was based in reality, partly because his best friend from the College of William & Mary -- where he went for undergrad -- was a future med school student named J.D.

Hence the inspiration for Lawrence's group of normal, young, fun-loving friends trying to survive the rigors of becoming a doctor.

Lawrence's last memory of J.D. was as a guy with an empty 12-pack of beer on his head. He told Fresh Air that his worst nightmare in the world as a young 23-year-old would have been to end up in the emergency room with J.D. as the doctor.

At a talk at his alma mater in 2009, Lawrence said that the relationship between J.D. and Turk is based off his own friendship with J.D. in school, mixed with the stories that came from the real-life Dr. Jon Turk.

You can see Faison and Braff meet the doctors they're based on in this video.

3. Braff said that his ideal end for the show was Ted going "postal" and killing everyone.

Talking with ABC -- coincidentally, during the same day as the previously mentioned AOL interview -- the main stars were asked how they would write the ending of the show.

Braff responded, "I would like Ted the lawyer to go postal and come to work and kill everybody." Faison responded, "Nice."

The three seemed particularly annoyed with this soul-patched interviewer, so Braff was probably just joking. He ended up changing his answer to Elliot and J.D. ending up together, Turk ending his relationship with Carla and then Elliot and J.D. adopting him.

4. The actor who played "The Todd" described the character's sexuality as "try-sexual," as in he'd try anything.

At a Season 3 party, IGN asked Robert Maschio about the sexual orientation of "The Todd."

Maschio responded:

I think he's not homosexual. He's not bisexual. He's try-sexual. He'll try anyone. I think "The Todd" would go for the hot girl at the party first, and then as the night goes on, if I may say, he may go for the fat girl, and then when he strikes out there, he's gonna go with the dude who's been eyeing him all night. Just take him home and say, "Just finish that off. As long as I don't touch your ears, it's not gay." That's how I take it. He's a hedonist. He's a sensualist. He's addicted to pleasures of the flesh.

5. The cast and crew had an ongoing game of dares called "Scrubs Factor." Tattoos and eating pigs' feet were involved.

"Scrubs Factor" is mentioned in that same IGN interview by multiple members of the cast and crew. At the time, Braff said the grossest one had been, "when the guy ate pigs' feet." Braff continued, "He loved pigs' feet and he downed about 30 in about five minutes for like 500 bucks."

In a feature for the Season 3 DVD, Lawrence explained that he started the game as a bonding session and initially instigated the pigs' feet challenge when they all came across a jar of them at a bar.

Chalke was once dared by Lawrence to go order coffee at a Starbucks in a burlesque outfit where she apparently had to wait 20 minutes in line. During the IGN interview, Chalke also mentioned that later that night, $1,000 was on the table for whoever got a "Scrubs" tattoo. It's unclear whether anybody followed through.

6. The medical cases in the show were based on actual stories from physicians, whose names would then be written into the show.

Image: Getty

During NPR's Fresh Air interview with Braff and Lawrence, the show creator said that every single medical story on the show was handed to them by real physicians.

The show never used real patients' names, but Lawrence and his writers would make sure the doctors' names were written into the episodes.

7. Lawrence's wife -- who played Jordan -- would dictate her acting schedule while they were in bed.

Image: "Scrubs"

Also in that NPR interview, Lawrence talked about what it was like having his wife, Christa Miller, play a main character on the show. Lawrence said that he'd take elements of their marriage and put them into the writing, presumably for the relationship between Jordan and Dr. Cox. He jokingly added that it was the one time a week he could tell his wife what to do and she'd have to listen.

Lawrence also said that Miller had "the world's cherriest gig" for an actress because she could wake up next to him, say she felt like working Thursday, and then Lawrence and the writers would write her into the script for that day.

8. Braff quit his job as a waiter when he got hired for "Scrubs," but didn't realize filming wouldn't start for another four months. He wrote "Garden State" during this time.

During the "Garden State" press tour, Braff was interviewed by Uncut and was asked how long it took him to figure out the movie. Braff said it actually had to do with how the beginning of his "Scrubs" job worked out.

I’d been waiting tables when I got cast in 'Scrubs,' and I quit as a waiter only to be told we wouldn’t actually be filming for four months. So I sat down for that time and hammered out the first draft. Then once 'Scrubs' started, I spent the next two years trying to get someone interested in making it.

9. The "Scrubs" scripts were kept top secret from even the main cast during the early seasons.

Image: "Scrubs"

An early episode of "The Daily Show" featured Jon Stewart interviewing a young Braff just as "Scrubs" was starting to get traction. When Stewart asked what sorts of plot developments were coming up, Braff claimed that the writers told him nothing and he didn't find out what would happen until the day he'd show up to set.

"It's all very top secret," said Braff.

Braff also asked Stewart to come on the show as a patient or a corpse, which unfortunately never came to be.

10. NBC changed the show's airing time so often that Braff's mom would regularly call him to ask when she could watch.

Image: Getty

IGN also interviewed Braff in 2004, and he said that he felt that a lot of the trouble with the "Scrubs" ratings at the time was caused by NBC moving the show around so much in their schedule.

Braff even told a story about how his mom had a hard time finding out when to watch her son, saying, "My mom will call me and be like, 'When are you on this week?'"

11. If the show only lasted one season, Janitor was going to be just a figment of J.D.'s imagination.

"If the show ended after one year, he was just going to be a figment of J.D.'s imagination," Lawrence said during NPR's Fresh Air interview. It wasn't until about midway through the second season that the actor who played Janitor, Neil Flynn, was able to interact with another actor aside from Braff.

There was also a couple competing reasons for why the Janitor was always picking on Braff. Lawrence felt, personally, that he'd always had someone in his life latch on to teasing him for seemingly no reason, and so Flynn's character was based on this idea.
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President Donald Trump’s war with the intelligence community is about to go nuclear, says former NSA analyst and national security expert John Schindler.

The intelligence community’s efforts to do their jobs and expose the connections between the Trump camp and the Russian government have been met with insults and attacks from our hypersensitive President as he attempts to paint them as the enemy and sides with the Russians against the men and women who work tirelessly to keep our nation safe from foreign threats.

Just this morning, Trump decided to smear last night’s bombshell report on the Trump camp’s continued contacts with Russian officials during the election as “illegal:”

The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by "intelligence" like candy. Very un-American! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

This is only the latest in a long string of attacks – like that time Trump compared the intelligence community to “Nazis” – that Schindler says is aggravating the intelligence community – with potentially devastating consequences:

US intelligence is not the problem here. The President's collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details, but the essence is simple. — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017

Progress? The President was calling US "intelligence" Nazis only a few weeks ago — now they're merely un-American.https://t.co/5y1T8EHCJy — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017

Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: "He will die in jail."https://t.co/e6FxCclVqT — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017

Putin never viewed Trump as anything more than a useful lunatic. Moscow wants political chaos in America — and oh boy are they getting it. — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017

In this tweet, IC is shorthand for “intelligence community” and EM for “email.”

If we take these tweets at face value, Trump’s continued insistence on berating the intelligence community for their work and siding with the Russians over our own national security apparatus is going to come back to haunt him.

The only thing “illegal” about this entire scandal are the secret communications that the Trump campaign was conducting with agents of the Russian Federation during and after the election – and every move the Trump administration makes only deepens the suspicion that the Russian government is blackmailing our so-called President – and that is an unacceptable state of affairs.

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TOP 5 SPENDING TOP 5 SPENDING WASHINGTON  Tuesday's midterm elections — and the record-shattering amounts outside groups spent to oust Democratic incumbents — are just a warm-up to the 2012 presidential race, analysts and experts say. Conservative groups outspent liberal groups by a more than 2-to-1 ratio heading into an Election Day that brought the biggest Republican sweep in the House of Representatives in decades and sliced into the Democratic majority in the Senate. "The Democrats brought a bat, and the Republicans brought a grenade," said Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign money. "If you think spending is out of control by outside groups, it likely will blow your mind in the presidential election." President Obama has repeatedly lambasted conservative groups for their role in the midterm elections and criticized the Supreme Court's decision in January that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate and union spending on election ads. Conservative spending has topped $187 million this year, up from $19.6 million in 2006, the last midterm election, the center's data show. The leader of one of the leading GOP organizations said on Wednesday that it plans to play a big role in 2012. "People wanted Congress and the president to address the economy and felt that instead the Congress and the president were pursuing an agenda that has nothing to do with what the average American wanted," said Steven Law, CEO of American Crossroads and a related group that spent more than $38 million combined to influence races. "Our goal was to amplify that," he said. "The main thing for the president to do is to listen to that for his own sake and for the country's sake. If he decides not to, we will amplify it even louder in 2012." In more than 50 House races, outside groups and party committees outspent the candidates, a USA TODAY analysis shows. Other trends: •In the 48 House contests in which outside groups spent a combined $1 million or more, Republicans won two-thirds, a USA TODAY analysis of election results and campaign reports shows. In one Upstate New York district, conservative groups such as American Crossroads, the Tea Party Express and the 60 Plus Association bought $2.8 million in negative ads attacking freshman Democratic Rep. Scott Murphy on health care, helping Republican Christopher Gibson win 55% of the vote. •Self-funded candidates of both parties faired poorly Tuesday. Only four of the 15 federal candidates who put $1 million or more into their own campaigns won on Tuesday, according to a tally by the Center for Responsive Politics. Wrestling executive Linda McMahon lost the Connecticut Senate race, despite spending $46.6 million — or roughly $96 per vote. By comparison, her Democratic opponent, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, spent $12 per vote with campaign and personal funds. Other self-funded candidates who lost include: former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who spent more than $142 million of her own money in the California gubernatorial contest. Some multimillion-dollar-spending candidates did have success. Republican Ron Johnson, CEO of a polymer company, spent $8.2 million of his own to oust Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Republican Rick Scott, founder of the hospital chain Columbia/HCA, spent $73 million in a successful bid for Florida governor. •U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $32 million on 67 House and Senate races. The USA TODAY analysis shows that 72% of chamber-backed candidates won so far. But, it spent nearly $5 million against Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who won. R. Bruce Josten, the chamber's top lobbyist, said the state's voters were out of step with the rest of the electorate. "You've got a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, with massive budget deficits ... and a body politic that showed absolutely no signs of coming to grips with their own economic reality." This year's spending should spur Democrats to start raising cash for their own outside efforts, said Mark Aronchick, a longtime Democratic fundraiser in Philadelphia. "Interest and advocacy groups that support the Democratic agenda need to stop wringing their hands and step up to the plate," he said. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
We are eight weeks into the season, and we only have three weeks left of the LCS regular season and fantasy. The pressure to win is increasing exponentially and decisions have more weight behind them now that the end is upon us.

Week 8 Analysis

Last week, I incorrectly predicted Millenium, Roccat, Dignitas, and Alliance. My data incorrectly predicted Roccat, Dignitas, CLG, and Gambit. I made the mistake of thinking that Mil was on a downswing, when in reality they were just being horribly inconsistent which they showed in their crushing victory over Alliance and their close game with CW. Alliance was the exact opposite: I thought that they were just having a fluke week on super week and that their games vs Roccat and Millenium would boost them back up. Instead, they went 0-2 and look extremely vulnerable for the first time this season. It seemed expected that Dig would at least have close games with LMQ and CLG, but they were crushed in both games and garnered less than half of what was expected of them. Roccat went 2-0 against SK and Alliance. CLG went 2-0 against TSM and Dig in crushing victories. Gambit swapped their roster around and not even NiQ could post a decent score this week. SK did much worse than expected this week, however, they were expected to do the worst, or the 2nd worst in each of their respective positions, so I would say that was still accurate.

Overall, my data predictions were extremely accurate and fairly precise last week. I was 0.56% accurate, and +/- 9.53 points precise for both EU and NA last week. A lot of that deviation comes from EU where teams like Gambit, SK, and Roccat scored upwards of 30 points off from the predicted values. In fact, EU was +/- 11.51 points precise while NA was +/- 7.54 points precise. The good thing about EU is that it remains extremely accurate due to many games being stomps. When one team in EU scores over, another team will score just as much under the projection.

I found that another good way to compare how well predictions worked is to rank all players based on their predictions, and then see where they ended up for their actual performance. For last week, the two tables are here:

Projected Week 8

Actual Week 8

As you can see, even though teams like SK did much worse than predicted, they were still predicted to be some of the worst players going into week 8, and they ended in relatively the same spots.

Week 9 Method

Not many changes this week. The biggest change is that I am including the chart that ranks the players by their position which can be found directly below.

And the points projected for each player (M3):

Top Lane

FNC SOAZ 42.61 points

Fnatic is now #1 in EU by elo, and they have crushed their competition in recent weeks. They also play the two weakest teams in EU this week: Gambit and CW. I’m going to spoil the rest of this for you, Fnatic is #1 in every position, and they will all have the same reasoning as s0AZ. Start them.

TSM Dyrus 33.67 points

TSM is a strong team that struggles to consistently beat the top teams in NA. This week, they play LMQ and coL. That seems a little contradictory for them to do well this week, but TSM players average 14 points a game against LMQ even though they have not beaten LMQ. They also average 25 points against coL. So expect TSM to do well this week. Dyrus is the biggest risk of the entire TSM roster because he only averages 6.5 points a game against LMQ and about 18.5 points a game against coL.

LMQ Ackerman 31.15 points

Ackerman has been one of the best top laners throughout the split and he is lucky enough to be playing against TSM and CLG this week. Most teams score a lot of points for their top laners against CLG, and LMQ has yet to lose to TSM this split. If Ackerman performs to his average against these teams, he is in line to get 51 points, 31 from TSM and 20 from CLG. I would definitely start Ackerman.

Jungle

FNC Cyanide 40.78 points

Fnatic player. See Soaz. See the past two weeks.

TSM Amazing 39.47 points

TSM plays coL and LMQ this week and both teams like to have games that either last extremely long or have a lot of kills. Amazing has 36 points on average from these teams, and his aggressive playstyle will be rewarded in these probably high-scoring games.

Mil KottenX 32.52 points

KottenX always plays well. He has had maybe one bad week this split, but he has consistently been one of the top performers on a team that goes for kills. Mil plays a struggling SK and a resurgent Roccat this week, so they might have issues, but I thought they would have issues last week and almost all of them were #1 in their respective positions.

Mid

FNC xPeke 48.48 points

I tried warning you guys. Fnatic is #1 in every position, and I think those predictions are fair. Keep reading.

TSM Bjergsen 44.61 points

Oh, I forgot to mention, TSM is #2 in every position this week as well. Again, I think #2 is fair for all of them except for Dyrus, and entirely possible. Unless they give Vasilii Tristana. Then your fantasy points can RIP.

All Froggen 41.99 points

Even when most of Alliance underperformed last week, Froggen remained strong. Alliance has an easier schedule this week, and they will hopefully perform better than last week. I feel confident with Froggen being my #3 mid laner.

ADC

FNC Rekkles 54.72 points

Even if FNC wasn’t all #1 right now, I think Rekkles would still be #1. Amazing player, team is playing better than ever, “easy” week; all of that means a lot of fantasy points.

TSM WildTurtle 44.63 points

TSM is 2nd again. WildTurtle has been playing amazingly ever since the casters started talking about him not having a game with more than 5 (or was it 7) kills in this split. I think the players just enjoy proving Jatt wrong and it is very likely that it can be an NA LCS game that they play amongst themselves.

CLG Doublelift 41.69 points

He’s in the number three position along with his trusty partner and the more attractive half of rush hour: Aphromoo. He plays LMQ and EG this week, and on average would score 40 points against those teams. EG has not looked like they have improved much since the last time CLG played them, and LMQ vs CLG is always a high-kill game due to both teams always trying to make plays to get back in the game.

Support

FNC Yellowstar 47.94 points

Supports are very reliant on how well their team does. Fnatic is doing well. Yellowstar will do well. He has also played amazingly the past 2 weeks. Start him.

TSM Gleeb 37.35 points

TSM will probably do well. TSM likes to snowball games from kills. Kills mean assists. Assists mean free fantasy points for whoever started Gleeb.

CLG Aphromoo 34.10 points

APHROMOO! The community-titled “Best Player NA” has been playing outstanding recently. CLG has historically scored a lot of points against EG and LMQ, and I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. I would start him, especially alongside his more attractive partner Doublelift.

Teams

Fnatic 34 points

This is like the really bad “Knock Knock” joke involving bananas and an orange. Except there are no oranges to make me glad I didn’t say banana. Fnatic is number one, once again this week, and that’s all I have to say.

Dignitas 30 points

Dignitas has already started their typical end-season slide with none of their players performing well in the past couple of weeks and a severe lack of coordination. Also, none of their players are expected to be in the top 10 of their respective positions, so it is extremely unlikely for their team to do that much better than the players. They play CRS and EG this week so there is hope, but I find it unlikely.

Alliance 30 points

Hopefully Alliance can pull it together, but like Dig, they are 2-4 in their last two weeks. They have an easier schedule this week than they did last week, but if they are really slumping, that might not even help them. SHC and GMB are still LCS-level teams, so no win is free, especially with how Alliance has looked these past two weeks.

Closing

LCS is coming to a close soon, and that means Worlds is coming up. However, that also means that Fantasy will end until January of 2015 (unless Riot has fantasy Worlds with a draft for all the teams for the round robin stage of Worlds. Rito pls!). So far, I think that fantasy data not only has applications in predicting the outcomes of games and scores players will get each game, but that the data is also extremely useful in identifying strength of teams and analyzing their playstyle’s or where their weakest link is. So far, I only have one loss this season in fantasy due to Mil and Roc last week (I hate you Fridge) and I have really enjoyed doing these articles for you guys. I look forward to the next 3 weeks and hopefully the next time Fantasy LCS becomes available.

Credit to /u/_Zaga_ and his site http://flcspro.com for compiling all data for me this week.

P.S. Have some elo graphs of NA and EU! K = 45.
EL SEGUNDO, CA — The phrase, “Go West, young man!” has been around for many decades, and although it will take them 80 years, the American Hockey League is doing just that.

Indeed, it’s been in the works for years, and there has been an ever-increasing amount of talk about it over the past few years, but it all became reality on January 29, when the AHL announced that the affiliates of five National Hockey League teams will move to California to form a new Pacific Division of the AHL. The teams in this new division will begin play next season, marking the first time the AHL will have teams in California in what will be their 80-year history.

“Today, we are announcing that we will begin our 80th season [2015-16] with another monumental shift in the geography of our league,” David Andrews, President, Chief Executive Officer, American Hockey League, told the media at a press conference in San Jose. “Earlier this week, the American Hockey League’s Board of Governors unanimously approved the purchase of an AHL franchise by the Anaheim Ducks, and the relocation of AHL franchises owned by the Calgary Flames, the Edmonton Oilers, the Los Angeles Kings, and the San Jose Sharks, as well as the franchise being purchased by Anaheim. These approvals are paving the way for the launch, next Fall, of the Pacific Division of the American Hockey League, with teams in five California cities.”

The new division shakes out this way:

Anaheim Ducks will purchase the Norfolk Admirals and move them from Norfolk, Virginia to San Diego.

Calgary Flames will move their affiliate, the Adirondack Flames, from Glens Falls, New York, to Stockton.

Edmonton Oilers will move their affiliate, Oklahoma City Barons, from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Bakersfield, where the ECHL’s Bakersfield Condors will move up to the AHL

Los Angeles Kings will swap their ECHL and AHL affiliates, with the AHL’s Manchester Monarchs moving to Ontario where they will take on the name of the existing Ontario Reign. Meanwhile, the ECHL’s Ontario Reign will move to Manchester, New Hampshire and become the ECHL’s Manchester Monarchs

San Jose Sharks will move their affiliate, the Worcester Sharks, from Worcester, Massachusetts to San Jose, where they will play at the SAP Center, sharing the same arena as the NHL’s Sharks.

“This is a significant day for hockey, and the growth of the sport in California,” said John Tortora, Chief Operating Officer, San Jose Sharks. “In 25 short years, hockey [in California] has grown from one NHL team to three very successful NHL teams. Each franchise has developed robust youth hockey programs in their markets, culminating with each team having California-trained players on their rosters and in their systems. Now, hockey adds another layer to its California growth, five NHL teams identifying five California cities throughout the state for the home of their top development clubs.”

“For the growth of hockey, it’s a tremendous thing, obviously, for California, but [also] for the United States,” said Luc Robitaille, President, Business Operations, Los Angeles Kings. “To have five teams that are going to play on the West Coast now, fans are going to be able to see players who are one phone call away from playing in the NHL.”

“When we talk about the AHL, we’re talking about an entirely different level,” added Robitaille. “People who are fortunate enough to see those games, they’re going to see a very, very high skill level, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Ducks Executive Vice President/General Manager Bob Murray and Vice Chair, Oilers Entertainment Group Kevin Lowe agreed.

“To use a favorite word of our recently retired Teemu Selanne, this is an unbelievable day for hockey in California, for Anaheim, the organization, and for the city of San Diego, where [their AHL affiliate] will be moving to,” said Murray. “When the Samueli’s bought the team in 2005, [former Ducks general manager] Brian Burke and I—our first week on the job—we looked at each other [and said], ‘we’ve got to move our minor league team out here,’ so this is a dream come true.”

“All of us will agree that from when Luc Robitaille played for the Kings, and Wayne Gretzky got traded there in 1988, it’s to the betterment of the NHL, and the great game of hockey, that Californians will have [a lot] more opportunities to watch world-class hockey,” said Lowe.

It’s All About Player Development

Despite all that, providing more professional hockey for California hockey fans is not the priority for these NHL teams—not even close. Rather, their focus is on improving their player development by bringing their top development teams much closer to home.

Murray provided an example of the impact the move will have on California’s NHL teams.

“On a Tuesday morning in November, now, I can do as the guys on the [East Coast] can do,” he said. “I can get out of bed, and instead of watching our team practice, I can drive down the coast, which is kind of nice, go to San Diego, and watch my minor league team practice.”

“There’s no price tag you can put on that,” he added. “That is just so valuable, to your players, and to you. This just exposes them to me, and me to them so much more. It’s a remarkable thing, and again, it’s a dream come true.”

For obvious reasons, things will be a bit different for the two Canadian NHL teams.

“It’s a great day for hockey, and it’s really going to enhance our development,” said Lowe. “As a Canadian team, we’re a little further away. We won’t have the luxury of driving down the coast to see our American league team. But the players are really going to benefit from the proximity of the teams.”

“Presently, we’re in Oklahoma City,” added Lowe. “It’s a wonderful city, and we really enjoyed being there. But our closest opponent was a six-hour bus ride away, and the rest of the teams were, pretty much, a flight away, so this is really going to enhance development for our players.”

Flames general manager Brad Treliving echoed Lowe’s sentiments.

“It’s really remarkable, when we talk about the growth of the sport within this state,” he said. “When you look at [it] from the pure product standpoint, from the general manager’s standpoint, we can’t really highlight as well as we should how important this is from a development standpoint.”

“The biggest thing for us is how can we get a better development model, and I can tell you from having a team on the East Coast—we’re currently in Glens Falls, which is a wonderful community,” he added. “It’s been an excellent market for us. But those cross-country flights, dealing with a different time zone when you play a game on a Friday night, and you need a guy on Saturday, there’s challenges involved with it. There’s a lot of challenges, and I think, for a number of years now, the [Western] teams—the real priority for this is, is there a better way for the teams in the West to develop players?”

To be sure, reduced travel will be huge boon to the development efforts of the Flames and Oilers.

“The big thing in development in hockey is to have practice time,” Lowe noted. “[But] when you’re flying around all the time, across the country, you eliminate practice days. We anticipate, possibly, somewhere between 20 and 25 extra practice days, and in a season that’s approximately 180 days, that’s a big percentage of time for the development of these young players.”

Murray pointed to the San Diego market as an example of how primed some California cities are for an AHL franchise.

“There’s been people asking me, ‘who’s going to play on your team down there?’ My answer is quite simple,” he said. “On our Anaheim Ducks roster, right now, there’s only two players who did not play in the American Hockey League. That’s remarkable.”

“As for San Diego, five years ago, we started a high school league,” he added. “We had two teams. Today, we have 41. Two years ago, one team from our area won the national championship. Hockey is growing in California. Even in bantam and midget [leagues], we’ve had winners coming out of California in the last few years.”

“Hockey is growing in California, and on the West Coast. This is just going to take that one step farther, and ahead.”

Move Will Be Tough On Current Fans

Although the five NHL teams are opening a new frontier, of sorts, in California, they know that they are leaving the fans of their existing AHL franchises behind.

“We’re thrilled to bring the AHL to California, and add to the incredible growth of the game on the West Coast,” said Andrews. “I want to thank, though, our fans, and all of those individuals who have supported the American Hockey League in Adirondack, in Norfolk, in Manchester, in Worcester, and in Oklahoma City.”

“This transition in the pro hockey landscape is important for our sport,” added Andrews. “We’re confident, though, that in the near future, our fans in those cities we are departing, will continue to enjoy a high level of minor professional hockey. We’re very thankful for their long-standing support of our league.”

Treliving acknowledged the fans of the Flames’ existing AHL affiliate.

“As exciting as this, is from a hockey standpoint and a development standpoint, we do understand and recognize that there’s markets today that are losing a team,” said Treliving. “That’s a difficult thing, when people invest, both financially and emotionally, it’s a hard thing, so I do want to thank the fans in Glens Falls who have supported our team over the course of the year, and we hope we can have a strong finish.”

The Kings are in a slightly different position, swapping their AHL and ECHL franchises, who will exchange cities and arenas.

“On behalf of the LA Kings, we want to say thank you to the people in Manchester,” said Robitaille. “You’re not losing a team. You’ll get another team.”

“We’re excited that we’re going to Ontario,” added Robitaille. “It will be a great thing for hockey.”

Kings Reaction

Back at their practice facility in El Segundo, California, left wing Dwight King, who played for both of the Kings’ minor league affiliates, was pleased to hear the news.

“I think it’s great,” he said. “As far as Ontario goes, they have a nice facility. [It’s well-]equipped. The fan base there is great, [and if the building isn’t] full, it’s near full every night. That’s what players want to play in front of.”

“For the players, it’s a lot easier for travel and locations, so that’s nice,” he added. “It’s a little different. [For most players], playing hockey in California is pretty rare. If [someone gets] the opportunity, I don’t think they’re going to be disappointed, no matter what city they’re in.”

Head coach Darryl Sutter noted that talk about such a change started back when he was general manager of the Calgary Flames (April 11, 2003 to December 28, 2010; he was hired as the Flames head coach on December 29, 2002, and served in both positions from April 11, 2003 to July 12, 2006).

“It’s been talked about for a long time,” he said. “When I was in Calgary and Brian Burke was [the general manager] in Vancouver, we were trying to get more teams to be involved, but at that time, we couldn’t get any of these teams in California to be involved. Now, we’ve got all three of the California teams. Hopefully, it works, and it should.”

“Glad that they’re finally putting it in place, formally,” he added. “It’ll be interesting to see how they announce the schedule, format, and all that, because it’s going to have to balance, somehow. There’s going to have to be a playoff set-up that works for the rest of the American league.”

“The next part is—five [teams] is an odd number. You’d like to have an even number of teams.”

Frozen Royalty

by Gann Matsuda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License . You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this site are required. Photographs, graphic images, and other content not specified are subject to additional restrictions. Additional information is available at: Frozen Royalty – Licensing and Copyright Information

Frozen Royalty’s Comment Policies
Youngster completes switch to Premier League side

Leyton Orient’s under-15s player Jay Beckford has completed a transfer to Premier League side Arsenal.The fee was subject to the Elite Player Performance Programme compensation agreement.And while disappointed to lose the youngster to the Gunners, Academy Director Andy Edwards wishes him all the best for the future.“He has been a credit to the club all the time he has been here,” said Edwards. “We are disappointed to lose him. We wish him all the best at Arsenal.“We have got some exceptional players in our academy of which Jay is one.“Arsenal have met the valuation which is linked to the EPPP guidelines and unfortunately we lose him.“The club have received a sum of money which is quite substantial should he go on and become successful there.“We are doing a good job, and as part of that sometimes you are going to lose your better players, but we still think we have got a lot of good players in our system who have got the potential to come through and play in the first team.”
Former England star Paul Scholes is set to play futsal in India

Former Manchester United and England midfielder Paul Scholes has signed a three-year deal to play in India's new futsal league which starts next month.

The inaugural edition of Premier Futsal, an indoor variant of football where players use a smaller and less bouncier ball than in the traditional game, will run from July 15-26.

"Futsal is a fascinating format that has played a pivotal role in developing the skills of some of the greatest football players," said Scholes.

"Premier Futsal will be a great way to introduce the sport to India and I'm looking forward to meeting the fans across India who I know are some of the most passionate in the world."

Deco (l) will also play in the inaugural league

Ex-Chelsea and Barcelona midfielder Deco and host of the world's top futsallers have already signed up to play in the league, with organisers promising that more marquee signings are on the way.

Premier Futsal co-founder, Nithyashree Subban added: "We are extremely proud to announce Paul Scholes as marquee player for Premier Futsal.

"Since our launch, we have maintained that we are committed to bringing the top talent from across the world to India and we are clearly delivering on our promise.

"Through a pioneering model for introducing futsal and a holistic approach to breeding home-grown talent, Premier Futsal aims to be the marquee all-star futsal tournament in the world."

Scholes retired from playing in 2013

Scholes, 41, won 11 Premier League titles, as well as two Champions League trophies, during more than 700 appearances for Manchester United before retiring in 2013.

Futsal is five-a-side and is played on a hard-court surface. Premier Futsal - whose president is ex-Real Madrid and Barcelona midfielder Figo - is the latest franchise-based sporting competition in India, following the Indian Premier League, Indian Super League and Premier Badminton League.
Fans who can't make it to University of Phoenix Stadium for 2014 Arizona Cardinals Training Camp presented by Hyundai can follow the team's practice on Tuesday, July 29 on NFL Network's Inside Training Camp Live.

Former Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner and anchor Amber Theoharis will host NFL Network's coverage from the team's practice from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.

Continuing through August 5, NFL Network's Inside Training Camp Live hits the field at 7:00 a.m., providing nine hours of live coverage each day. As teams report to camp and take the field, NFL Network will provide live look-ins at team practices, interviews with players and coaches, analysis from former players, head coaches and front office executives, and live reports from reporters stationed at various training camp sites.

Each day, NFL Total Access airs at 4:00 p.m., followed by a two-hour Training Camp Primetime at 5:00 p.m. recapping all of the day's action and providing up-to-date information and analysis.
Lena Oxton (call sign: "Tracer") was the youngest person ever inducted into Overwatch's experimental flight program. Known for her fearless piloting skills, she was handpicked to test the prototype of a teleporting fighter, the Slipstream. But during its first flight, the aircraft's teleportation matrix malfunctioned, and it disappeared. Lena was presumed dead. She reappeared months later, but her ordeal had greatly changed her: her molecules had been desynchronized from the flow of time. Suffering from "chronal disassociation," she was a living ghost, disappearing for hours and days at a time. Even for the brief moments she was present, she was unable to maintain physical form.Overwatch's doctors and scientists were stumped, and Tracer's case seemed hopeless until a scientist named Winston designed the chronal accelerator, a device capable of keeping Tracer anchored in the present. In addition, it gave Tracer the ability to control her own time, allowing her to speed it up and slow it down at will. With her newfound skills, she became one of Overwatch's most effective agents.

: Overwatch: Tracer (Lena Oxton)So I keep going with my Overwatch portraits series. The story of Tracer is also full of drama, and I decided to illustrate her as a ghost when she had a "chronal disassociation":

- Overwatch Wiki

Programms used: SFM+ PS5

#21DaysofOverwatch
Editor's note: This article was updated with new figures on procurement.

MOSCOW — Despite the pressure of Western sanctions, the sharp devaluation of the Russian ruble and runaway inflation at home, Russian defense firms featured in this year's Defense News Top 100 ranking saw surging revenues as exports reached new highs and the government poured money into defense procurement.

Russia's largest defense firm, air defense concern Almaz-Antey, saw revenues rise 10 percent to $9.2 billion, up $883.5 million over 2013. The Tactical Missile Corp., maker of air-to-air systems, saw the most drastic increase with a 48.6 percent rise in revenue to $2.8 billion in 2014.

Other Russian firms that made the ranking were the United Aircraft Corp., which owns Sukhoi, MiG and Irkut, and saw revenues rise 7 percent to $6.2 billion; Russian Helicopters, which finished at $3.96 billion, up 16 percent over 2013; and the United Engine-building Company, which saw a 25 percent increase over 2013 revenues to $3.3 billion in 2014.

Other firms that made the ​ list were tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod, which reported defense revenues of $1.54 billion in 2014 — a 1 percent rise — and electronics component manufacturer RTI, rising 15 percent to $947 million.

Russia's shipbuilding conglomerate, the United Shipbuilding Corp., declined to participate in the ranking.

The impressive rise in revenues for Russian defense manufacturers, despite the pressure of Russia's economic crisis and Western sanctions, was likely due to record-setting export revenues and government procurement expenditures as President Vladimir Putin's decade-long $350 billion military rearmament drive kicked into high gear.

Export and Procurement Surge

Russian firms exported a record $13.2 billion worth of military hardware abroad in 2014, continuing a nearly 10-year ​year-on-year rise in export revenues for Russia's defense industry.

Exports were largely unharmed by sanctions, as Russia's major trading partners are non-Western nations with close political ties to Moscow, such as China, India, Algeria and Venezuela.

At the same time, Russian procurement hit a new high, with about 2 trillion rubles (US $33.2 billion) spent on new equipment in 2014, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in April. This was a large increase over the 2013 state defense order, which Medvedev said was valued at around 1.5 trillion rubles.

Devaluation and Inflation

Although Russian firms saw soaring revenues, Western sanctions did have an impact on the industry, though their effects are not readily apparent from the revenue data.

Sanctions combined with a sharp drop in the global price of oil, Russia's main export commodity, ​ to send the value of the ruble plummeting by 40 percent and inflation soaring in 2014.

This is a bigger problem for the Russian Defense Ministry than it is for the defense industry, since equipment is now more expensive to produce and Putin's rearmament can afford almost half of what it was intended to two years ago, said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defense industry think tank and analytics firm.

The impact of sanctions on the defense industry will take longer to manifest itself since sanctions were ​limited mostly to a loss of access to Western credit markets and advanced component imports.

"The industry was taking money from Russian banks and loans were guaranteed by the state, but the banks were taking cheap money from the West and selling them to Russian defense industry enterprises, and now the majority of these channels are cut," Pukhov said.

Russia has launched an import substitution drive to spur the creation of domestic alternatives to foreign procured components, but the process is expected to take two to three years.

The government is working to secure advances for defense enterprises working on import substitution to finance the research and development ​ and the investments needed to launch domestic production lines of components ranging from optics to ship diesel turbines, but not everything can be substituted.

Pukhov pointed to production equipment and machine-building tools as one area that Russia will struggle to replace, since much of the know-how was lost in the wake of the Soviet collapse in the 1990s.

The problems will take longer to manifest themselves, but they have had immediate impacts in the field of shipbuilding, pointed out Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian military expert at the Virginia-based CNA think tank.

"The impact of sanctions on shipbuilding has been quite significant, because the gas turbines for a number of frigate classes were being manufactured in Ukraine," which imposed an arms export embargo on Russia shortly after Moscow annexed Crimea, Gorenburg said.

The loss of Ukrainian-made turbines has forced a production halt on the construction of around eight ships of the Admiral Gorshkov- and Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates.

But as Gorenburg notes, the EU arms embargo also deprived Russia of German-made engines being used to construct the new Gremyashchy-class corvettes. Only two of the ships have been built and the eight remaining ships ordered for the class have been canceled.

"In general, a lot of the problems caused by sanctions are disruptions to the supply chains," Gorenburg said. "Even if they can find new sources, they still have to set those up and they probably won't be identical to those found in Western Europe."

Email: mbodner@defensenews.com
Two guys walk into a bar. They order beers. Bartender says they don’t have any beer. The men look confused. A stranger in a stylish hat suggests they try something different. They order a clear malt beverage. It’s on ice, clear, delicious. The men are happy.

The entire ad spot lasts 30 seconds, or roughly the same amount of time Zima could claim to be among the most popular adult beverages in the country.

In 1991, with beer sales on the decline across the industry, the Coors company of Golden, Colorado decided to blend two of the hottest trends in consumer marketing: “clear” products like Crystal Pepsi and the smooth, gently-intoxicating appeal of wine coolers. By using charcoal to filter the color and taste from their brews, they were able to deliver a vaguely citrus-tasting drink with 4.7 percent alcohol content. The company asked third-party marketing firm Lexicon Branding to give it a name; Jane Espenson, who would later become a staff writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Game of Thrones, dubbed it Zima, the Russian word for "winter."

Armed with a $180 million budget for the 1994 launch, Coors peppered television with commercials featuring a spokesman who exchanged his s's for z's. (“What’s your zign?”) They also pushed a slew of merchandising and even an early consumer-use product website.

The goal was to get Zima on the minds and into the hands of young males. Owing to the blanket advertising assault, that's exactly what they accomplished. Zima sold a staggering 1.3 million barrels’ worth of product in 1994, giving it a near-instant 1 percent market share in the booze industry. It was estimated that 70 percent of all drinkers tried the “malternative."

As Coors would soon learn, those numbers only work in your favor if people like the product. The company was disappointed to learn that many of them didn’t: Men found the taste off-putting. And those who enjoyed it were precisely the demographic they were looking to avoid.

Women who normally passed over beer embraced Zima, giving it an effete quality that marketing considered to be grim death for the valued male customer base. If a man couldn’t feel manly taking a pull of the clear stuff, he'd be likely to reach for something else.

On the public relations side, Coors was also having to defend itself against charges that teenagers were growing fond of Zima because its smell was harder to detect than regular beer (it had almost no odor) and was easier to consume out in the open. A rumor surfaced that Zima wouldn’t set off a breathalyzer, which Coors was forced to debunk in letters addressed to police chiefs and school officials.

Unfortunately, being in the beer business and having to write letters to superintendents means that something has already gone very wrong. By 1995, Zima's sales dropped by half; in 1996, they dropped nearly in half again. David Letterman began mocking it on his talk show. Coors tried to entice the hip crowd, launching Zima Gold, which had a more liquor-like taste, but they weren’t fooled. Zima XXX and its higher-volume alcohol content (5.9 percent) followed, all to diminishing returns.

Nothing could recapture that early intrigue: Citing poor sales, Coors, which eventually merged with Miller to become MillerCoors, discontinued Zima in 2008—but that wasn't quite the end.

In 2014, The Japan Times reported that Zima was a popular order in Tokyo bars. The drink’s advertising campaign was focused on appearing cool to young Japanese men, who apparently order it without fear of coming off like a party lightweight. And in summer 2017, MillerCoors banked on nostalgia to fuel a Zima comeback: The brewer has resurrected the suds-free beverage for a limited time through Labor Day.
The world’s first monkeys with genes modified through a DNA engineering method known as Crispr/Cas9 were born in a lab. The scientific breakthrough by Chinese researchers could become a cornerstone for research and prevention of human genetic disorders.

Researchers at Nanjing Medical University and Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in Kunming in China have created two genetically modified macaques with targeted mutations using the CRISPR/Cas9 system.

“Our study shows that the CRISPR/Cas9 system enables simultaneous disruption of two target genes in one step without producing off-target mutations,” study author Jiahao Sha told the Science Daily. “Considering that many human diseases are caused by genetic abnormalities, targeted genetic modification in monkeys is invaluable for the generation of human disease models.”

The researchers introduced single-cell macaque embryos with modified Ribonucleic acids (RNAs) to generate the genome-editing process. RNA is a ubiquitous family of large biological molecules that perform multiple vital roles in the coding, decoding, regulation, and expression of genes. Using the Crispr method, Chinese scientists were targeting three genes in the experiment – one that regulates metabolism, another that regulates immune cell development and a third that regulates stem cells and sex determination.

The birth of the genetically modified monkeys was not an easy process. Scientists had to target the genes in 180 single-cell monkey embryos. Eighty three of those 180 embryos were injected into female macaques, yielded only 10 pregnancies.

Only one pregnancy so far led to the birth of a pair with simultaneous mutations in two genes.

According to coauthor of the study Wezhi Ji, researchers discovered multiple changes in their target genes at different stages of embryonic development. But the newborn macaques are still too young for researchers to determine if their experiment had an effect on physiology or behavior, though “data from this species should be very useful for curing human disease and improving human health,” says Ji.

Monkeys are a natural choice to study human disorders because of their close similarities to Homo Sapiens, although past scientific endeavors of precision gene modification in primates have failed.

Inserting, deleting, and modifying DNA in human cells and other animal cells has been performed in labs within the confines of petri dishes. The method of gene modifications was also applied to various rodents and zebrafish, however with the birth of two monkeys the study published in Cell magazine, shows that Crispr can produce practical primates with genomes customized at specific targeted genes.

Some researchers have already welcomed the breakthrough, saying that this method can eventually help recreate in monkeys such diseases as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which can’t be studied in other animals like mice.

"If we can identify genes for neurological disorders in a clinical setting and transpose those into a monkey it would be of massive benefit. I don't know that it'll lead to a rise in the use of monkeys, but it will lead to more focused studies," said Tipu Aziz, who used primates for his work on Parkinson's disease at Oxford University, the Guardian reports.

"People have been looking for primate models for a whole list of diseases, but in the past it's been either completely unfeasible, or incredibly expensive," Nelson Freimer, director of the centre for neurobehavioral genetics at the University of California, told The Guardian. “It's going to be really critical to define the problems for which this is used, just as you always do with animal research. You want to use all the alternatives before you propose animal research. This will be reserved for terrible diseases for which it offers hope that cannot be gotten any other way.”
One of the strangest sentences in American law comes from Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. “Under the First Amendment,” he wrote, in 1974, “there is no such thing as a false idea.” That is not a decree that the world brims with truth. He meant that we rely on the marketplace of ideas, rather than on judges and juries, to sort out truth from falsehood—and to continually check our understanding of the truth. The Justice was restating the central tenet embraced in New York Times v. Sullivan, in 1964, the Supreme Court’s most important decision about freedom of speech and of the press. The Court extended the scope of the First Amendment to libel law and held that, even if a citizen stated or a newspaper published criticism about a public official that was incorrect, that mistake could be punished as libel only if the critic knew or suspected that the criticism was false. In 1967, the Court applied this rule to public figures as well.

The premise of the marketplace applies broadly, not just to libel law. The First Amendment protects a lot of harmful speech, including much that is incendiary, offensive, and untrue. That protection covers President Trump, even if he does not believe the torrent of falsehoods he has uttered. Experts on crowd size estimate that his Inauguration attracted a crowd of about a hundred and fifty thousand, but Trump is free to say that there were as many as a million and a half people there. Public officials who oversaw the 2016 election reported that there were scant numbers of votes cast illegally—virtually none compared to the more than 137.7 million ballots cast in total—but Trump can claim that, had it not been for massive voter fraud, he would have won the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won by 2.9 million votes, or 2.1 per cent of the total.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced this concept into American law almost a century ago, writing that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” That includes Trump’s views that journalists are “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” and “the enemy of the American people,” and that the federal appeals-court ruling that struck down his first travel ban, a month ago, jeopardized the security of the country.

A wide body of scholarship has poked holes in Holmes’s idea. Fifty years ago, Jerome A. Barron, of George Washington University Law School, instructed that the marketplace fails because it assumes incorrectly that all citizens have access to it, that truth is always among the ideas in the marketplace, and that citizens are rational and will see the truth, rather than being irrational or simply subjective.

Frederick Schauer, of the University of Virginia, summarized the case against the marketplace concept: “placing faith in the superiority of truth” to persuade—over the authority of a speaker, the frequency with which he makes an assertion, the consistency between the assertion and what a listener believes, and other factors, such as whether an assertion is illustrated or not—requires “an almost willful disregard of the masses of scientific and marketing research to the contrary.” (Elizabeth Kolbert wrote last month about new cognitive research that shows the limits of reason.) Schauer wrote that the belief that “a good remedy for false speech is more speech, or that truth will prevail in the long run, may itself be an example of the resistance of false factual propositions to argument and counterexample.”

These days, the most obvious problem with the notion of a marketplace of ideas is balkanization: instead of there being an overarching marketplace where truth can vanquish falsehood, there are at least two very separate markets—“filter bubbles,” as Amanda Hess described them in the Times—for Trump supporters and opponents, resulting from “the tendency of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to lock users into personalized feedback loops, each with its own news sources, cultural touchstones and political inclinations.”

There is also the problem that some bubbles are more counterfactual than others. This was clear from the proliferation of bogus news in support of the Trump campaign, like what came out of the Macedonian town of Veles, with its “100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news,” during the Presidential election, as Wired reported. That counterfeit content “energized Trump’s partisans,” the scholars Michael C. Dorf and Sidney Tarrow wrote recently, “and may have been decisive in securing Trump’s victory.”
Visitors to the shrine chant a prayer to the saint. Before heading back to their homes, many will give alms to the beggars who sit on the tomb’s marble steps. Mariya Karimjee

In Manghopir, the shrine’s caretakers worry about the consequences for their fledgling microeconomy. Vendors struggle to sell flowers outside the shrines, the mosaic tile work at the shrine falls into disrepair as donations shrink, and the beggars who once lived off visitors’ alms have dispersed. The shrine’s caretakers are concerned that eventually there may be no crocodiles left. Currently, they say, there are an estimated 200 crocodiles at the shrine, though the actual number appears to be smaller.

“Every so often we’ll sacrifice a goat and cut it up and feed it to the crocodiles, but these animals live off the donations of shrine visitors,” says Mahmood, who has watched over the reptiles since he was a young boy.

Each year since 2010, citing imminent threats by Islamic fundamentalists, the Sindh government has canceled the Sheedi Mela, an annual festival that long honored the culture of those responsible for caring for the shrine — all descendants of African slaves brought to Pakistan by Omani traders. Proceeds from the festival could often feed the crocodiles for months.

Muhammad Saleem Shaikh, the public-relations manager for the province’s charitable-giving department, which oversees shrines, mosques and historic religious venues, says he saw no choice but to cancel the festival again this year. Manghopir has become one of Karachi’s no-go zones, where violence and crime are so rampant that security forces refuse to enter. These pockets of lawlessness within Pakistan’s largest city have become safe havens for the Taliban, say analysts. In early November, five tortured bodies were found in the area; police have no leads or pending investigations into the crime. Says Shaikh, “Elsewhere in Karachi, homeless men seeking refuge in various shrines are found beheaded simply for practicing their religion.”

In January, at another shrine in the city, police found a scroll of paper inside the mouth of a man who had been beheaded. The note, signed by the Pakistani Taliban, said that worshipping Sufi saints was blasphemy and forbidden by Islam.

Baba Mohammad, an elder patron of Manghopir’s shrine, says he believes the Taliban consider the local Sufi community a threat. The Sufi culture that thrives in Sindh is one reason the Taliban haven’t made bigger inroads in the province, he says.

But more and more people are drawn to the Taliban’s brand of Islam. Mohammad’s grandson, Mohammad Bilal, began taking classes three years ago at a local madrassa. According to Baba Mohammad, his grandson was alarmed to learn how fundamentally opposed Sufism was to the Wahhabi Islam he was learning at the madrassa. He’s now stopped going to the shrine where he grew up, but his grandfather and uncles still visit almost every single day.

Iqbal says she saved for months to make the journey. She points to the face of her only son, partially paralyzed after an insect bite. She doesn’t have any money for doctors, she says; working as a maid in a middle-class neighborhood, she earns the equivalent of $50 a month. Even if she did have enough money, Iqbal says, she doesn’t believe that medical care could help her son. Instead, she came to pray to God, to feed the crocodiles and to wash her son in the hot springs, hoping for a miracle.

“My husband said, ‘Don’t go. The Taliban will kill you,’” she says. “But I had to try.”
DETROIT (WWJ/AP) – The U.S. government issued an urgent plea to nearly 8 million people to get the air bags in their cars fixed, amid concern that a defect in the devices can possibly kill or injure the driver or passengers.

The inflator mechanisms in the air bags can rupture, causing metal fragments to fly out when the bags are deployed in crashes. Safety advocates say at least four people have died from the problem and there have been multiple injuries.

Multiple automakers have recalled vehicles in the U.S. over the past two years to repair air bag inflators made by Takata Corp., a Tokyo-based supplier of seat belts, air bags, steering wheels and other auto parts.

The warning covers 7.8 million cars made by BMW, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota. Passenger or driver air bags or both could have the faulty inflators.

In a statement Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration warned owners of those cars to act right away. The agency has been investigating the problem since June, and has cited reports of six inflators rupturing, causing three injuries.

Consumers who are uncertain whether their vehicle is impacted by the Takata recalls can contact their manufacturer with their vehicle identification number (VIN) to confirm whether their individual vehicle has an open recall that needs to be addressed.

Worldwide, automakers have recalled about 12 million vehicles because of the problem. Safety advocates say the problem could affect more than 20 million vehicles in the U.S.

Automakers have been recalling the cars to fix the problem for several years, but neither Takata nor NHTSA have identified a firm cause. The agency opened a formal investigation into the problem in June, and agency documents detail a theory that the chemical used to inflate the air bags can be altered by high humidity, making it explode with too much force while deploying.

NHTSA Deputy Administrator David Friedman said in a statement that responding to the recalls is essential to keep people safe.

“It will aid in our ongoing investigation into Takata air bags and what appears to be a problem related to extended exposure to consistently high humidity and temperatures,” he said. The agency, he said, is tracking down the “full geographic scope” of the issue.

The rare warning by regulators comes three weeks after a Sept. 29 crash near Orlando, Florida, that claimed the life of a 46-year-old woman. In that crash, Hien Thi Tran suffered severe neck wounds that could have been caused by metal fragments flying out of the air bag on her 2001 Honda Accord. Her Accord was among the models being recalled.

One police agency concluded that the air bags caused her wounds, while another is still investigating. NHTSA is seeking information in the case.

Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, estimated there are 20 million to 25 million cars in the U.S. alone that are equipped with the faulty air bags.

In the Florida case, Tran turned left in front of another vehicle and the front ends collided. Her air bag inflated. The original report on the death said the seat belt could not have cut the right side of her neck. Also, there was no broken glass and no other apparent cause of the neck wounds.

Initially the case was turned over to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, whose homicide investigators determined that the air bag caused Tran’s neck injuries, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Because the death appears to be traffic-related, the matter was sent back to the Florida Highway Patrol, which has not finished its investigation.

The Highway Patrol will call in an air bag expert to help make the determination, said Sgt. Kim Montes. The car’s steering wheel and spokes were not damaged and appeared to be a normal air bag deployment, she said. Investigators also will look for evidence of metal fragments in the car and try to determine what caused Tran’s neck wounds, Montes said.

TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
No self-respecting oligarch these days can afford to be without a superyacht. Ownership of a bling boat is as obligatory as the Ferrari in the triple garage and the private jet on standby.

However, within months any billionaire wanting to sail their marine home into US waters will have to comply with stringent new environmental regulations to curb their hulking vessel’s polluting effects. The regulations, which stipulate that certain types of vessel built after 2016 have to be fitted with bulky equipment that converts nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water, were presented to the International Maritime Organisation, the UN body responsible for reducing shipping pollution, but were resisted by trade bodies representing superyacht manufacturers. They protested that the proposed rules threatened their industry because the engine rooms of some superyachts were too small to accommodate the new equipment, meaning they would have to lose a guest cabin to make room for the technology.

A vociferous lobbying campaign was mounted, with some boat builders suggesting that the regulations represented a “doomsday” scenario for their industry. Russia, too, weighed in against the proposals. Amid the standoff, the US has opted to impose its own unilateral obligations, which come into force from 1 January in North America and the US Caribbean, and will force all newly built boats over 24m long and with a gross tonnage of 500 tonnes or more to cut their sulphur and nitrogen oxide emissions by nearly 80%. Experts predict that the regulations, which will apply to all vessels over 24m by 2021, would soon be rolled out to other maritime areas, including the Mediterranean.

Although the new US rules apply to all types of boat built from next year, it is their impact on superyachts that will be most noticeable. Environmental campaigners have expressed anger that, even when the cheapest of cars are equipped with anti-pollutant filters, superyachts have historically had to meet few environmental obligations to reduce their sizeable diesel emissions.

It reportedly costs more than £250,000 just to fill the fuel tanks of the Vava II, which is almost 100 metres long and was commissioned for a former Miss UK, Kirsty Bertarelli, by her billionaire husband Ernesto. The vessel is dwarfed by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich’s 160m Eclipse, which can accommodate 36 guests in 18 cabins. U2 singer Bono owns the more modestly sized Kingdom Come which is 60m long and can hold up to 115,000 litres of fuel.

With the super-rich competing to build ever larger vessels, curbing diesel emissions is becoming a priority for engine builders who believe that incorporating anti-pollution systems into their next-generation designs represents a new marketing opportunity.

“These yachts can go up to 200 metres and everything is getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Ivo Van Den Berg, business manager at Zenoro, a company that specialises in fitting power systems to superyachts. “These boats need more than shore power can provide when they are moored up. You go to Monaco and you see lot of yachts running on generators all the time. When there is no wind, the emissions are like smog in the city.” Dan Houston, editor at classicsailor.com, said the shipping world was a major polluter that had been slow to clean up its act. “Around 95% of all that we use comes in by ships,” Houston said. “I live in Hove, and you can see the diesel fumes out at sea on certain days. The ships are trucking up and down through the straits of Dover, and when you can’t see the yellow smudge out to sea, that’s when you’re in it.”

Some studies suggest that the health risks of shipping pollution are worse than those caused by traffic pollution. It is claimed that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50 million cars. A German report estimates that 60,000 deaths each year are caused by shipping pollution.

But, despite these concerns, the shipping world has not yet been subject to the same level of scrutiny as other polluting industries.
Last updated on: July 12, 2013 13:08 IST

The Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment regarding leaders with a criminal background and said that they stand to be disqualified on date of conviction. The number of members of Parliament with a criminal background is 162, which means 30 per cent of those who govern the nation in the Lok Sabha have pending criminal cases.

The person with the highest number of criminal cases (46) against him is Kameshwar Baitha, a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader from Jharkhand.

Here is a look at the top five MP’s with criminal cases:

Kameshwar Baitha: He won the 2009 elections from the Palamau constituency in Jharkhand. Aged 56, he has 46 pending criminal cases against him. He is worth Rs 5,70,000 as per his assets declaration.

He has not been convicted as yet in any of the cases. The list of the cases pending against him are mentioned below:

22 charges related to attempt to murder

17 charges related to murder

6 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means, 5 charges related to theft

4 charges related to voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means

3 charges related to voluntarily causing grievous hurt

2 charges related to dishonestly receiving stolen property

2 charges related to extortion

2 charges related to theft in dwelling house

2 charges related to kidnapping or abducting in order to murder

1 charge related to assisting in concealment of stolen property

1 charge related to assaulting President, governor, etc., with intent to compel or restrain the exercise of any lawful power

1 charge related to dacoity

1 charge related to culpable homicide not amounting to murder

20 charges related to rioting

20 charges related to rioting, armed with deadly weapon

17 charges related to every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object

15 charges related to assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty

13 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt

11 charges related to punishment of criminal conspiracy

10 charges related to wrongful restraint

8 charges related to mischief causing damage to the amount of Rs 50

7 charges related to mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to destroy house

5 charges related to wrongful confinement

4 charges related to mischief by destroying or moving, etc, a landmark fixed by public authority mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to cause damage to amount of one hundred or (in case of agricultural produce) ten rupee

3 charges related to intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace

3 charges related to acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention

3 charges related to putting person in fear of accusation of offence, in order to commit extortion

2 charges related to abettor present when offence is committed

2 charges related to abetment of a thing

2 charges related to causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender

2 charges related to criminal intimidation

2 charges related to house-trespass after preparation for hurt, assault or wrongful restraint

The rest of his charges range from harbouring robbers, extortion, trespass, unnatural offence and death caused by act done with intent to cause miscarriage.

Ahir Hansaraj Gangaram -- winner from the Chandrapur constituency in Maharashtra. This Bharatiya Janjhata Party MP is worth Rs 80 lakh and has 30 pending criminal charges against of which he not been convicted as yet in any of them.

1 charge related to assaulting or obstructing public servant when suppressing riot, etc.

1 charge related to criminal intimidation

1 charge related to voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty

1 charge related to mischief causing damage to the amount of fifty rupees

1 charge related to wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot-if rioting be committed-if not committed

1 charge related to wrongful restraint

1 charge related to mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to destroy house, etc

1 charge related to rioting

1 charge related to every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object

1 charge related to harbouring deserter

1 charge related to knowingly joining or continuing in assembly of five or more persons after it has been commanded to disperse

His other offences are pending under sections 135,294,337,427,131,143,188,341,186 of the Indian Penal Code.

Vitthalbhai Hansrajbhai Radadiya -- The 'gun-toting' ex-Congressman is a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Legislative Assembly from Gujarat has 20 pending criminal cases against him. He is worth Rs 2 crore. His offences are:

2 charges related to dacoity

1 charge related to voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons

1 charge related to culpable homicide not amounting to murder

9 charges related to Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace

6 charges related to disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant

5 charges related to obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions

4 charges related to being member of an unlawful assembly

3 charges related to rioting

3 charges related to abettor present when offence is committed

3 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty

2 charges related to robbery, or dacoity, with attempt to cause death or grievous hurt

2 charges related to every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object (IPC Section-149)

2 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt

The other charges against him include threat of injury to public servant, voluntarily causing hurt in committing robbery, wrongful restraint, defamation, abetment of desertion of soldier among others.

M B Rajesh -- This Communist Party of India-Marxist candidate won the elections from Palakkad in Kerala. He has 16 pending criminal cases against him and is worth Rs 11 lakh. He has not been convicted as yet in any of the cases: His list of criminal cases is:

2 charges related to attempt to murder

16 charges related to rioting

10 charges related to being member of an unlawful assembly

10 charges related to every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object

8 charges related to danger or obstruction in public way or line of navigation

6 charges related to Assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty

4 charges related to rioting, armed with deadly weapon

4 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty

4 charges related to joining unlawful assembly armed with deadly weapon

2 charges related to obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions

2 charges related to joining or continuing in unlawful assembly, knowing it has been commanded to disperse

2 charges related to assaulting or obstructing public servant when suppressing riot, etc.

2 charges related to voluntarily causing grievous hurt to deter public servant from his duty

2 charges related to non-attendance in obedience to an order form public servant

His other charges include criminal conspiracy among others.

Bhonsle Srimant Pratapsinh -- He is the Nationalist Congress Party candidate who won from Satara in Maharashtra. Worth Rs 8 crore, he has 14 pending criminal cases against him.

1 charge related to murder

1 charge related to kidnapping

7 charges related to criminal intimidation

6 charges related to being member of an unlawful assembly

6 charges related to rioting

5 charges related to intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace

4 charges related to voluntarily causing hurt

His other charges include, mischief, trespass, wrongful restraint, rioting and criminal force among others.
This man is serious about these Tiffanys!

Are you a professional sneaker camper? If so, then this job is perfect for you! You may proceed to apply for this job, as long as you meet this guy's requirements:

Experienced camper ie: One who has previously camped out for electronics, sneakers, ect. I will provide 1 Tent

1 Lawn Chair

1 Book of Choice

1 24 pack of Deer Park 16.7 oz waters. **Please note, you probably will miss out on the super bowl this Sunday.

And if for any reason you lose your spot in line, this terminates your duty as a camper.

Please bring toiletry, and warm clothing.

Yes folks, this is a real craigslist ad. It is not uncommon to see girlfriends, bestfriends, and relatives camping for someone during a sneaker release, but we have seen it all now. This person who posted this ad is located in Merrifield, Virgina. Cant knock a man's hustle, clearly he is thirsty for a pair of the Nike Dunk High SB Tiffany. Here is the Craigslist Ad if you're curious.

Compensation on the bottom of the ad reads, "Pay will be $2.08 an hour which equals $50 per day. If you begin today you will."

Would you take him up on the offer? Comment below.
How Rise of the Tomb Raider is forging a gaming icon.

Camilla Luddington is frowning seven different ways. She's an experienced actor, so each frown carries its own nuance and meaning: defiance, confusion, vulnerability, fear.

She's filming in a Los Angeles facial capture studio for her role as Lara Croft in the forthcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider. Since the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, Luddington has provided the basis for the face and voice of one of video gaming's most recognizable characters. A few days later, some 350 miles north of L.A. in the offices of Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics, Senior Technical Artist Jon Robins leans into his monitor and carefully studies the Luddington footage. "Making a human being is the most challenging thing when creating video games." He notes how light bounces off the ridges on Luddington's forehead, how her eyes move in a slightly different fashion for each frown, how the lines around her eyes transfer to the particulars of her smile, the angle of her cheekbones, the jut of her chin. He imports the images into facial engine models of Lara Croft. The mesh of her face represents thousand of data points. Robins manipulates blend shapes in order to tweak Lara Croft's expressions, each designed for a specific moment in the game — for a flash of peril, a quizzical exchange of dialog or an internal moment of self-reflection. He is tasked with making Lara Croft look as human as possible. She must seem like a real person while also being an action hero. She must convey both power and vulnerability. She must be visually and emotionally appealing to the player. She must seem like the same Lara Croft we have known for two decades. As Croft shows a variety of on-screen emotions, Robins sits back in his office chair and gazes at her face. He frowns. Something isn't right. It takes a moment for him to articulate the problem. There's a woman on his screen but she isn't Lara Croft. He's looking at an actor. He's looking at Camilla Luddington. Lara Croft is gone.

Remaking Lara Croft video

New horizons Rise of the Tomb Raider is the first Lara Croft game made specifically for the current console generation. It’s a timed exclusive for Xbox One (and Xbox 360), due out on Nov. 10. Rise of the Tomb Raider picks up after the events of the 2013 reboot, during which young and inexperienced archaeology graduate Lara Croft struggles to survive on a lost island infested with enemies, secrets and mysteries. In the new game Croft arrives in wintry Siberia, once again up against determined, well-armed enemies in hostile terrain, all searching for valuable artifacts. Now she is more self-confident, more assured and more certain of her place in the world. Crystal Dynamics and publisher Microsoft make much of the value of their iconic character, stressing her physical realism in promotional materials. Everyone knows Lara Croft. She is the game’s most marketable asset. "We all see people every day. We can pick up when something is wrong very quickly." Lara Croft was the first major female video game protagonist. She remains one of the most recognizable game characters in the world: a smart, ambitious, athletic, attractive young Englishwoman. Movement has always been a key component of her character, all the way back to her swishing braid in Core Design’s 1996 original. In the intervening years, she has evolved to ever-more detailed polygonal representations and fluidity of movement, up to today’s motion-captured avatar. So making her look great is taking up a lot of Crystal Dynamics’ attention. "Making a human being is the most challenging thing when creating video games," says Senior Character Artist Kam Yu. "Technological advances help us get there but it needs a lot of skills. "To make a believable character you need a good concept, the right model, shaders, animation, performance. It’s a complete package." The trouble with fake human beings is real human beings. We are very good at spotting the slightest fakery, the merest hint of offness. "We all see people every day," says Yu. "We can pick up when something is wrong very quickly. When you’re putting together a well-known character like Lara, you have to be aware of every aspect that goes into making her."

The importance of anatomy Cutscenes and action sequences in carefully choreographed Rise of Tomb Raider demos show that Croft’s creators aspire to intense physical details. Extreme cold weather pricks Croft’s skin with red patches. Her eyes reflect light convincingly. Her hair moves more like a collection of strands than a set of shapes. Unlike many inferior game characters, her teeth don’t shine luminescent. When she climbs, the muscles on her back seem connected to one another. Her clothes crease and line according to the shape of her body. This isn’t mere PR puffery. Lara Croft looks like a genuinely impressive video game avatar. It has clearly taken a great deal of work to get her to this point. "Her clothes crease and line according to the shape of her body." Studio scans are the starting point for Crystal Dynamics’ artists. Then they use their artistic skills and a facial technology called Morphology to tweak and twist. "We take elements of the scans and then we add to them," explains Yu. "When we want a particular shape, we add pose-based deformers. We can sculpt the exact shape we want all over the body: on the knees, shoulders, elbows, the waist. "In addition to those pose-based deformers, we add wrinkle maps as well. When she bends a joint, we actually see the wrinkles in her shirt change. Or if she bends her arm you’ll see the musculature in her shoulders deform." Yu’s background is in anatomical art and medical illustrations. Anatomical models and images can be seen around the desks of the art department in Crystal Dynamics’ offices. "We could never get this level of anatomical correctness in the character before," says Game Director Brian Horton, referring to the consoles and the development technology now available. "The systems just wouldn’t allow for it. Now we have so much more artist control. "From a technology standpoint, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into the formation of Lara’s character. Not only her face, but her body. We’ve created a whole new animation system that’s based on artist-sculpted shapes, to create a more believable musculature for the face and the body."

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s hair behaves more realistically, with 123 "parent" strands of hair controlling 30,000 "child" strands to give the artists more control.

Fixing Camilla The technology used to create humans in games is changing fast. Sometimes, the artists are trying to catch up with the tech and sometimes they find themselves pushing too far. "[At one point] Lara started to look too much like Camilla," says Chief Technology Officer Gary Snethen. "Things were almost too real. We had to bring her back, to make her a video game character again and give her that iconic look. She started taking on too many human qualities. It kind of took away from her character." "Our first tests of this yielded great results and brought a lot more to some of the scenes than we thought they would." When Robins understood that Lara Croft was turning into Camilla Luddington, he and the team-leaders got to work unmaking the current build and restructuring her. It was, he understood, an issue that had been created by technology and would need to be solved the same way. "Moving onto a new console and having new blend shape tech, we wanted to rebuild our facial system from the ground up," he explains. "We looked at as much reference as possible from Camilla and general female facial features in scans and video. We wanted to make Lara as believable as possible and a solid way of doing that is bringing more of our actor to our model so that we could fully convey the emotion Camilla brings. "Our first tests of this yielded great results and brought a lot more to some of the scenes than we thought they would." But the art team thought she looked "too real," meaning that she looked like Luddington. This was the point at which they decided to bring back Croft. Croft is now being made for vastly more powerful consoles than in the past. Her parameters have changed. "We started doing paint overs on the current poses and animations," Robins explains. "This was a long process as we'd not really seen Lara at this fidelity yet and had to create a canon to work within. After iterating and testing each set of shapes on new base meshes we were able to give Lara her own identity and individual movement while preserving the great performances provided by Camilla."

The eyes have it For artists, there is no more troublesome part of the human anatomy than the eye. Video games have long suffered from uncanny valley representations of weird-looking people, eyeballs swiveling like marbles in a milky shot glass. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft is often placed in moments of peril generating scenes during which she needs to look scared, troubled, determined. All good screen actors understand that the trick is in the eyes. Recreating this artistic magic in digital, technological form is extremely tough. "The eye is a very complex system," says Snethen. "They have refraction and all sorts of internal curvature. You have to get the look of the eye right, the wetness and the micro-details within the eye. The surrounding tissue has to move just so, as the expressions enter the character." Croft’s eyes in Rise of the Tomb Raider demos aren’t perfect — there are moments when they seem too intense and slightly off — but they are better than those in most other games. "We create this illusion of the way the light bends and refracts and changes the color of the eye through the shader." "There’s only one mesh for the eyes," says Yu. "The way it shades, it makes it look like there’s a cornea over her iris. There’s parallaxing. Her eyes look a little bit different depending on where you look at them from." "When you look at the color of the eye, it bends as you move around it," says Horton. "Even though the mesh is just a simple sphere, we create this illusion of the way the light bends and refracts and changes the color of the eye through the shader. "The contact point, where the eye meets the bottom of the lid, is the tear line. There’s that extra wetness you get, the layer of tears that keeps the eye moist. Those small details are very important." "We have specific cinematic eye shaders that we use as well, so we can control the specularity, the direction of the light, the substance of the eyes," says Yu. A lot of focus has gone into the connectivity of the body and face, the interplay of how one thing connects with another. "We really focused on the connection from the eyes and brows down to the jaw and mouth," says Robins. "In previous rigs and blend shapes systems we focused too much on isolated movements and not about how each muscle is connected across the face and how some can't move without others."

Snow days Notable is Rise of the Tomb Raider's snow, which builds in drifts and can be an impediment for the player. It build up on Croft’s clothes and shoulders. It can also be used to track prey, or to hide from enemies. "If you’re going to put snow in a game, you want to do something new with it," says Snethen. "The way it renders is very unique, because you get the glistening and the glittering. All the little micro-facets catch the light at different times. You actually see the contact between the player and the snow. It leaves a persistent trail where you pass and then you’ll see the trails behind Lara gradually fill back in as the snow falls from the sky. It gives the impression that you’re in a blizzard environment."

To be young Lara Croft presents a particular problem for Crystal Dynamics, one that many other highly detailed game protagonists don’t face: she’s young. Most game leads are men and they are usually past the first flush of youth. They are often grizzled and wartorn. Their faces are naturally lined. "When we have a grizzled man with a craggy face, deep scars and heavy wrinkles, it’s very easy to express pained emotions. It looks just fine," says Horton. "A younger woman’s features are softer in general. When you put those harsher emotions on her, it tends to make her look different or strange. What we’re always balancing is making sure the emotional intent from Camilla is coming through, but [making sure that] it doesn’t cross a line where [Croft] looks like she’s aged 15 years or she doesn’t look like herself anymore. "There’s an acceptable amount of grizzle and grit you can put on a man in his 40s." "That, I’d say, is the greatest challenge of creating a female protagonist with this range. Their faces are inherently softer. They don’t have the cuts and details you’d see in a man. But we’re still asked to make sure all those emotions come through. It’s creating a more subtle band of wrinkle that still conveys an emotion that’s easier to express on an older male avatar." Yu says that it’s not about ensuring that Croft merely looks pretty. "Wrinkles and stuff tend to make young people look different and too extreme. On older men you have more latitude for that. On a young woman you don’t have as much latitude for that extreme. It just doesn’t wind up looking good." "There’s an acceptable amount of grizzle and grit you can put on a man in his 40s," says Horton. "Deep facial lines come across very well on a CG character. You can really push those things and it doesn’t tend to look wrong. "For a woman in her 20s, everything is much more subtle."

Arts and crafts Croft’s story in Rise of the Tomb Raider is about realizing her destiny as an adventurer and an explorer. "She’s not starting at zero in this game," says Horton. "She’s gained a lot of effectiveness, not only in her ability to traverse through the world and solve puzzles, but also as a combatant. She can hold her own. "In Rise of the Tomb Raider, we think we’re in a position to show Lara’s strength, not only her smarts, but also her ability to use the world in a smart way and hold her own in a fight." While the 2013 reboot featured a single crafting resource, Rise of the Tomb Raider tasks Croft with collecting multiple items in order to create and upgrade weapons and ammo. Players can choose to grab guns and use those to defeat enemies, but ammo is limited and guns are noisy. Croft’s collection of bows and arrows can be crafted on the fly. "When we look at Lara, it’s about her journey and her resourcefulness and her intelligence." "What I like about the crafting is that it feels like it ties the world together," says Brand Director Rich Briggs. "Lara gathers everything around you and uses it in different ways. It speaks to her resourcefulness and intelligence." Many resources are gathered by hunting animals. "Players told us that, yeah, there was hunting in the previous game, but it didn’t really have as much gameplay significance." Fan feedback has also influenced other gameplay changes. There are fewer QuickTime Events than in the last game, something which many players found irritating. In this game. Croft has the option to rely more on traversal and stealth skills than gunplay. Tombs are much larger than in the last game, with lots of trademark Lara Croft water puzzles as well as search-and-find puzzles. "She uses her movement to gain the edge on enemies," says Briggs. "Whether it’s traversal, her natural mobility or swimming underwater. She can go up trees as a new tool in combat. "Using her smarts, crafting ammo types out of the environment to whittle down the enemy one at a time, using the environment against them, that’s a way she succeeds against overwhelming odds. When we look at Lara, it’s about her journey and her resourcefulness and her intelligence."
AMD's EPYC Launch presentation focused mainly on its line of datacenter processors, but fans of AMD's new Vega GPU lineup may be interested in another high-end product that was announced during the presentation. The Radeon Instinct MI25 is a Deep Learning accelerator, and as such is hardly intended for consumers, but it is Vega based and potentially very potent in the company's portfolio all the same. Claiming a massive 24.6 TFLOPS of Half Precision Floating Point performance (12.3 Single Precision) from its 64 "next-gen" compute units, this machine is very suited to Deep Learning and Machine AI oriented applications. It comes with no less than 16 GBs of HBM2 memory, and has 484 GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with.AMD also presented a 2U server rack with EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs on-board that they have co-developed with Inventec. It is capable of a staggering 100 TFLOPS of performance.It is certainly encouraging to see AMD launching competitive products in this market segment.The high points of the presentation are available below:
Hundreds gather at De la Guerra Plaze to cheer on alternative choice to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump

“For the first time in my life, I have someone I can stand behind as a presidential candidate,” Texas resident Diane Boyd, 69, said at a Santa Barbara rally for Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein.

With 31 days left until the Nov. 8 election, Stein brought her campaign to De la Guerra Plaza on Saturday morning, speaking in front of more than 200 supporters.

During the rally, she promoted “the push for peace, justice and democracy.”

“The biggest wasted vote is the one that is thrown away voting for the political parties that have thrown us under the bus,” Stein said. “The best use of our vote is an investment in the future and a real declaration of the power we have.”

Key issues in Stein’s platform are college debt and making public higher education free, she said.

The Harvard University graduate and physician said the 43 million people in student loan debt “have one place to put their vote.”

“Most people are struggling and they aren’t recovering,” Stein said. “There’s only one candidate who will cancel that student debt and who will bail out the students like we bailed out Wall Street — the crooks who crashed the economy.”

Referring to that 43 million people, Stein said the bloc “is enough to win a three-way presidential race and the numbers it takes to turn the election on its head.”

Stein also discussed the need for a “Green New Deal,” the idea to create millions of jobs by making the transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2030.

She said there’s a need to create 20 million livable wage jobs with clean renewable energy that will help restore ecosystems.

“In doing this, we not only revive the economy, we turn the tide on climate change,” she said.

Enthusiastic fans applauded in support after her statements.

Addressing her supporters at the rally, Stein advocated “health care as a human right, for everyone, through a health care-for-all system.”

Throughout her remarks, Stein referenced Republican candidate Donald Trump’s position on immigration.

“We don’t need your frigging wall, we just need to stop invading other countries,” she said. “We call for a welcoming path toward citizenship for the immigrants who have always been at the front of our economy and community.”

She also addressed the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We need to put an end to the abuse and should not let one more die in the arms of police,” Stein said.

Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will face off at 6 p.m. Pacific time Sunday in St. Louis for a 90-minute town hall at Washington University.

Stein said she will join a live debate response via her social media platforms to coincide with the second debate, which has been preceded by extraordinary chaos in the wake of a tape of Trump describing his pursuit of women in lurid and demeaning terms.

“The political establishment wants us to believe we are powerless and the problems are way too complicated to solve them,” Stein said.

“In fact, in this election, it’s not just about what kind of a world we want but, but whether we will have a world or not going forward.”

National polls put Stein at 2 percent, behind even Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson at 7 percent, according to a CNN/ORC poll of 1,501 adult Americans interviewed by telephone between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2.

Stein was also the Green Party’s 2012 candidate for president.

Green Party Ventura County member Michael Cervantes joined the Santa Barbara rally in hopes of getting Stein to the White House.

“We are here to listen to a true progressive voice,” he said. “The people still seem to need to hear that. Much of what she is talking about is similar to what Bernie Sanders talked about.”

Joining Stein at the rally was rapper Kor Element, who said he started supporting her after Sanders lost the Democratic Party nomination to Clinton.

He’s been campaigning with Stein across Southern California and said he supports her progressive ideas.

— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
A counterterrorism catch-and-release campaign by Canada's national police force may have prevented 10 aspiring jihadis from heading off to war, but the roundup at Montréal-Trudeau airport is raising worries about what comes next for radicalized youth.

On Wednesday, while federal and provincial political leaders applauded the police work, anti-radicalization experts said only an integrated effort involving civilians and police can deal with youth fixated on taking up arms in the Middle East or joining terrorist groups.

In Montreal, which has become a jihadi recruiting hotbed, the only tool appears to be handcuffs. In the past six months alone, at least seven youths have left the city to join the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq. At least 15 other teenagers and young adults have been arrested pre-emptively. Some have volunteered to be monitored, while others, such as those arrested at the Montreal airport on the weekend, were simply released after having their passports confiscated.

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Acting on a tip from one or more parents, the RCMP arrested the 10 youth at the airport but have released few other details. An 11th teenager was captured on video being led away from a Montreal home by investigators. None of the teenagers have been identified publicly and no charges were laid.

The government may opt not to pursue a criminal case for fear that any public trial could force it to reveal sensitive intelligence methods – a situation that is a chronic issue in Canadian counterterrorism cases.

The passport confiscations recalled last fall's terror attacks in which two lone-wolf assailants each killed Canadian soldiers after they were thwarted in attempts to travel abroad and possibly join jihadi groups. Officials provided no answer when asked how they might prevent similar backlash in the latest cases.

The arrests again turned scrutiny toward a pre-university in Montreal's east end. Four of the people arrested on the weekend attended Maisonneuve College. A total of 11 alleged extremist recruits have now come from the school, which again denied it has a radicalization problem. "It's increasingly clear youth recruitment is happening through social media," a statement issued by the school said.

Observers are increasingly asking whether the threat to Canada can be contained if the ranks of extremists and thwarted jihadis continue to grow.

The RCMP's terrorism prevention program is designed to intervene before suspects mobilize toward violence, but the details of the program remain murky. In Quebec, Premier Philippe Couillard has promised oft-delayed legislation to deal with radicalization. He said a new law will be presented within weeks, meaning it will be months before any new program is enacted.

The City of Montreal has announced a radicalization-prevention centre, but so far it amounts to a phone number at police headquarters. Mayor Denis Coderre said Wednesday that much work remains to be done.

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"How many parents will have to call the police or the RCMP on their children because it's all they have for tools to prevent radicalization?" said Agnès Maltais, an Opposition member of Quebec's Legislature.

Vern White, a police chief turned senator, pointed out that police cannot put released suspects under surveillance indefinitely because monitoring can require as many as 25 officers per target.

"I do have confidence if charges are warranted they will be laid… If this is an early intervention, [police] might have gotten to this before they crossed the line into criminality," Mr. White said in an interview.

But, he added, authorities have to learn how to de-program extremists – and quickly. "Now it becomes a de-radicalization discussion."

Civilians who are trying to set up anti-radicalization efforts say they're getting little support and are struggling to build trust – both among police and parents who suspect their children may be radicalized.

"You know things have already gone sour when the police are involved," said Abdul Rashid Anwar, a leader in the small Montreal Ahmadiyya community who is trying to get anti-radicalization efforts off the ground in the city but is having little success. "Parents, teachers, community leaders have to do the work of educating these kids before the police get involved. We seem to be missing the bridge from one side to the other."

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Christianne Boudreau, an Alberta woman whose son was killed in 2014 fighting with the Islamic State, is working with a public outreach program called Extreme Dialogue. She says a hardening stance in law enforcement combined with a recently enacted federal anti-terror law are making it even harder for police to reach for tools beyond arrest and detention. "Every police force is different, but some of them are hesitant. Some have their hands tied. Crown prosecutors often have their own agenda, too," she said.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a terrorism researcher who is studying Canadian foreign fighters, said it is significant that no charges have been laid in Montreal.

"I think it shows just how difficult this issue is. Tracking these individuals and understanding their networks and intentions is enormously complicated," he said. "I think, perhaps, the government is trying to move away from approaching this from strictly a law-enforcement angle."

The size of the alleged cluster caught in Quebec is large, possibly uniquely so in North America, where smaller-scale interdictions against "high-risk travellers" and "foreign fighters" have become commonplace. The Montreal case is also significant because police pounced without pursuing any immediate criminal charges or peace-bond conditions.

Charges may yet come, but investigations such as this may be the new normal. Ever since the self-proclaimed Islamic State started to seize swaths of Iraq and Syria, jihadi siren songs on social media have enticed a growing pool of would-be recruits from the West. The conflict has no end in sight and police are increasingly put into the position of trying to stop suspects who cannot be proven to have broken any laws.
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Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Nicki Bidlack holds her son, December 24, 2015. Bidlack and her son's biological mother who Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Nicki Bidlack's son grips his mother's hand, December 24, 2015. Bidlack and her longtime pa Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Nicki Bidlack shows the new birth certificate of her son, stating the names of she and Sara Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Nicki Bidlack carries her engagement rings with partner Sara Clow in her purse, December 2 Photos courtesy Nicki Bidlack. Nicki Bidlack and her partner Sara Clow on the day of their son's birth in 2013 (top) and a photo Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Nicki Bidlack wipes away tears as she talks about her deceased love, Sara Clow, December 24
For the bread, see croutons

In Quebec cuisine, cretons (sometimes gorton or corton, especially among New Englanders of French-Canadian origin) is a forcemeat-style pork spread containing onions and spices. Due to its fatty texture and taste, it resembles French rillettes. Cretons are usually served on toast as part of a traditional Quebec breakfast. It is not to be confused with "fromage de tête" (tête fromagée in Quebec) or head cheese.

Recipes [ edit ]

Recipes vary, but traditional preparation involves covering 1–3 lbs of ground pork shoulder in milk or water in a large pot, then seasoning with onions and a mix of spices. The blend of spices varies from recipe to recipe, but nearly all include ground cloves. Other spices often used include cinnamon, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, and bay leaf. Some recipes include minced garlic.

Basics The mixture is simmered gently over low heat, and stirred often to prevent scorching until all the liquid is cooked off and the mixture is thick. It is then allowed to cool, then stirred again to incorporate all the rendered fat, and transferred to a large, clean container or individual containers, covered tightly, and refrigerated for several hours or overnight until firm. Pig marrow is also often added to form a gelatin that allows it to congeal.

Cretonnade [ edit ]

More specifically, cretons is pork-based; otherwise, it is a cretonnade, especially if it is veal- or poultry-based.[1] However, the distinction is often not made, even in French, with either type being cretons.

See also [ edit ]

References [ edit ]
Clarence Saunders is often credited as the father of the modern-day supermarket with his self-service Piggly Wiggly stores providing grocery needs as far back as 1916.

In Western Massachusetts, there have been numerous supermarket chains that have served shoppers, most notably the D'Amour family's Big Y.

In 1936, Paul D'Amour, a route sales driver for Wonder Bread, opened the Y Cash Market with his brother Gerald in Chicopee. The brothers opened a second and larger Y Cash Market in a former bowling alley in 1947. Building on their success they opened a 31,000-square-foot Big Y in Northampton in 1960. It was the largest supermarket in Western Massachusetts.

Other popular chains over the years have included Stop & Shop, A&P and Food Mart.

Here is a look back at where many of us have done their grocery shopping over the years.
After a Palestinian researcher was denied a bug bounty by Facebook, Marc Maiffret, CTO of BeyondTrust, kicked off a crowd-sourced fund yesterday to come up with a reward.

The researcher, Khalil Shreateh, expressed his gratitude today to Maiffret and others who have contributed to the fund. “Thank you so much. I never imagined what they will do for me,” Shreateh said in a telephone interview.

Seventy-nine people have contributed nearly $9,000 in the last 24 hours to an account that will be handed over to Shreateh once it reaches the goal of $10,000.

Maiffret seeded the fund with $3,000 of his own money after appearing on CNN to talk about the Facebook vulnerability that Shreateh found.

Earlier this month Shreateh reported a vulnerability to Facebook’s bug bounty program, saying that he had found a way to post content to any user’s timeline, even when not on a victim’s friends list. Facebook rebuffed him in return emails and ultimately claimed his discovery wasn’t a bug.

Frustrated, Shreateh took matters into his own hands and planted a message on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook timeline.

That got the attention of Facebook’s security engineers, who quickly locked Shreateh out of his account. After restoring his access, Facebook said it would not pay him a bounty.

“The more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission,” said Facebook software engineer Matt Jones in a Sunday entry on Hacker News. “Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat.”

Jones did acknowledge that Facebook should have asked Shreateh for more information before dismissing his report, but he also ticked off a list of reasons, including the fact that Facebook receives “hundreds of reports each day” and the lack of detailed proof in Shreateh’s original report. He also intimated that Shreateh’s poor English skills had been a problem.

In an interview on CNN Monday, Maiffret took exception to Facebook’s decision not to reward Shreateh.

“Ultimately, he helped kill a bug that could have been used by pretty bad guys out there to do things against Facebook users,” said Maiffret. “Ultimately, he did a great thing and I don’t think that should be lost in all this.”

The vulnerability was certainly worth money to criminals, Maiffret asserted. “It would have been something that was very useful to folks in the underground to be able to post different content on celebrity sites or whatever it might have been, to be able to lure people to websites that would then attack them,” he said. “With the nature of the severity, it would be good for Facebook to pay the guy.”

During the interview, Maiffret also said he would pay Shreateh himself if Facebook would not. “If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have the $2,000 to set this guy on the right path, if he contacts me I’d be happy to do it personally,” Maiffret said.

Zuckerberg has the $2,000: In July, the CEO’s net worth was estimated by Forbes at $16.1 billion, or nearly $3 billion more than in March.

Within minutes of Maiffret’s move to fund a bounty, others began to pitch money into the pot. Firas Bushnaq, who co-founded eEye Digital Security with Maiffret in 1998, also contributed $3,000.

“This was a one-off in the sense that I just wanted to do something cool for the guy,” said Maiffret in an interview today. “I want to inspire the technology companies to pay attention [to researchers] a little bit more, and for researchers to do their part, too. It was much more for an awareness thing for me.”

Maiffret, a high-school drop-out and self-proclaimed hacker when he was younger, is one of the country’s best-known security researchers, having founded eEye when he was a teenager. Among his notable finds was the notorious “Code Red” worm that plagued Microsoft’s IIS Server in mid-2001.

“Before the [CNN] interview, I was watching television, and it had all the news about Egypt,” said Maiffret today. “It felt weird, that we were going to talk about something so small in a way, and I wondered what I could do to make it better. The point is, even with an old broken laptop and the Internet you can teach yourself and take the right path.”

Today Shreateh expressed his gratitude. “I appreciate it, and my best wishes to everyone out there,” said Shreateh.

Shreateh, who lists himself as unemployed on his Facebook page, said he has received job offers in the security business, but has not yet accepted one.

When asked what he might do with the $10,000, Shreateh said, “It’s not in my pocket yet.”

Maiffret intends it will soon be.
Back in 2013, a chance viewing of a Super Mario-themed burlesque show opened my eyes to the wonderfully wacky world of nerdlesque, a sub-genre of burlesque performance that celebrates and satirizes nerdy pop culture. I love a good Harry Potter or superhero satire, which is why NOLA Nerdlesque has quickly becoming one of my favorite local festivals—and I’m pretty sure you will love it too.

Nerdlesque is a performance art notable for its inclusivity of all body types. It empowers performers and audience members to not just “let it all hang out,” but to feel daring and confident while doing it. Though nerdlesque is a modern art form, it is rooted in classic burlesque, particularly the smart satire. According to Persé Fanny, Co-Founder, Artistic Director, and one of several producers, “Most people think that nerdlesque is an entirely new concept, but the truth is nerdlesque is at the root of traditional burlesque. It is a parody of pop culture, a mocking of society.”

NOLA Nerdlesque, now in its fourth year, “started out of a love for nerdy pop culture and burlesque,” says Fanny, when she and other local nerdlesque performers “decided to combine our dorky efforts and celebrate nerds together.” It is only the second festival solely dedicated to nerdlesque in the world, despite the popularity of nerdlesque at conventions and other festivals.

Now sexier (and nerdier) than ever, NOLA Nerdlesque’s 2018 fest runs November 16-17. The festival is curated by Remy Dee, Persé Fanny, Vincent Gallant, Sable Switch, and Honey Tangerine, all well-known names in the local burlesque scene.

The well-rounded festival includes four shows, three workshops at the New Orleans School of Burlesque, a closing party at the International House Hotel’s Loa Bar (221 Camp St.), and a nerd market during performances. Get the dirty on this year’s shows below, and be sure to buy your tickets in advance (note all shows are 18+ and tickets will be available at the door).

Stripped Crusaders

Friday, Nov. 16 at 8:00 p.m.

Contemporary Arts Center (900 Camp St.)

General Admission, $15

Stripped Crusaders kicks off the festival weekend with superheroes taking off their spandex after long nights of fighting crime and being, well, heroes. Come watch the alluring performances of talented nerdlesque performers from all around the country as they channel your favorite cartoon, comic, and video game heroes.

Tease from the Crypt

Friday, Nov. 16 at 10:30 p.m.

Contemporary Arts Center (900 Camp St.)

General Admission, $15

Extending the Halloween spirit just a bit, Tease from the Crypt is a nerdy revue playing on the late 80s/early 90s Tales from the Crypt. Get you heart racing as “glitter covered ghouls, stripping serial killers, [and] mesmerizing monsters” misbehave. The show’s featured performer is Juno from New Orleans.

Cyburlesque

Saturday, Nov. 17 at 8:00 p.m.

Allways Lounge and Theatre (2240 St. Claude Ave.)

General Admission, $15

Sci-Fi nerds, get ready! Cyburlesque brings together nerds from across the galaxy for an evening of out of this world performances. Why not? Robots, androids, and Bill Nye can be sexy. Performers include Risky Sour from Atlanta, Little Bo Peepshow & Narvel P Tuffnuts from St. Louis, and Doctor Vu from Burlington, Vermont, among many others.

Just Drawn That Way

Saturday, Nov. 17 at 10:00 p.m.

Allways Lounge and Theatre (2240 St. Claude Ave.)

General Admission, $15

The final show of the festival puts a spin on cartoons and comic books with Just Drawn That Way. Come see your favorite characters from the morning cartoons, fairy tales, and video games of your childhood in a totally different light. More than a dozen performers will take the stage including Lady Fingers from Austin, Ginger Oh Snap from Nashville, and featuring Piper Marie from New Orleans.

Workshop: Producing for Love and Profit…But Mostly Profit

Saturday, Nov. 17 at 11:00 a.m.

New Orleans School of Burlesque (830 North Rampart St.)

$10 at the door

Hear from KiKi Maroon, who produces burlesque shows for a living, about how you can make money doing what you love. During the 90-minute workshop, she will discuss enticing topics such as common marketing mistakes and production budgeting. Plus, attendees will leave the workshop with KiKi’s own project plan which she uses for her own productions.

Workshop: Floorwork with Ember Blaize

Saturday, Nov. 17 at 1:00 p.m.

New Orleans School of Burlesque (830 North Rampart St.)

$10 at the door

Ember Blaize guides this movement-oriented workshop to help performers learn new techniques and safety increase their flexibility. This workshop specifically focuses on floorwork and you’ll leave with a few new tricks up your sleeve.

Workshop: The History of Burlesque

Saturday, Nov. 17 at 3:00 p.m.

New Orleans School of Burlesque (830 North Rampart Street)

$10 at the door

While the previous two workshops are designed with burlesque performers and others in the industry in mind, the History of Burlesque is open to anyone. Persé Fanny leads this 60-minute lecture that delves into the genesis and background of American burlesque.

Nerd Market

Friday, Nov. 16

Contemporary Arts Center (900 Camp St.)

Saturday, Nov. 17

Allways Lounge and Theatre (2240 St. Claude Ave.)

NOLA Nerdlesque’s nerd market pops up during shows on Friday and Saturday nights at the evening’s venue. Stroll by booths from local artists, festival sponsors, and festival organizers, and get your photo taken by New York based photographer Brandon Perdomo. Be sure to stop by on Saturday night to glitterize at Electra Cosmetics’ glitter sampling bar.

Closing Party

Friday, Nov. 16 at Midnight

The Loa Bar at the International House Hotel (221 Camp St.)

Free

NOLA Nerdlesque’s festival party pops up after the Friday night shows. The Loa Bar will have a late night happy hour menu, including a special festival punch. The party is free and open to all. So go ahead, live a little, laugh a little, and let your freak flag fly. You’ll be in good company. Costumes, of course, are encouraged.
I have spent most of my 20s in emotionally abusive relationships. Until a year ago, I thought I was the worst kind of damaged goods, a girl who could only love men who hurt her.

I know there are three sides to every story. In this article, you're going to hear one; mine. I don't write this with venom. The men I've been involved with were handsome, smart, charming and talented. There were good times. The bad times outweighed them.

Most people don't know I've been in (to clarify again) emotionally abusive relationships. From the outside, I'd bet my life looks pretty great. Some parts of it always were. I guess I am proof that there is no likely candidate for abuse.

For a long time, I found my romantic past embarrassing, confusing and very sad. I didn't want to talk about my experiences because I thought that my kind of pain was self-inflicted.

If I was stupid enough to stay, I deserved it.

But when "the Jian Ghomeshi thing" happened, it was all I could think about. When people first sided with Ghomeshi and not his victims, I was so mad I started shaking. When I started listening to Serial, I had recurring dreams about Hae Min Lee. I was obsessed with figuring out who killed her.

Then, I started dreaming of all my ex-boyfriends again.

Trauma is a funny thing. It hides in the shadowy corners of your mind, resurfacing when all you want is for it to be erased from your memory forever.

I'm writing this for a lot of reasons. Some of them are: I think abusive relationships are an epidemic in our society. It could help someone understand their friend, their sister, their daughter who keeps going back. It could help someone who keeps going back. Because articles like this helped me.

Because what trauma really wants is a voice.

To anyone who needs help,

You think you are crazy.

You're anxious all the time. Your heart beats quickly.

You have a lot of questions for your boyfriend that you don't feel like you can ask. You wonder if you're always being lied to. You spend a lot time in the past, likely when you first fell in love him.

You apologize constantly. When you explain your fights to anyone who will listen, no one understands why you're apologizing. You are always confused.

You're high as a fucking kite when he's nice to you. He says "one small thing," and with an embarrassing clarity, you are reminded of all the parts of yourself you hate. How can he see those parts so clearly?

You cry a lot. Sometimes you know why. Sometimes you don't.

You are not crazy.

When you're with your boyfriend, you're usually with just him alone. You feel weird around your friends and family, the people you used to feel the most yourself around. You can't remember how to feel like yourself anymore. Now, being in your own skin is like a long dull headache that won't lift and then feels like normal. Pretty much all your thoughts about yourself are negative.

"I used to be funny, why aren't I funny anymore?"

You think you are crazy.

There will be good days with your boyfriend. There will be miraculous days of exquisite and suffering beauty between you two.

On these days, you will feel better than the best and like everything's okay. You will believe that the chaos has made you stronger; that he loves you more than anything. These days are bright spots in the darkness that has descended upon you. They are the moments of hope that you'll cling to, your proof that everything is okay.

But moments aren't a life. Moments aren't enough. You deserve weeks, months and years of feeling like everything is okay. You deserve a lifetime of that.

When your relationship ends, you will drown in the confusing, competing narratives in your head, just like you did while in the relationship. Memory is going to be a weird thing for you for a while. Grief is a delusional state.

We really loved each other. I could've helped him if I'd tried harder. I'm not perfect. And sometimes, I don't think love should feel like this.

The latter will be quieter, the former will roar inside you. Some days, you will think you left the most beautiful relationship and the truest love in the whole world. Some days you will think you are just hysterical and crazy and that you weren't being abused at all.

Until very recently, I still had days like that.

After you break up with him, you might not feel an immediate sense of relief, empowerment or really anything that resembles "I know this is the right thing." You will likely feel very alone. Unfortunately, coming out of the fog with your eyes open is more painful than slipping into one without noticing.

But remember: feelings aren't the truth. You aren't the worst off you've ever been. Expect the sadness. It sounds crazy but welcome it. That sadness is going to live in you for a long time and it will teach you a lot. I know you don't believe me, but that sadness is your friend. That sadness is your becoming.

Not everyone you lose is a loss.

Tell your story no matter how murky the details seem at first. Keep talking. Read every article you can find on abuse until you feel an intellectual understanding of what happened tunnel into you emotionally. The head will come first, your heart will follow; it will all become clearer.

Talk to your friends. Talk to your family. I promise you have more than one person in your life that can sympathize with you in the deepest of ways. You know someone who has lived through this. Maybe it's your mom. Maybe she modeled this kind of love for you.

If you're lucky like I was, you'll find a therapist that can help you. There are also a lot of free resources. There are a lot of great 12 step meetings you can go to. There is free counseling available (links below).

When getting help, you will have to reflect on your relationship. Don't blame yourself for not leaving sooner, and don't let anyone else blame you, either. In moments of trauma and shock the brain has a funny way of protecting itself. It's called disassociating. You have done a lot of this.

You will remember about three months in your ex-boyfriend did something and it was like a mask was lifted. He showed you a person you had never met before. I mention this because statistically an abusive person will do something that throws you completely off balance within the first three months. Then, they will be really sorry.

You will come to learn that real love is not a cycle of cruelty, effusive apologies, a honey-moon period, then a dreaded waiting for the other shoe to drop followed by more cruelty. Abusive relationships are defined by this pattern.

When you do leave, you will realize that the space that your relationship took up was enormous. It was, whether you knew it or not, the monkey on the back of every thought you had. When it's gone, the emptiness left in its wake will feel like an ocean around you

It will take way longer than you want to "get over it," and you will think you will never reach the shore.

You will.

When I was newly single and going on dates, this is how it went. First, I dated blindly and way more than I should have. I was attracted to guys who were like all my ex-boyfriends, physically and emotionally. Then, I started dating people who were completely different but whom I was not ready to love. Like a scientist, I observed how they treated me with a confusing detachment and thought, "Oh, so this is what it should be like."

"So, this is what kindness is like."

Dating made me feel like the loneliest person in the world for a long time. I wish now I hadn't done it at all, but withdrawal is painful and uncomfortable. I was willing to try anything to feel just a little better.

You will miss your ex boyfriend in a way you didn't know was possible and you don't think should be allowed. You will want to get back together. Abusive relationships fuck your brain chemistry up. They're addictive, and the withdrawal is not fun.

Don't worry, with time, your brain will even out. In awhile, you won't want to be with him anymore. Crying helps you detox, so do a lot of it. So does sleeping, exercise, therapy, eating healthy, seeing your friends and laughing.

For me, alcohol didn't really help. Or I guess, it did, until it didn't.

When you're in the withdrawal phase, you'll begin to understand why you thought being in an abusive relationship was okay for you. You're going to have to look at a lot of your past and your inherited patterns. It can get heavy but knuckle through it. You can do it. I did.

You will tell people that know your ex-boyfriend about what happened and how he treated you. Likely, no one will be surprised by his behaviour. Likely, no one will confront him. This is one of the saddest parts of our world. You will feel like the last one in on a sick joke.

Your ex-boyfriend will probably never apologize to you. If you do hear from him or see him, he will make you feel crazy. He's really good at that. He will likely minimize your history, dismiss your relationship and pull the rug out from under you again. The way he frames you and your relationship will be distorted.

I believe that amends can happen, but usually, not in a timely manner. Like you need time to really unpack and understand why it all happened, so will he. Now factor into this that you have the desire to understand yourself and your behaviour.

The closure you desire is a myth and it's not reachable in one conversation. Closure happens slowly and keeps happening. You'll give it to yourself.

If you leave your boyfriend for someone else, beware. Until you truly understand why you were in the situation you were, emotionally and intellectually, your subconscious will have a sad way of attracting an identical relationship that looks completely different from the outside. This is not always true, but has been my experience.

At first, when the fog is lifting, you will look at your past self with shock and disgust. Then, later, you will look at your past self with sadness. Then, with understanding. Finally, you feel the most visceral pride for the moment you left, even if you didn't want to -- because you did that on the blind faith that life might be better on the other side. You did that on hope alone. You didn't know what you do now. That's so brave.

You are so brave.

I know how scared you are. I still get scared. My year of recovery has been the most challenging and rewarding of my life. It's not perfect and I don't think it ever will be. I get lonely and restless. I live with those feelings. Actually, I try to understand them.

One day, your life will look like a version of mine. Things will keep getting better and better, faster and faster. Good things will keep finding you. You will be really happy. That happiness will get so big that you won't notice how the sadness is lifting until it's almost gone.

My life is full of hard work, art, friends who love and support me, friends that I am lucky to know. I have more energy than I know what to do with. I am the most productive I have ever been. I travel, I have meaningful conversation, I rest, I laugh a lot, I stay out too late. I am closer to my family than ever before. I found my way back to my old friends.

Maybe I'm becoming myself again.

Finally, (I know you're worried about this) you will meet someone else. You will fall in love again and this time, it will be about more than your wounds matching up with someone else's. It will be different and it will be better.

But something becomes more important to you than romantic love and it's called self-worth. It will feel like it happens almost over night, but you will grow to love the person you are. You should.

You fought hard to become her.

Love,

Katie

P.S. If you have a friend or a family member, male, female or transgender, that you suspect is the victim of emotional abuse, tell them you are there for them. Tell them you support them unwaveringly. Believe what they're telling you. Tell them you will be there for them when they decide to leave. Show them this article or articles like this. Send them these links:

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This Arsenal is different. That, at least, is what they are trying to prove and so far the evidence is in their favour. The players know that past slip-ups mean many people remain unconvinced of Arsenal's ability to sustain their title challenge as Manchester City and Chelsea breathe down their necks but they are determined not to buckle.

The fact that this victory over Fulham could be described as routine shows the progress Arsène Wenger's team have made. "That's something that has changed from last season," said Santi Cazorla, who sealed the win with two sweetly taken second-half goals.

"There were games last year where we'd go 2-0 up and we'd end up losing it or under pressure. For a title-winning team that cannot happen. This season the team is much more solid, we're much better at closing out games. We need to continue this form because of Chelsea and Manchester City.

"Maybe at the start of the season nobody put us up as high as Manchester City or Chelsea, maybe because of the signings they made, but it's ultimately demonstrated on the pitch and right now Arsenal are above them. Our objective is to keep fighting with them. We're top because up until now we've been the best team."

Wenger attributes much of the credit for his team's improvement to its new defensive fortitude. Per Mertesacker and Laurent Koscielny have formed an authoritative central defensive partnership, Wojciech Szczesny is becoming ever more reliable, the full-backs are secure and the midfield, especially Mathieu Flamini, provides sturdy protection to the rearguard. Wenger suggests his team is now locked into a virtuous circle. Each victory is both a stride forward and a hiccup avoided and enhances the side's belief that they can last the distance.

"The consistency of the results of the team since January 2013 has strengthened that maturity and the fact that we are defensively more stable gives us more of a serene attitude and that helps a lot," he says.

That "serene attitude" makes it hard to envisage Arsenal collapsing like they did the last time they had so many points at this stage of the season. That was in 2007-08, when they had 54 points after 22 matches (compared with 51 now) but finished third after going on a wretched run of a single win in eight league games between February and early April.

That hapless streak was triggered by the horrendous injury that their striker, Eduardo, suffered during a draw at Birmingham City, but the poise of this Arsenal team suggests they would be capable of withstanding even such a traumatic misfortune.

If all the challengers have a similar level of mental strength, then the title will be decided by skill. Arsenal seem well-armed on that front too. Cazorla's flourishing against Fulham followed a similarly decisive impact from Jack Wilshere in the previous match at Aston Villa. With Aaron Ramsey unavailable, Theo Walcott out for the season and Mesut Özil curiously off form, it is important that others step to the fore. So far they are doing that. Arsenal's last six wins have brought 12 goals from seven different scorers.

"That's the best thing that can happen to us," says Wenger. "If you depend on one player, then you have to put him in cotton wool to keep him fit. For us it's important to know everybody can score."

There are, however, concerns and Özil's form is one of them. In addition, it still looks a risk not to sign a striker this month to relieve the burden on Olivier Giroud. Nicklas Bendtner resumes full training on Monday following injury and Yaya Sanogo is expected to do so later inthe week but they may not be enough. Arsenal are seeking an additional centre-forward but it remains to be seen whether they can conclude a deal. They have held talks with Juventus over Mirko Vucinic but are interested only in taking the 30-year-old on loan, whereas his employers want a permanent sale. Discussions with Real Madrid over Álvaro Morata, whom Arsenal would be happy to take permanently, are also at an impasse.

Fulham, meanwhile, may just have solved one of their biggest problems, although that cannot be said with much certainty given the way they have fluctuated between respectable and wretched performances this season.

At the Emirates they showed a steel that has seldom been seen this season, as the fit-again Brede Hangeland and the 21-year-old debutant, Dan Burn, blended well in central defence.

"It gives confidence to the whole team, a feeling that we are more solid and that it's harder for opponents to break us down," said their manager, René Meulensteen.

"We just need to make sure that one goal conceded does not create a ripple effect, which then creates a wave of negativity. We are starting to look more solid and that's our way forward."

Man of the match Santi Cazorla (Arsenal)
The High Cost of Treating Gun Violence Victims Hits Southerners Especially Hard A new Stanford study tapped a massive database to show how shootings strain hospitals and taxpayers.

The cost of treating gunshot survivors is greatest in states with the highest rates of firearm ownership and the most permissive gun laws, new research shows.

More than 4 in 10 shooting victims admitted to hospitals between 2006 and 2014 were concentrated in 16 Southern states and the District of Columbia, according to a study published this week by two researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Of initial hospital admissions for firearms injuries, 43 percent were in the South. The West and Midwest each had 20 percent of hospitalizations, while the Northeast claimed 16 percent. More than a third of patients treated in the South were uninsured.

Dr. Thomas Weiser, an associate professor of surgery, and Sarabeth Spitzer, a medical student, analyzed inpatient hospital records to conclude that the initial hospitalization of patients wounded by guns over the eight-year period cost Americans more than $6.6 billion. The researchers used a sample of more than 250,000 patients admitted to American hospitals with gunshot injuries.

The average cost per hospitalization was $24,746. Patients with government-funded Medicaid or Medicare were responsible for roughly 40 percent of costs in the survey period. Uninsured patients were accountable for about a quarter of the costs.

The costs attributed to the South alone were $2.7 billion.

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The medical community is in near unanimous agreement that owning a gun increases the risk of being shot, whether intentionally or in an accident. As Americans continue to purchase firearms at breakneck pace, this reality has public safety implications: Every year, roughly 110,000 people are shot in the United States. This epidemic also has financial ramifications for the institutions that must treat victims: Most of the roughly 80,000 people who are wounded by a bullet annually enter the healthcare system, incurring massive costs.

“For every one person who dies from a gunshot, there are three or four people who survive,” Weiser said. “At the end of the day, injuries are associated with a cost. And that’s a cost that’s [often] borne by taxpayers.”

The study draws from a survey of 20 percent of American hospitals conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The survey collects patient information and insurance trends of roughly 8 million discharges annually. The study does not offer state-by-state breakdowns, but does show costs across geographical regions. Southern states were responsible for a disproportionate amount of patients.

The study counts Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, as Southern states.

The researchers focused on financial costs, and did not attempt to account for how gun ownership and gun laws might play a role. Weiser said he wants to better understand the connection, but “we don’t really have data.”

But the finding that the South is the region with the highest number of gunshot victims roughly mirrors gun ownership statistics. According to a survey by researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities, of America’s 55 million gun owners, nearly 37 percent live in the South, while the West and Midwest claim about 22 percent, respectively. Eighteen percent of gun owners hail from the Northeast.

The same survey found that almost three quarters of Southern gun owners said they own their firearms for self-protection.

Over the last decade, many Southern states have rolled back restrictions on carrying guns in public and relaxed requirements for obtaining a concealed weapons permit, all while strengthening laws protecting the use of deadly force. On Wednesday, Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas signed a bill that would allow people to carry concealed handguns on the campuses of the state’s public colleges and universities.

The Stanford study emerged from Spitzer’s interest in gun violence. When she arrived at Stanford two years ago, she was surprised to learn just how little research had been published about firearms injuries, she said. She hopes that the success of this study will inform researchers more down the road, potentially with a focus on how often gunshot survivors return to the healthcare system for care after their initial injury.

“A motivating factor is filling this [research] gap,” she said.

The study only focused on a patient’s first trip to the hospital with a gunshot wound. It does not include the subsequent hospitalizations, rehabilitation, or patients treated and released from the emergency room.

“This is a very select group of patients,” Weiser said. “And in truth we don’t know anything about patients about once they get out.”

A gunshot victim’s recovery can be an arduous and costly process, especially for those without the financial means to access services. Survivors often require long-term care, such as physical therapy or mental health treatment to deal with the aftermath of such traumatic injuries.

Past studies have included long-term rehabilitation — and a variety of other factors — when calculating the cost of gun violence, but the majority focus on specific states. In one recent analysis, published in February, Dr. Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute and First Coast News determined that gun violence costs each Florida resident $740 every year. The model included estimated costs to the criminal justice system, loss of work, extended medical treatments, and a decline in quality of life.

Miller is the same economist who worked with Mother Jones in 2015 to calculate the national cost of gun violence. The number they landed on, using the expanded criteria of costs: $229 billion per year.

Weiser stressed that such additional costs are extremely important when assessing the total impact of recovering from a gunshot. But he said that many of them can “be perceived as arbitrary.” He said it was his and Spitzer’s intent to conduct their analysis with the most iron-clad data available, to prevent the findings from being misconstrued. His objective was to “remove the emotion” from the research, he said, “and look at the actual dollar figures.”

That’s one of the reasons the authors believe their work may have an impact outside of the medical community.

“If these costs are borne by the government, it has real implications for federal and state budgets,” Weiser said. “If you’re going to argue for increased availability for firearms, you need to calculate the increase in costs.”

Uninsured patients and those with Medicaid each accounted for roughly 30 percent of the sample used in the survey. Slightly more than 20 percent of patients had private insurance, while just 6 percent had Medicare. The insurance status of an additional 14 percent of patients was “other”: individuals whom the hospital opted not to charge, and those with “alternative forms of insurance,” according to the study.

Demographics varied significantly between payer groups. The average Medicaid patient was 26, and more than 50 percent identified as black and reported a household median income in the lowest quartile, below $37,999. Individuals with private insurance were on average older, more likely to be white, and had a higher median income. Patients with Medicare had an average age of 57 and were the most likely to be transferred to another hospital for treatment, or die as a result of their injuries.

However, one factor remained the same: In every payer group, males accounted for more than 80 percent of patients.

Weiser said he is energized about continuing work on the issue of gun violence. In the operating room he interacts with shooting victims first-hand, though he’d rather not have to.

“If I as a trauma surgeon never had to take care of a young kid with a gunshot wound again, that would be fantastic,” he said.

[Photo: Flickr user Airman Magazine]
This is the second part of an ongoing look into the state of online gaming in Japan. If you’d like to read more on the subject head over to part one.

Last time, we discussed the issues facing the Japanese online gamer. Of note, Japanese online gaming is so niche that the term MMORPG has very little meaning to your average online gamer, who tends to be more of a console shooter fan than PC playboys/girls. According to Akiba MMO‘s CEO Keiko, “Japan essentially skipped the PC and jumped straight to mobile phones.” Having a big, bulky machine that’s primarily used at one’s place of work hardly seems like something that would have awesome games on it. Worse yet, because of the small market, few western companies translated their games into Japanese. No problem, right? Japanese people must be able to speak English like the rest of the world despite being an island nation no where near an English speaking country…

English Only

Despite having to learn it for at least six years, Japanese people really don’t speak English. As a teacher, this comes up a lot, but Keiko in particular noted that English’s role in Japan is often restricted to unique wording/phrasing that only makes sense to Japanese. In short, it’s used for adding an exotic flavor for advertisers, but as a communication language, people may only passively understand English. Even then, as founders of gaming, Japanese expect good games to be translated for them if they are indeed any good.

While there are certainly Japanese players who like western games, remember that online gaming is already a niche market. Add in the fact that foreign products are even more niche, so it’s more difficult to find translated fan sites of foreign games if you’re a Japanese player. There’s even a stigma that “Western games are shit” partially due to the fact that Japan simply didn’t have the PC gaming market to support localization into Japanese. While localization teams for Blizzard games may advertise in Japanese, the client is often still in English. This is most likely why Blizzard is practically unknown in this country. Everyone I spoke to who knows Blizzard’s games enjoyed them, but when asked why the games didn’t seem popular, the answer was always the same: no Japanese language support, until recently. Even then, keep in mind from last time that Japanese gamers tend to prefer anime style art. This is perhaps why Blizzard needed Square-Enix’s help releasing the game in Japan.

But let’s be fair. As Keiko put it, it you can’t understand the story, how to play the game, or the character/item system, it’s very hard to play the game. This is a universal issue, not a Japanese issue, and one reason why importing and raw media is uncommon at best for the general population. However, western PC players have greater access to these games for lower prices than console gamers. Europe and Asian countries with strong PC gaming communities allow us to invade their virtual worlds from time to time so we’re exposed to the idea of playing games in a foreign language more than the Japanese console gamers.

This isn’t to say that Japanese don’t play western games, and they certainly don’t avoid online ones. However, culturally speaking, Japanese people would prefer to stay silent and avoid inter-cultural communication issues. That may sound racist, but as someone who lives outside of the major Japanese cities, I can tell you life out here is quite different. It’s a stereo type, but all stereotypes are based on perspective. I’ve seen stupid Americans yelling when they just need to speak slowly, but I’ve never seen them begin to cry because a foreigner was trying to explain (in English) that their traveling companion doesn’t speak English.

Now, apply that to games, where you can no longer easily gesture, use facial expressions, draw pictures, or use the tone of your voice. Like in real life, Japanese players want to play games in their native language with other people that speak their language. However, in some ways, Japanese players online are perhaps a bit more clannish.

To be fair, Keiko feels that many Japanese players choose games they like and meet new people there. It’s not unheard of, and I even had a lone Japanese guy join my guild in Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, in my experience, many Japanese gamers in the MMO sphere, much like with Monster Hunter, people begin by joining their friends. Outside of Neverwinter Online, I was unable to find a Japanese guild in both the Japanese version of Darkfall and ArcheAge, even though I specifically went of out my way to search for them. Admittedly, these are PvP games, and foreign made ones at that. Often, people do tend to stick with people they’ve previously established ties with when joining these games. I did meet other lone wolf types, but when I asked if they would join a guild, many said they were waiting for a friend to join the game.

When I mentioned this issue to Matthieu, developer of Gangs of Space, and the Akihabara eSports Square staff, they had similar responses. Both feel that this is changing, but felt it is a bit of a problem. Part of it is the language. The eSports staff in particular noted that, for Japanese, it was difficult to talk to a person they don’t know outside of a game in English.

I can understand this, but also know this is compounded by the fact that, in my experience, not speaking and trying to play with native speakers is worse than admitting you’re not proficient in the language. There are countless times I’ve been grouped with non-native speakers, not just Japanese but Chinese, Korean, even German. Shy people exist in all cultures, but when these people didn’t speak up, they were verbally abused, and those are usually the words people understand. In MMOs, the first thing I do when there seems to be a problem is to check if the other person is a native English speaker. Most of the time, this is the problem, and since I’m an English teacher, if the group has a little patience, we can get through things well enough.

Few people play foreign games and possess zero knowledge of the foreign language/culture. Just the same, if a person doesn’t communicate their language handicap and is constantly abused, they won’t really bring their friends to the game. Although there were a few rude comments when I had previously mentioned my language issues when playing with Japanese players, the good ones stood out much more, and I honestly tend to be more of a negative person. Most people seem to stereotype Japanese as being overly polite, so you can only imagine what happens when foreigners who are usually accused of being rude taunt a Japanese player.

However, that can’t be the only factor. As Matthieu and the eSports Square staff commented, this may partially originate with Japan’s local co-op traditions. Although playing a game at someone’s house is limited to friends and family, Japanese people have been meeting in front of stores and at arcades for decades to physically play with or against people. The latter is especially relevant in terms of PvP play, in that the arcade scene (particularly fighting games and shooters) in Japan generally has you battling someone you can see and interact with before and after the fight. When taken online, where people can be anonymous and resort to trash talking, which I often saw between Japanese and Korean players on their shared Darkfall server, this tradition breaks down. It’s no wonder the Japanese players would prefer to stick with people they know!

The View of Online Gamers in Japan

Although online gamers in the west are seen differently than non-online gamers, online gaming is so niche that most of my contacts have said there’s almost no difference. Matthieu says there is a small difference in the perception, with online gamers being seen more for being basement dwelling loners, but that image is going away. This is slightly confirmed by the eSports Square staff commenting on the fact that there being any difference at all only being recognized recently, but, in general, gamers are gamers in Japan, and as all my contacts– professional and casual alike– agree, gamers in Japan are still not highly respected. The overall negative image we hold of gamers in the states is still pretty true in Japan, but like the west, it is starting to soften, partially due to mobile gaming making games more acceptable by your average Japanese citizen.

Internationally, however, there are still issues the Japanese gamer must deal with. As I mentioned previously, Japanese gamers are often shy and may not even admit to being Japanese. People who played the original Final Fantasy 11 would also mention how the Japanese players sometimes seemed clannish, though I’ve also witnessed genuine random acts of kindness towards non-Japanese as well.

Within the eSports community, I’ve had people (Japanese and non-Japanese alike) personally tell me that Japan simply doesn’t care about international recognition, but that was up for debate. LoL players in particular seem to look forward to seeing what Japanese players are capable of, though many still don’t realize the Japanese players still don’t have their own servers (and Riot games has yet to return my inquiries about the situation). I know some of the eSports Square staff have personally voiced concern about Japanese players’ LoL skills in the competitive community, but the overall tone is that they just hope esports become more recognized in Japan.

Mathieu, on the other hand, noted that Japanese players often have different styles. A good example is the shooting scene. At least compared to the people in his non-Japanese gaming circle, the times the Japanese players he knows have joined them in matches, the Japanese are simply in a different league.

However, Keiko really brought up what may be the truest sentiment: if Japanese players don’t care about the international scene, it has more to do with their language ability than anything else. The hesitance to community in an international setting, in English, is quite challenging, especially when the games themselves are also often in English. If the tables were turned, and the games were in Japanese and had international players speaking in Japanese, they would be much more open to it.

The Future

The overall environment for online gaming in Japan is certainly a small and fairly close one. It’s alive and healthy enough, but as Matthieu put it, if you don’t know someone in it, you don’t really have access to it. However, even the most cynical people I spoke to do think online gaming has a future, even with competition from the mobile crowd. I feel that the rise of tablets is giving the PC market a solid middle ground and potential step for those who tire of mobile phone games and need something meatier. The availability of World of Tanks and its Japanese client certainly drew attention to the event Keiko helped with!

However, there needs to be support. Steam already provides Japanese language options at least for shopping, which is a good start. Riot’s Tokyo office will hopefully release news on a Japanese server, or at least language pack, for Japanese gamers. Kei’s MMO site, Akiba MMO, serves as a general community site, mostly for PC gamers and developers. It’s actually providing a space where presenting developers are posting about the games they’re bringing to Tokyo Indie Festival. The country is already home to many internet cafes to make-up for the fact that PC aren’t considered a necessity in Japan, but Akihabara eSports Square at least encourages patrons to download their Steam games when visiting their location.

It’s a good start, but I wonder if it’s enough. In the west, we had small time developers leading the charge in MMORPG development. Origin Systems and Turbine aren’t exactly household names, but few MMO players have trouble recognizing their work. Perhaps a game like Kantai Collection can help make way for online games’ popularity, but I don’t know if that’s enough, and indie developers are rare in Japan. There’s a big difference between making doushinji (games made for fun more than profit) and being an indie developer trying to make a living, and the latter are quite rare in Japan, though I was lucky enough to meet some.

My interview with Matthieu occurred at Pico Pico Cafe, which hosts something called “Picotachi,” a monthly indie game developer (and fan) meet. The place is absolutely packed to the point where I’d certainly call it a “standing-room only” type of event. There were some interesting games, but mostly they were simply, ranging from 2-D platformers to a 100-player Tetris that required 10 people to form a single line across their territories to clear the blocks. Fun stuff but nothing quite on the same level as an online game. In fact, after talking to Matthieu and looking at the list of TIF presenters (so far), it seems the Japanese indie devs are naturally chasing the most profitable market: mobile gaming. Aside from Gangs of Space, nothing seemed to indicate that the indie scene here is looking to bulk up the online gaming market.

It feels like the big corporations, like Square and Sega, will be needed to develop the online gaming market. Smaller projects certainly seem to be helping. Before starting this project, most people I talked to seemed, like myself, fairly isolated in their physical locations about their online, PC gaming hobby. We mostly meet and talk to other people online, and if someone changes games or doesn’t log in at the right time, they seemingly disappear. Finally making some business contacts has shown me that there is a community here, but it’s certainly in a position to grow. There are opportunities for people willing to network and innovate, assuming you have the money understand the current culture. I feel that the last point is probably what’s kept western publishers out of Japan. Until they either invest the money or innovation to attract the audience, Japan’s online gaming community will probably remain very niche, limited mostly to shooter fans, monster hunters, and gamers who also are willing to put up a foreign language in their pursuit of finding a virtual paradise…. or Valhalla.

Related: Akiba MMO
BALTIMORE (WJZ)–The Humane Society of the United States is offering a reward of $5,000 for information leading to an arrest in the gruesome killing of a cat in Maryland.

On September 7, 2016, authorities say a cat was found burned to death in an apartment complex in Hollingsworth Manor in Elkton, Maryland.

Investigators believe it was severely tortured and then set on fire.

“It is absolutely horrific to imagine someone intentionally and viciously harming an innocent cat in this way,” said Emily Hovermale, The HSUS’ Maryland state director. “Whoever would commit such a crime is clearly a dangerous person, and we are hopeful that this reward will bring forward anyone with information about this heinous crime.”

Anyone with any information is asked to call the Cecil County Animal Services at 410-441-2040.
Despite predictions of gloom and doom, the province posted a surplus last year of more than $1 billion, no matter how it’s counted.

The previous Tory government initially forecast a $514-million surplus last year, but when oil prices plummeted last fall, premier Jim Prentice warned Alberta could end up in the red.

The 2014-15 consolidated surplus of $1.1 billion ends of string of six consecutive deficits and boosts the province’s contingency fund to $8.2 billion — a reserve Finance Minister Joe Ceci says will come in handy in dealing with the drop in non-renewable resource revenue.

“Going forward the climate — the economy today — is very different from what it was then,” he told reporters at the legislature Tuesday as the NDP government released the final year-end numbers.

But Ceci said he was reluctant to use the cash savings to fill the projected revenue void.

“If we can find a way to achieve greater revenue stability without the use of the contingency account — though it’s probably not possible — that would be my first desire,” said the Calgary MLA.

“Philosophically, I think contingencies are there to smooth things out. They’re not there to totally drain the bank account.”

Although the price of oil has stayed below $60 US per barrel for much of this year, Ceci said he hoped new corporate tax increases and hikes in personal income tax for the wealthiest Albertans will meet some of the projected shortfall.

He also mused about other “revenue measures,” but would not elaborate.

During the spring election, the NDP campaigned on a budget with a projected $5.4-billion deficit — $400-million more red ink than was forecast in the PC budget for 2015-16 that was released in March.

The final Tory budget, however, was never passed as the Prentice government called an early election, which it lost to Rachel Notley’s NDP.

PC interim Leader Ric McIver said the fact the province recorded a hefty surplus during a period of falling oil prices proves the former government was fiscally prudent and left the province in strong economic shape.

“The government did control expenditures last year because it was the right thing to do,” said McIver, former labour minister in the Prentice government.

“This annual report is a good sign post to go look at what good shape Alberta is in overall.”

But Wildrose finance critic Derek Fildebrandt said the report doesn’t reflect the deteriorating state of Alberta’s finances because it relies on the same accounting methods that were employed by the former PC government.

The Wildrose MLA said the provincial government paid out more than $780 million to finance interest payments on debt last year, and Alberta remains on pace to top $30 billion in debt by 2019.

“When you collect record revenues and still have to take out billions in debt, the real problem is overspending,” Fildebrandt said in a statement.

“The NDP plan of raising spending faster than they can raise taxes just isn’t sustainable.”

Ceci would not comment on the size of the projected deficit for the current fiscal year, which began April 1. The NDP don’t plan to table their own budget until October.

Alberta Finance officials say higher-than-expected revenues from taxes and investments in the first six months of last year offset the impact of lower oil prices in the fall.

Although bitumen royalties fell $530 million, the province still brought in $8.9 billion in non-renewable resource revenue.

The Heritage Savings Trust Fund was reported to be $17.9 billion. Total capital debt climbed to $11.9 billion.

The PC government reported a $755-million surplus in 2013-14, but under its new consolidated reporting, that surplus was actually a $302-million deficit. The new reporting method now includes revenue, expenses, assets and liabilities from schools, universities, colleges and health facilities as well as pension liabilities.

Under the previous financial reporting method, which was criticized by opposition parties and the provincial auditor general, the surplus in 2014-15 would have been reported as $1.4 billion.

dhenton@calgaryherald.com
The message board website 4chan struck at the hearts of every OVO fan this morning when they started a rumor that Drake died in a car crash in Los Angeles. "Operation Drake, as the original thread called it" started in the comment section of Drizzy's "Hotline Bling" video, where users wrote "RIP Drake" before the news then spread to other outlets. The fake news eventually ended up as a community post on Buzzfeed that was syndicated on the front page of Yahoo! before it was eventually removed. CNN also picked up the story through syndication, but it was removed shortly after.

Buzzfeed pulled the community post and left an editor's note that a community user posted a false claim about Drake and that it was removed. Drake's Wikipedia page for a time listed his date of death as Nov. 22, though it's unclear if 4chan made that update. The original 4chan threads have since been deleted, but it looks like the damage is already done, with Twitter questioning if Drake actually died. Thankfully, Drake is still alive and Views From the 6 is on the way.
Critics say the plan will only alienate citizens with ties to Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based.

Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta said in a speech on Tuesday (Feb. 16) that his government is thinking about building a prison that will hold those with “violent and extremist” tendencies to limit their ability to spread “poison” to other prisoners.

“We will establish a new prison to hold violent, extremist offenders,” Kenyatta, speaking at a graduation ceremony for new prison guards, said. “The truth of the matter is that we cannot allow them to spread their poison to vulnerable Kenyans.”

It was unclear who, specifically, Kenyatta was referring to. But the language he used in the speech suggests that he may have been talking about individuals with alleged ties to the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab.

Kenya has been targeted by the al Qaeda-affiliated organization ever since the country sent troops into Somalia in 2011 to help defeat the group and secure the country for the government. Several high profile attacks by the Shabaab, including at a high end mall in Nairobi and a university in the northeast of the country, have killed hundreds of people.

Last June, Kenyatta suggested that the situation is forcing Kenya to think of new ways to combat the threat.

“We must accept that we are faced with a new kind of enemy against whom the conventional methods of fighting crime will not work,” he said. “We have amongst us radicalized youths who appear innocent which makes us believe that they are doing God’s work while they are busy planning evil against other Kenyans in the name of religion.”

At the time Kenyatta indicated that his government was going to work with community and religious leaders to protect against such radicalization. But the decision to potentially build a special prison to detain individuals suspected of extremism could portend a new phase of Kenyatta’s administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. It follows another radical idea, yet to be fully realized, of building a wall along the Kenya-Somalia border the government says will keep out the militants.

Some analysts compare the proposed prison to the controversial US naval base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay where the US government has been holding prisoners suspected of terrorism. They say this approach will only work to exacerbate the already difficult relationship the government has with Kenyans of Somali ethnic origin, a community it cannot afford to alienate in its anti-terrorism efforts.

“There is a real risk that this prison for jihadists may only fuel anti-Kenyan government sentiments, especially if the majority of the prisoners in this jail are Somali Kenyans,” Ahmed Salim, a senior analyst at Teneo Intelligence, told Quartz. “Effective counterterrorism measures requires the support and buy-in from communities.”
We need your help to build wheelchair costumes for kids in walkers and wheelchairs in time for Halloween 2015! So please pledge and spread the word. The more money we raise, the more children we can build for in the future! Our goal is 5 costumes, but we’d love to make more with more donations.

What is Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes?

Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes is a nonprofit organization that turns kids’ walkers and wheelchairs into the best Halloween costume ever! Lon & Anita Davis are the parents of 2 boys, 1 of whom, Reese, was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma (a childhood cancer) at the age of 2 months old. The tumor was on his spine and ended up crushing his spinal cord preventing him the full use of his legs and trunk muscles. Together, with the help of now 10-year-old Reese, the family launched Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes with this simple goal in mind: “To provide any child with special needs equipment a unique and custom built costume for them, free of charge to the family.”

How it all started.

When Reese received his first wheelchair around the age of 3, he was really into the movie, “Wall-E.” So for Halloween he wanted to be the title character. We knew there wasn’t a way to purchase a costume that would work for him, so we decided to build it from scratch. The end result featured mechanical arms that Reese could control from within the body and large track treads on the side of his wheelchair. The costume blew people away and it even ended up in the Kansas City Star newspaper.

The first costume built by the Walkin' & Rollin' Costumes team.

Each year following, Reese would come up with creative ideas for his costume, and Dad would have to figure out a way to make them work. Year two, Reese wanted to be Buzz Lightyear and wanted his wheelchair to be the Claw Machine from the first “Toy Story” movie. That costume ended up coming in 2nd place for a city wide costume contest and was featured on the home page of the Kansas City Star website.

Buzz Lightyear in the Claw Machine

Fast forward to 2015. We have numerous costumes under our belt, each being more elaborate than the last. We were even featured on the evening news for our Comic Con costume in 2015 when we introduced the debut of Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes.

Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes' mission is “to provide any child with special needs equipment a unique and custom built costume for them, free of charge to the family. There are some great ways you can help.

How you can get involved

There are a few ways you can help Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes.

1) PLEDGE. Any amount is appreciated, but the more you give, the more children we can build for, and the cooler the rewards you'll receive!

2) SHARE. Please let your friends and family know about the Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes campaign! Your support will not only help some great kids, but will also assist in spreading awareness about the challenges faced by kids in wheelchairs. These kids want to dress up just like every other kid, but not every kid gets a costume like these.

3) VOLUNTEER. Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes wants YOU! If you're a designer, costume builder, craftsperson, social media master, or just want to do whatever is needed to help us on this journey, please contact us on the Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes website. There is a form to fill out to become one of our elite “Custom Costume Builders.” (Sign Up Here) We never know what skills we might need until we have a child with a dream.

A variety of some of our costume designs.

Three more designs of various styles.

Where will the Kickstarter funds go?

100% of your pledge money will go to purchasing materials and supplies for these one-of-a-kind wheelchair costumes, and shipping them to the families (if needed). Each costume, depending on the design, can range in price from $100-$250. Any additional funds beyond our $1,000 goal, will be used to build even more costumes for more kids! The more kids we can help, the better! Please consider donating.

Cinderella's Pumpkin Coach

How do kids get a costume from Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes?

Parents can fill out our form on our website, www.WalkinRollin.org, to request a costume. We work with the family to design the costume based on what the child wants. We provide sketches and design concepts for the family to approve.

Frank the combine from the movie "Cars."

If they are outside of the Kansas City Metro area, we then pair them up with a Custom Costume Builder in their area. That way, the builder can meet with the family and can take precise measurements of the chair or equipment. Since every wheelchair is different, it is important to do this to make sure the costume fits properly for Halloween. We would love to build a costume for every family that contacts us. However, if we are unable to locate a Custom Costume Builder in their area, we will still work with the family to help produce what we can from a distance. Some costume parts can easily be built with simple measurements provided by the family and then shipped to the family. Others, we may have to be more creative. It all depends on the costume that the child would like.

Additional costume designs for walkers and wheelchairs.

Our first Custom Costume for Halloween 2015

For Halloween this year, we already have a 5 year old girl in a wheelchair who is very interested in dressing up as R2-D2. Her whole family is dressing up as “Star Wars” characters and we want to make sure that her costume will make for an awesome night. Here is an early concept drawing of that costume.

R2D2 Costume design

How many kids will get a costume from Walkin’ & Rollin’ Costumes?

This year our goal is to build wheelchair costumes for 5 kids in time for Halloween 2015. But the number of children we can build for in the future is only limited by the funds we're able to raise and the number of Custom Costume Builders we can locate. So please pledge! We hope to eventually have a full network of Custom Costume Builders around the nation so we can create these awesome costumes for every child with special needs equipment, and ALWAYS, make them free of charge to the family.

Belle gown that goes around the walker to hide it with the exception of the handles.

The Best Halloween for these kids.

Being in a wheelchair is very tough, especially for a child who just wants to run and play with their friends. My son recently told me that he doesn’t think of his wheelchair as a wheelchair. He thinks of it as part of him. Where ever he goes, the wheelchair goes. So when Halloween comes, he wants all of him to dress up, including his wheelchair. I don't think my son is the only kid who thinks that way, do you?
The 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was celebrated loudly as a victory for supporters of gay “marriage” Friday, and yet, the way the case was decided, using a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, may have opened the floodgates for gun rights reform.

I argued Friday morning that the Obergefell decision validated concealed carry reciprocity nationwide.

By using the Constitution in such a manner, the Court argues that the Due Process Clause extends “certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy” accepted in a majority of states across the state lines of a handful of states that still banned the practice. The vast majority of states are “shall issue” on the matter of issuing concealed carry permits, and enjoy reciprocity with a large number of other states. My North Carolina concealed carry permit, for example, was recognized yesterday as being valid in 36 states, which just so happened to be the number of states in which gay marriage was legal yesterday. But 14 states did not recognize my concealed carry permit yesterday. Today they must. Using the same “due process clause” argument as the Supreme Court just applied to gay marriage, my concealed carry permit must now be recognized as valid in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

What I didn’t know at the time is that a more expansive argument had already made by Marc Greendorfer in an amicus brief attached to the Obergefell case.

In retrospect, it seems short-sighted to believe that the majority decision by the five justice majority in Obergefell would only apply to something as narrow as one kind of state or local gun law.

As Greendorfer argues, if there is any intellectual and logical consistency in the Supreme Court’s arguments at all, the “due process” argument must be applied as equally to state and local gun laws, sweeping them aside entirely, and reaffirming the clear command in the Second Amendment that, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

All, state and local on concealed and open carry would seem to be invalidated, and citizens should be allowed to carry firearms, either openly or concealed, anywhere they want to go.

Dare the Court dare claim that the 14th Amendment’s due process clause only applies in specific and narrow instances?

[Rainbow Gadsden flag image via Pintrest, possibly originating from the work of Benjamin Sapiens at the Washington Blade]
Foretelling the future can be a tricky business. It’s hard to trust your own psychic abilities. They are skills one comes into by accident and design. There are lots of things that you can try. These can help to hone your skill if you’re a beginner or even a seasoned expert. I’ve been reading the cards and getting psychic readings for over three decades. Over the years I’ve consulted with thousands of professionals and clients about what it is you need to know, what you want to know, and how the different systems work.

Keep a Record – It is good magickal practice to keep track of your readings, dreams, and the events that follow. You don’t need to get obsessively anal about it, but if you keep a journal you can begin to see patterns and signs that you may not have recognized otherwise.

– It is good magickal practice to keep track of your readings, dreams, and the events that follow. You don’t need to get obsessively anal about it, but if you keep a journal you can begin to see patterns and signs that you may not have recognized otherwise. Observe your own Thoughts – Consider your own personal observations and associations as they relate to the archetypal symbols present in the Tarot. One of the most important things to remember while reading is “wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

– Consider your own personal observations and associations as they relate to the archetypal symbols present in the Tarot. One of the most important things to remember while reading is “wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” Test and Re-Test – Psychic tests can start with something simple. As your cards a question like will it rain on me today? Or Will I get a call from X in the next 24 hours? Choose simple and verifiable questions to start with. Measure your results against the actual outcomes.

– Psychic tests can start with something simple. As your cards a question like will it rain on me today? Or Will I get a call from X in the next 24 hours? Choose simple and verifiable questions to start with. Measure your results against the actual outcomes. Practice – How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Ok, I’m a New Yorker, I couldn’t pass that joke up. No matter what you are trying to achieve practice goes a long way. Many readers start by doing daily sessions with their cards, some still do.

– How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Ok, I’m a New Yorker, I couldn’t pass that joke up. No matter what you are trying to achieve practice goes a long way. Many readers start by doing daily sessions with their cards, some still do. Make Sure You Have the Right Cards – There are thousands of tarot and oracle decks in existence today, will more being created every day. There are decks based on Pulp Fiction, Fairies, Dragons, and Goddesses. You can find your way with cards inspired by Victorians, Steampunks, Masons, and a whole host of others.

– There are thousands of tarot and oracle decks in existence today, will more being created every day. There are decks based on Pulp Fiction, Fairies, Dragons, and Goddesses. You can find your way with cards inspired by Victorians, Steampunks, Masons, and a whole host of others. Make Sure You Have the Right Spread – Tarot spreads can be very open or very rigid. There are three card spreads to represent the past, present, and future. There are spreads that incorporate the entire deck and are designed to tell the story of an individuals whole life.

– Tarot spreads can be very open or very rigid. There are three card spreads to represent the past, present, and future. There are spreads that incorporate the entire deck and are designed to tell the story of an individuals whole life. Scry or Die – All forms of divination, tarot included, involve opening one’s mind up to new ways of seeing. Most people are used to practicing the art of scrying with a mirror or a crystal ball. These same techniques used with these methods can be utilized with tarot cards. Obviously there is the image one sees on the card, but tarot challenges your mind to think beyond the four edges of the card.

– All forms of divination, tarot included, involve opening one’s mind up to new ways of seeing. Most people are used to practicing the art of scrying with a mirror or a crystal ball. These same techniques used with these methods can be utilized with tarot cards. Obviously there is the image one sees on the card, but tarot challenges your mind to think beyond the four edges of the card. Sleep with your Deck – In many different spiritual tradition the psychic energy of places and things is very important. Sleeping with your tarot cards under your pillow allows you and the cards to access your subconscious power. That way there will be an energy exchange between you.

– In many different spiritual tradition the psychic energy of places and things is very important. Sleeping with your tarot cards under your pillow allows you and the cards to access your subconscious power. That way there will be an energy exchange between you. Only You Know– Ultimately, you are the only person who can attempt to be objective about what you are seeing in the cards. Sometimes you may notice a tendency towards wishful thinking or paranoia. That may be when you need to take a break.

This list of recommendations is only just a beginning, Tarot provides a whole world of possibilities. More information about learning the tarot can be found in our Divination Space Station series. If you are interested in getting a Tarot reading email me at voodoouniverse@yahoo.com

What are your recommendations for learning and trusting your own readings? Please post them in the comments below! If you enjoyed what you have read here please help me out and share, tweet, and pin this post!
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It's an airport that's been frozen in time, with bold architecture that must have seemed space age at the time.

These photographs, which originally appeared in Curbed, of the TWA Terminal at JFK offer a glimpse of the golden age of travel, transporting guests back to what travellers would have experienced in 1962.

Photographer Max Touhey was granted access to capture the closed-to-the-public building just ahead of its transformation into a boutique hotel.

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The lid has been temporarily lifted on the preserved TWA Terminal at JFK, with fascinating images by photographer Max Touhey transporting you back to what travellers would have experienced in 1962, as reported by Curbed

Touhey captured a round capsule departures board at the TWA terminal, as reported by Curbed

The flight centre was the last project of architect Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American designer known for his love of curves, and was completed posthumously in 1962, for the now defunct Trans World Airlines (TWA).

The futuristic building was designed to replicate a bird's spread wings mid flight in reflection of the company's directive, which they stated was to 'capture the spirit of flight.'

Construction on the airport hub lasted six years starting in 1956, and upon completion it was celebrated as an architectural masterpiece that represented a shift in air travel in which middle-class Americans could now afford to fly.

'We wanted passengers passing through the building to experience a fully-designed environment in which each part arises from another and everything belongs to the same formal world,' Mr Saarinen had said about his philosophy behind the design.

The terminal design reflects a bird's spread wings mid flight in reflection of the TWA company's directive, which they stated was to 'capture the spirit of flight' as captured by Max Touhey for Curbed

The flight centre was the last project of architect Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American designer known for his love of curves. The photograph, by Max Touhey, first appeared in Curbed

Plans for the hotel are well underway, with a team preparing a digital 3D model of the airport having taken extensive measurements in June. Photograph courtesy of Max Touhey and Curbed

High-flying: Airline hostesses for TWA are pictured welcoming people aboard a flight back in 1966

Flashback: Two first class seats aboard a TWA jet from London to Washington in the 1960s. One occupied by a caesium beam timepiece accurate to one-millioneth of a second used in the USA's space programme. This clock was being returned to America from South Africa and as it must not be allowed to stop it is connected to a power point in the aircraft during the flight. The other seat is occupied by one of the clock's escorts

Pat Till Twa Air Hostess Who Was Voted Miss Heathrow Airport 1964 With 2nd Place (left) Christine Longthorp, 20, and Linda Stafford, 21

Touhey's photo project was a one-off experience as the TWA terminal has been mainly shut to the public since 2001.

In recent years the building underwent a $20million renovation and opened its doors to design buffs, eager for a peek at the architectural jewel, for just a weekend in 2012.

The Curbed website features about 98 fascinating photos of the terminal plus a time-lapse video which tours guests through the empty halls, brightly coloured carpets and futuristic chairs.

Plans for the hotel are well underway, with a team preparing a digital 3D model of the airport having taken extensive measurements in June.

Golden Age: Architect Eero Saarinen said he 'wanted passengers passing through the building to experience a fully-designed environment

End of an era: The terminal was built for TWA but the airline went bankrupt and was purchased by American Airlines in 2001

After a $20 million renovation project, the building maintained its ambiance of the sixties, including this retro bar

Times gone by: Construction on the airport hub lasted six years, beginning in 1956, and upon completion it was celebrated as an architectural masterpiece

The flight centre was the last project of architect Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American designer known for his love of curves, and was completed posthumously in 1962, for the now defunct Trans World Airlines (TWA)

In recent years the building underwent a $20 million renovation and opened its doors to design buffs, eager for a peek at the architectural jewel, for just a weekend in 2012
It is ok to hate your personal bests. Actually, I’d encourage it. I hate most of mine. When you get a new one, it’s so exciting! You see your name printed next to a fancy new number that you’ve never seen before, and it validates everything you’ve been working towards. But then the next day you wake up, watch the race video and think, ‘I could have gone faster had I just done this, this and this.’ Maybe the next few weeks you’ll still beam with pride when congratulated on the number, but time passes and it grows old. Then you’re sick of it. And then it’s 3 years of self-loathing and conversations about the existence of short tracks. But when I crossed the finish line in South Carolina and saw the clock was way lower than ever before, I flipped out!

In 2012, while a senior at Columbia, I was able to use a few connections to gain a late entry into a small Monday night 1500 at Swarthmore College. Training had been going really well, and racing was on a sharp upswing. I stepped on the line calm and ready, knowing that the 3:39 Olympic Trials qualifying time was well within reach of my fitness. The plan was just to follow the leader, and slowly move up in the field. We strung out immediately, and with the help of Nick Willis pacing for 1300 meters, I ran splits of 59-58-57-41 for the American Collegiate Record* of 3:35.59.

A couple years later I had a conversation with Nick about why that race was so fast, and I think he summed it up perfectly: Most rabbits go out fast, slow down and step off after their slowest 100. Now the athletes behind have lost their momentum, and have to shift gears again to head into the kick. In that race, we were wound up and released.

If your goal is to break 5 minutes in the mile, you can most likely find a race that would set you up for a chance to do it. It’s nice in HS and most of college, to have so many prospective races setup to get the times you are chasing. Unfortunately, at the professional level, you have to earn [deservedly so] the right to be in those races unless you get lucky being in the right place at the right time (i.e-Swarthmore, Furman). Once you reach the Diamond League level, you have world-class rabbits and competition that produce sub 3:35 races with regularity. At a certain level you run into this problem again since 3:26-3:29 races are extremely rare, and getting rabbits that are capable of coming through in 2:45 is a tall order.

From Swarthmore until Furman, the fastest race I had been in was a 3:38.5 race last summer in the ‘C’ heat at Heusden-Zoleder [and I won]. Saturday night at Furman, I was lucky enough to be in a fast race that ran from the gun. We had a fresh and capable rabbit, as well as a couple brave runners who were fearless about attacking the pace and chasing the standard. But as noted, these opportunities are special, and it’s of utmost importance to capitalize on them when they do come. And hopefully then, you run fast enough to climb the ladder and get into the next tier of professional meets. It’s a tough, but fair process.

During our cool down the conversation was overwhelmingly positive about the success of the meet, and we couldn’t help but wonder why there aren’t more races like this in the United States throughout the summer. The atmosphere was intimate, the field was competitive, and the pace was honest. After last summer, having attended the Michigan Track Classic and the Falmouth Mile, I was inspired to create my own race, The Hoka One One Long Island Mile this September 9th. It’s an easy formula to replicate, and if enough individual race organizers through out the country decided to put one of their own on, we could have a competitive domestic circuit in our own backyard during the summer months that could rival Europe’s. The US distance scene is plenty deep, and it’d be a great boost to the local running community and for athletes who cannot afford to spend multiple weeks overseas.

Just food for thought.

A huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders for the next two US Championships by achieving the World/Olympic ‘A’ Standard. I am stepping away with a lot of confidence having closed in 54-mid off an honest pace. Now the focus shifts to the US Championships and a top 3 finish. Back to work!

My next race on the schedule is an 800 this Thursday at the Adrian Martinez Classic in Concord, MA.

(By the way, I think it’s an awesome experience and fully support HS runners getting a chance to compete at professional races. I apologize for the inability of sarcasm to be translated via the Internet.)

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The logical way to start exploring this possibility would be to give elephants the pointing test. But these giant mammals are a lot more challenging to work with than a poodle. In fact, it wasn’t until last year that one of Dr. Byrne’s students, Ms. Smet, was able to run the test.

Ms. Smet traveled to Zimbabwe, where a company called Wild Horizons offers elephant-back safaris. Each morning, while the elephants were waiting to take tourists on a trip, Ms. Smet would set up two buckets behind a screen.

An elephant handler would bring one of the animals a few yards away from her. The elephant watched Ms. Smet lower pieces of fruit behind the screen and put them into one of the buckets. But the elephant couldn’t see which bucket she put the fruit in.

“I actually checked that from elephant height,” Ms. Smet said.

Ms. Smet then brought the buckets out from behind the screen and stood between them. She pointed at the one with the fruit inside, and the handler walked the elephant toward the buckets. Ms. Smet noted which bucket it stuck its trunk in first.

For two months, Ms. Smet tested 11 elephants. When she crunched the data afterward, she found that the elephants picked the right bucket 67.5 percent of the time. (One-year-old human babies do a little better at these tests, scoring 72.7 percent.)

Ms. Smet found that the elephants could follow her pointing whether she stuck out her whole arm or just used her hand. And when she simply stood between the buckets, by contrast, the elephants stuck their trunks in the buckets at random.

Ms. Smet and Dr. Byrne published their results Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The scientists were able to rule out the possibility that the elephants learned to associate pointing with food over the course of the experiments. “They were just as good on Trial 1,” said Dr. Byrne.
The title of this article is conjectural. Though the topic is found within The Simpsons universe, a proper name is not available.

The Blue-Haired Lawyer, is Springfield's most prominent lawyer known for his pasty face, blue hair, New York accent, and nasal voice.

Contents show]

Work

He was first introduced as one of Mr. Burns' many lawyers. Subsequently, he most commonly appears as the lawyer arguing against the Simpsons whenever they wind up in court. He often makes good points against them and wins over the judge. However, he has attempted to aid the Simpson family at least once.[6] He also occasionally appears to serve as a prosecutor.

He worked for "Luvum & Burnham: Family Law" in one episode, where he had a secretary named Uwa (homophone for "YOU WHA?!?!").

His name is never stated, though it's presumably either Luvum or Burnham, given his law firm's name. In one episode, he reveals himself to be the author of a scifi novel called "The 60 Foot Baby" and on the cover he is simply credited as "Burns' Lawyer."

Despite being his lawyer, he is, sometimes, intimidated by Burns. An example of this is when Burn begins losing money, he (and Burns's other lawyers) loses his competence and acts as a yes-man out of fear of his wrath, going as far as to encourage Burns into making bad investments that bankrupt him.[7]

Politics

He is a member of the Springfield Republican Party

He graduated from Springfield University.

Non-Canon Appearances

The contents of this article or section are considered to be non-canon and therefore may not have actually happened/existed.

In the The Simpsons Game , several of him work as The Creator's lawyers/bodyguards.

In The Simpsons Guy, he sues the Pawtucket Patriot brewery for copyright infringement.

Behind the Laughter

Writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss have both stated on the DVD commentaries that the voice is based on McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn, and animator Jim Reardon has said that he is designed to look like character actor Charles Lane.

If you compare him to Milhouse, he has a striking resemblance to yet another adult version of him: plus, thin glasses and tuxedo and minus the humor, voice, and relationship with a Simpson.

His voice sounds similar to Arnie Pye's voice.

Appearances
Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival will return March 2 through April 12, 2018, bringing delicious cuisine, specialty beverages and exciting entertainment to Disneyland Resort guests for its third season. The culinary festival will expand to six weeks, with more days for guests to enjoy the flavors of the Golden State.

More than a dozen Festival Marketplaces will feature California-inspired tastes and sips. Guests will experience presentations and demonstrations with celebrity chefs such as Robert Irvine and Alex Guarnaschelli; food and beverage tastings; winemaker dinners; beer, wine and spirit seminars – all in addition to live music, entertainment and special activities throughout the festival.

The festival’s signature events will include new experiences such as the Disney Family of Wines Dinner, as well as returning favorites like Sweet Sundays and the Winemaker or Brewmaster Dinners. Another guest-favorite returning to the festival is the Junior Chef experience, with hands-on fun led by Chef Goofy, for children ages 3 to 11.

Keep an eye on Disney Parks Blog and Disneyland.com for more information about the Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival, returning March 2 through April 12, 2018!

Additional fees required for the signature events and certain seminars. Separate admission to Disney California Adventure Park is required and is not included with the cost of such events. Space is limited for all ticketed events; advance reservations are recommended. Guests must be 21 years of age or over to consume alcohol and to participate in some events; valid photo ID required. Events and demonstrations are subject to restrictions and change or cancellation without notice.
CTVNews.ca Staff

Four people are recovering in hospital after a frightening fall from a chairlift at a ski resort near Kelowna B.C.

Rescue crews were called to Crystal Mountain Ski Resort on Saturday after a ski lift chair carrying passengers fell more than seven metres to the ground.

One person was airlifted from the scene while three others were taken to Kelowna General Hospital by ambulance.

Officials say two of the injured remain in critical condition.

Resort staff have confirmed that the injured include two ski patrollers, a ski instructor, and a visitor to the resort.

Mike Morin, the resort’s manager, says this is an extremely rare circumstance and the first time an incident like this has happened since the resort opened in 1967.

“One of the empty chairs was swinging and struck the tower, tower number two, on our double chair and caused a deropement and the chair came down to the ground,” he told CTV Vancouver.

Witnesses say they saw the passengers tumble to the ground.

“From what I saw, they fell pretty hard,” said Carson Moss.

Tyler Mow told CTV Vancouver that the ski lift did not feel right when he was on it.

“The chairs felt springy earlier in the day,” Mow said.

“We were just commenting that it felt funny and that something was different.”

While paramedics rushed to treat the victims, other skiers remained stuck on the lift and had to be evacuated.

“We had to wait for everyone to come up and harness us down,” said Kaite Cornet.

Officials say an inspection of the chair lift will now take place to determine what went wrong.

With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Norma Reid
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

The more pertinent question is, since when did Iran have a drone program? Ah, that dates back to 2011, when President Obama literally gave Iran U.S. drone technology, during the RQ 170 incident. I know, you think I'm making this up. Why would Obama do anything at all for the Persians, stemming from giving them drone technology to removing sanctions, to paying them billions for the release of US hostages? You'd have to ask him. But I do know this. Source: Wikipedia:

On 12 December 2011, U.S. administration asked Iran to return the captured U.S. drone.[27] The day before, on 11 December, General Salami stated that "no nation welcomes other countries' spy drones in its territory, and no one sends back the spying equipment and its information back to the country of origin."[28] On 13 December 2011, Defence Minister of Iran, dismissed the request and said "Instead of apologising to the Iranian nation, it is brazenly asking for the drone back." And the ministry spokesman, Mehmanparast, stated that "it seems he [Obama] has forgotten that Iran’s airspace was violated, spying operations were undertaken, international laws were violated and that Iran’s internal affairs were interfered with. ... Instead of an official apology and admitting to this violation, they are making this request."[29] Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney criticised Obama's decisions on the drone, saying that, after the aircraft went down, the president should have ordered an air strike within Iran: "The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air ... and, in effect, make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone." Instead, "he asked nicely for them to return it, and they aren't going to".[30] On 17 January 2012, an Iranian company said it would send miniature, pink, toy versions of the captured drone to President Obama as a response to the request for sending the drone back.

On 10 December 2011, Iran announced that it intended to carry out reverse engineering on the captured RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft.[6] In April 2012, the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution claimed to have succeeded in extracting the entirety of the data collected by the drone and are currently in the process of building a replica of the aircraft.[33] Iran claimed to have been approached by countries, including China and Russia, seeking information on the drone.[34] Although U.S. officials expressed concern over the possibility of China or Russia receiving the drone's technology, they cast doubt on whether Iran could replicate the technology of the aircraft, as well as the amount of intelligence data available, due to the precautions installed for malfunctioning drones.[35] On May 2014, Iranian state TV displayed what was claimed to be a reverse engineered RQ-170. Sources familiar with the RQ-170's design say that the Iranian RQ-170 is merely a static mock-up rather than a flyable aircraft.[36] In November 2014 Iran claimed to have carried out a successful test flight of an aircraft based on reverse engineering of the RQ-170.

The armed pro-regime Shaheed-129 UAV was shot down by a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle about 12:30 a.m. after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on Coalition forces. This is the second the U.S. shot down an Iranian drone in less than a month. The coalition forces were manning an established combat outpost to the northeast of At Tanf where they are training and advising partner ground forces in the fight against ISIS. This is the same location where another pro-regime UAV dropped munitions near Coalition forces before it was shot down on June 8. The F-15E intercepted the armed UAV after it was observed advancing on the coalition position. The armed UAV was shot down when it continued to advance on the coalition's position without diverting its course.

Shortly thereafter, Iran announced it has reverse engineered it.Isn't that heartwarming? Fast forward to today, the United States shot down an Iranian drone over the Syria -- the second drone this month.The Iranian Shaheed 129 drone looks very similar to the MQ-1 Predator Drone made by General Atomics, who sells these armed UCAVs to UAE and Turkey.MQ1Iran's Shaheed 129While the country obsesses over Russian phantoms, the DOD is in the process of expanding an illegal war in Syria -- furthering a neocon strategy that has wreaked havoc upon America's balance sheet for the past 30 years.
3D Systems abandons its Cube printers, but DRM means you can't buy filament from anyone else

3D printing giant 3D Systems has experienced a terrible year and a change in leadership, and seems to be backing away from consumer products, meaning that it's orphaned its Cube home 3D printers.

But the Cube was born dead, because it was born with DRM. It only accepts filament -- its 3D equivalent to inkjet ink -- that comes in a package that's been cryptographically signed by the manufacturer. Thanks to laws like the US DMCA, the European Union Copyright Directive and Canada's Bill C-11, it's a crime to defeat this measure and load third-party filament into your printer. That means that once the existing stock of Cube filament is gone, there will be no legal way to keep using your Cube printer.

The US Copyright Office did grant a three-year, expiring exception allowing 3D printer owners to jailbreak their devices, but it has so many conditions as to be unusable, and it also doesn't grant an exception for the tools necessary to jailbreak your printer. So even if you satisfy the criteria, you still have to make your own jailbreaking tool from scratch.

Michael Weinberg points out that 3DS can do two things to make up for their stupid DRM strategy:

Since the Cube is designed to only accept printing filament made by 3D Systems, as part of winding down the Cube - and as an act of good faith to Cube owners - 3D Systems should explicitly open the doors to third party filament. This can take the form of two simple public commitments. First, 3D Systems can promise not to sue any Cube users who use non-3D Systems filament for the Cube. Second, 3D Systems can promise not to sue anyone who wants to make and sell filament that will work with the Cube. Doing both requires circumventing the verification chip that 3D Systems includes in its filament today.

Free the Cube [Michael Weinberg]
It’s presidential election season, so it’s obligatory for all candidates to talk about jobs. You have already heard a lot about jobs being lost to China and Mexico (a strong concern of Donald Trump), jobs being outsourced to low-wage countries or moved to tax havens (so-called “tax inversions” are a Hillary Clinton bugaboo), or jobs eliminated because of Obamacare or high minimum wages (a favorite Ted Cruz line).

You won’t hear many of the points below, however, either because they are too positive, too subtle to capture in a sound bite, or too long-term to worry about now. But if you want the truth about American jobs, you may want to keep reading rather than tuning into a presidential debate or stump speech.

Times Are Good

It’s hardly a bad time for jobs overall—official unemployment is at the lowest rate since 2008, and applications for unemployment insurance were at the lowest level since 1973. You won’t hear that from the Republican candidates, of course—the news is much too sanguine. If there’s a problem, it is with low labor force participation, which has dropped several percentage points over the last decade. As testimony before a Joint Economic Committee suggests, there are a variety of reasons for this, although an aging population is clearly part of the issue.

The Lack of Middle Class Jobs

Growing inequality is another big issue—the hallmark of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and an issue that is occasionally even mentioned by Republican candidates. An overall lack of jobs is less of a problem for our economy, however, than the shortage of well-paying, middle class jobs.

Many of the new jobs in the US over the last decade or two have been low-end service jobs—feeding, selling to, and taking care of our fellow Americans. These jobs don’t generally produce a lot of revenue or grow much in productivity, so it’s difficult for businesses to pay high wages to workers who perform them. And that situation isn’t going to change much no matter who is president. As a New York Times article points out, our economy is a service economy, and it’s been going in that direction for several decades now.

Free Trade Isn’t the Problem

There is little doubt that some of our well-paying manufacturing jobs have gone to places like Mexico and China. But recent trade deals aren’t the problem, capitalism is. For several centuries now, manufacturing has moved to places where it’s done most cheaply and effectively. And for most industries, that place hasn’t been the U.S. for a while.

Donald Trump’s bluster notwithstanding, it seems highly unlikely that any president could change this much. As a society we don’t generally like to tell businesspeople where they can produce stuff, and we don’t like paying high tariffs for stuff made elsewhere. Corporate moves to low-tax countries do some damage to our tax base, but they don’t tend to involve many jobs.

Automation Is Good

Ironically, our best hope for bringing manufacturing jobs home is automation. Also ironically, the same is true for outsourced service jobs. Since the U.S. is one of the world’s leaders in automation technologies, we’ve got some chance of bringing jobs home if we have the best automation capabilities and the people who are best at working with automation technologies.

In factories, this means technologists who can install, maintain, and optimize robots, CAD/CAM, and flexible manufacturing cells. In services, it means working with tools like robotic process automation and cognitive technologies that can do work previously outsourced to low-wage countries. Whether in factories or offices, all those automation machines need people to configure, install, and tend them. Because most of the actual work is done by machines, there won’t be huge numbers of jobs that will come home this way, but there will be some.

Information Technology is a Drag

Information technology hasn’t eliminated a lot of jobs, but it is keeping some from growing. Take bank tellers, for example. Contrary to what President Obama said in a 2014 interview, automated teller machines haven’t led to many fewer jobs in that field. Mr. Obama may not run into them when he needs cash, but the number of bank tellers in the U.S. has remained pretty constant since 1980, when ATMs really took off. Of course, the U.S. has grown a lot in population since 1980, but the number of tellers hasn’t. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of tellers will decline about 8% over the next decade—not a precipitous decline, but certainly not a growth occupation either.

The Service Sector Slowdown

In the future, many lower-level service jobs are going to stop growing—if not decline—because of technology. There are already some pretty capable technologies that automate truck and taxi driving, hamburger ordering and preparation, lawn mowing, and so forth. They’ll get better and cheaper over time. Human workers will get more expensive. If I were in one of these fields, I’d learn how to sell, install, or fix these machines.

Professionals Should Be Wary

The same is true for many professional jobs. There are already smart machines that can do some of the key tasks of lawyers, doctors, marketers, journalists, and even scientists. Not all of the incumbents of these knowledge work roles will lose their jobs, but some will. If you don’t want to be one of the losers, again, your best bet is to make sure you know how to work alongside these machines and add value to them.

The lessons from all this are pretty clear. If you’re voting for your preferred candidate because you believe they can reverse the economic trends of the last several decades, you might want to reconsider your choice or your reason for it. You may also want to think about whether you want your candidate to bring about more jobs or less inequality. The policies that lead to these objectives are different (though they are both quite difficult to achieve), and candidates tend to emphasize one or the other.

Whether you prefer lower unemployment or higher incomes, helping Americans get more college degrees is still a good idea, although it probably won’t be the boon that it’s been in the past. And if you want to be assured of a job over the next few decades, learn how to work closely with smart machines and to do something they can’t.

Thomas H. Davenport is a Distinguished Professor at Babson College and a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital. With Julia Kirby, he is the author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines (Harper Business, 2016).
Despite the blur of activity by innumerable candidates, the 2016 presidential campaign so far is a mostly shapeless enterprise, save for one dominant factor: the prominence of money in the narrative. More than anything, money has been the defining characteristic of the race, highlighted by the political and private activities of the brand names of Clinton and Bush.

In their own ways, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush have brought unintentional attention to the role of money in politics and public life, to the intersection of money and political and public influence, and to the general absence of restraints, self-imposed or enforced.

For Clinton, the story is partly about non-campaign money, about fundraising for the Clinton Foundation as well as the extraordinary amounts of money she and former president Bill Clinton have been paid for speeches since early 2014. For Bush, it is the apparent disregard for the spirit of campaign finance laws as he travels the country, filling up his super PAC with tens and tens of millions of dollars, all the while posing as someone still trying to decide whether he will become a candidate.

Clinton cannot shake off questions and criticism about how she and her husband have cashed in after leaving public service. Even though much had been written about the amounts each of the Clintons was being paid for speeches to corporate, trade-association or educational institutions, the revelation last week that they have received about $25 million for 104 speeches since early 2014 was eye-popping.

Hillary Clinton likes to say the deck is stacked against average Americans. She said Tuesday in Iowa that she wants to “reshuffle” that deck. No doubt that is a genuine belief from a Democratic politician looking at the state of the economy and comes with a conviction that public policies can and should be geared to alleviate the imbalance, at least somewhat.

But she and her husband also are evidence of the imbalance. Bill Clinton’s declaration that he will continue to make paid speeches because, as he told NBC News, “I gotta pay our bills” sounds tone-deaf in the face of it all.

The Clinton Foundation points to another problem of a Clinton presidential candidacy: the potential conflicts of interest — real or perceived — that the foundation’s fundraising could pose should Hillary Clinton win the White House in 2016. The charitable foundation does good work — few would dispute that. But the sources of money are not all equal, particularly foreign governments. Appearances count.

As a candidate, Clinton has chosen to make money in politics one of the pillars of her platform. From the day she did her first campaign event in Iowa in April, she has talked about her belief that the campaign finance system needs to be reformed, even if it takes a constitutional amendment to do so.

[Clinton seeks justices who would overturn Citizens United]

She told fundraisers last week and repeated in Iowa on Monday that, as president, she would apply a virtual litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, seeking justices who favor overturning the Citizens United decision, which is credited with bringing about the era of super PACs and the further empowerment of billionaire donors at the expense of everyone else.

That’s an extraordinary statement, perhaps proof that she is truly committed to changing a system that has led to a dramatic escalation in fundraising and spending, to levels unheard of not long ago, and to the empowerment of the wealthiest people in society. Even those who raise and spend the money for campaigns say it is too much, that it is obscene and distorting and possibly corrupting. Without doubt, it is contributing to the cynicism with which many Americans view the political process.

A constitutional amendment, however, is years in the future. It might never happen. In the here and now, are there steps other than rhetorical commitments that Clinton could take to show some break with the past? So far, there have not been any. Why not? In fact, she is exploring ways for her campaign to coordinate directly with a recently formed super PAC, Correct the Record, in what will test the limits of the law.

Former U.S. senator and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that she’s running for president in 2016. Here's the Democrat’s take on women’s rights, Benghazi and more, in her own words. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post)

No rational campaign strategist would tell her to do anything that would limit her ability to compete. In other words, no unilateral disarmament. As the saying goes, they gotta pay the campaign bills, and those bills will be costly. Still, it’s a question worth asking, and an explanation worth hearing, from a candidate who has put the issue front and center at the start of her campaign.

Meanwhile, Bush continues on with the ruse that he is still deciding whether to run — as he regularly says in front of audiences, the lawyers make him issue a qualifier to keep him on the right side of the law. No one in any audience is fooled.

This, after all, is coming from someone who, since late last year, has been running aggressively, who has made multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina to address voters and participate in cattle calls, who has hired a first-rate staff of strategists and communicators, and who has cozied up to rich people in small gatherings in New York and California and Illinois and Florida and Texas.

Once he becomes a candidate, the rules will sharply limit Bush’s ability to coordinate activities with his super PAC. Until he is a candidate, he can remain in the thick of building a war chest, coordinating strategy, sharing data and analysis, talking directly to advisers who will later be walled off. He can personally work out which responsibilities will fall to his campaign and which will go to the super PAC.

Bush is helping to stockpile money in his super PAC in a way no previous candidate has ever done — and in ways none of his prospective rivals are doing. He is creating a new model, one that may be within the letter of the law but that nonetheless mocks a long-ago-shredded system of campaign finance. His one effort at restraint, if it can be called that, was to ask super-PAC donors at one point to limit contributions to $1 million.

Campaign money has rarely been a voting issue for most Americans, however much they deplore the expense of campaigns and the distortions it brings to the way politicians spend their time. It probably won’t be an issue in 2016. But there is no escaping the fact that campaign and non-campaign money continues to define and shape the 2016 race — and at least two of its leading candidates.
EMBED >More News Videos NASA says it is ready to send its next generation space craft on its maiden voyage

EMBED >More News Videos NASA has picked Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the International Space Station

Saturday was NASA's second shot at inflating the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module , named for the aerospace company that created it as a precursor to moon and Mars habitat.

EMBED >More News Videos NASA has selected the four astronauts who will train for and launch from US soil for the first time since 2011.

NASA's Space Exploration Vehicle has reached downtown Houston after a trip up the Gulf Freeway.NASA usually looks to the stars, but today all eyes were on I-45 as the space agency hit the road to downtown Houston.The Space Exploration Vehicle is a big machine that NASA hopes will one day be used by astronauts to explore other planets. NASA moved it to Discovery Green for the Super Bowl fan festival taking place there.To get this thing from the Johnson Space Center to Discovery Green, it had to be driven up the Gulf Freeway on a tractor trailer, complete with police escort.
A state of emergency has been declared on the Vanuatu island of Ambae, as the volcano that towers from the island's centre continued to erupt, forcing thousands to flee their villages.

The volcano - known as Monaro - has been rumbling for weeks, but its activity increased rapidly on Saturday, when it started belching ash across much of the island, blanketing villages and crops in the north and south.

Photo: Vanuatu Disaster Management Office

That prompted authorities to evacuate half the island's population - at least 5000 people - from the north and south of the island, sending them to the east and west.

"It's quite a serious emergency," said Manuel Amu, the chairman of the island's disaster committee. "Moving people from their communities into an area with very limited houses and very limited resources like food and water. It's really a challenging issue.

"At the moment the volcano has blown up ash and dark smoke, with a little bit of lava," he said in an interview.

New Zealand scientists were monitoring the volcanic activity with an Air Force Orion due to fly over Vanuatu today.

GNS vulcanologist Steve Sherburn told Morning Report recent photographs showed it could have a devastating impact on the island.

"There's now a cone in the lake that's completely isolated from the water. So it means the eruptions will be dry and therefore will produce a lot more ash.

"And this is where we are going to get the impact on people living downwind and [their] agriculture."

The country's Geohazards Department on Saturday raised its alert for Ambae from level three to four, which is classified as a "moderate eruption state." According to a department spokesperson, the volcano's activity had not changed on Monday, with no increase nor decrease in the intensity of the eruption.

Photo: Vanuatu Disaster Management Office

However, earlier in the weekend authorities swung into action to relocate thousands of people from the remote villages scattered across the rugged, bush-covered 400 square kilometre island, which sits between Santo and Pentecost about halfway up the Vanuatu archipelago.

Several ships had been deployed around the coast to pick up evacuees - as many as 1000 people on one journey, said Mr Amu - and cars and trucks packed to the hilt made their way across the island's narrow, winding and bumpy tracks to safety.

Peter Korisa, the operations manager at the National Disaster Management Office in Port Vila, said authorities were taking action now in case the eruption intensified.

"The major hazard at the moment is to do with ash fall and acid rain. We're using whatever resource we have, some local vessels, commercial vessels, as well as the local transport," he said. "We want to be more proactive before we have to worry about pyroclast (where rocks and other fragments are hurled by the eruption) and stuff like that."

Mr Korisa said evacuation was compulsory and police officers were being used to help convince people to move.

Photo: Vanuatu Geohazards Department

About 15 evacuation centres had been opened in the east and west, mostly in schools and community halls, Mr Amu said. However, assistance from the national government would be needed to deal with such large displacement.

"We've got enough accommodation. But at the moment we have to carry out an assessment to consider other issues relating to sick people, the pregnant women and children and people with special needs. We also have to address the issue of food security, wash, and probably education for those schools which have been closed," said Mr Amu.

One option, Mr Amu said, was to relocate the vulnerable to neighbouring islands - including Pentecost and Maewo - to help ease the burden on Ambae, which he said already lacked the resources to cope.

"The provincial government has been for the last two weeks trying to support these people," he said. "We put our request for the national government to come in if possible to support us with food and water and other necessities.

"At the moment we need help from the national level and if necessary then we need overseas friends to help us with the situation we are facing."

Photo: Vanuatu Geohazards Department

According to the government, the state of emergency it declared on Monday would immediately release funding and national resources for such support.

Most of Ambae live on subsistence crops, which were being pelted with ash and acid rain. Additionally, most peoples' water supply came from rainwater tanks, which were now also contaminated. Mr Amu said while only half the island was being evacuated, the whole island would need assistance.

Further west, residents on the country's largest island, Santo, said crops risked being ruined by ash if the wind direction did not change.

The last time there was a significant eruption on Ambae was in 2005, when a similar evacuation of 5000 people was carried out. It was as long as three months before people could return to villages and there were many complaints of evacuees being contained in squalid conditions.

Photo: Vanuatu Geohazards Observatory file

Mr Korisa admitted conditions for evacuees would likely be basic again this time around. "There is an issue with basic services," he said. "We're talking about islands that don't have electricity and the water system is a big challenge for us. In 2005 there was the same incident and it's the same situation again we're trying to deal with. We're hoping to have learned from that."

However Mr Amu said things were worse than 12 years ago. "In 2005, the evacuation had been done on level 3 [alert]. At the moment the volcano is on stage 4 and at the moment it's more serious than in 2005 and I think it would take much longer than what happened [then].

"Hopefully this time most of the challenges, we hope those challenges won't occur again. That's why we called in the national director of disaster to intervene very quickly during the weekend," said Mr Amu.

He said authorities were also preparing for the possibility that the eruption could get worse. If the alert level was raised from four to five, the entire island may have to be evacuated, and authorities were preparing for such a situation while hoping it would never come to fruition.

"Most people are not coping very well," Mr Amu said. "We're feeling the pressures."
Averil Macdonald, the chair of shale gas lobby group UK Onshore Oil and Gas, recently made some highly controversial statements about how she believes gender impacts a person’s feelings about fracking.

During an interview with The Times of London, Macdonald argued that men are generally more in favor of fracking–the controversial drilling technique used to mine shale gas–because they’re influenced by an “awful lot of facts.”

Macdonald may not be wrong that gender plays a role in how fracking is viewed; a University of Nottingham survey found recently that, out of a pool of approximately 7,000 participants, women were less likely to approve of fracking than men or to correctly identify shale gas as the fossil fuel produced by the process.

A board member of Women in Science and Engineering, an organization dedicated to encouraging women to enter STEM fields, Macdonald says that women’s judgement is clouded by our emotions and dedication to family. Speaking to The Times, she argued that women compensate for their lack of formal scientific education by instead trusting their “gut reaction”:

Frequently the women haven’t had very much in the way of a science education because they may well have dropped science at 16. That is just a fact. Women do tend not to have continued with science. Not only do [they] show more of a concern about fracking, they also know that they don’t know and they don’t understand. They are concerned because they don’t want to be taking [something] on trust. And that’s actually entirely reasonable. But women, for whatever reason, have not been persuaded by the facts. More facts are not going to make any difference. What we have got to do is understand the gut reaction, the feel. The dialogue is more important than the dissemination of facts. Women are always concerned about threats to their family more than men. We are naturally protective of our children. I would similarly be concerned but I read the literature and I feel comfortable that I understand. What I hope is that I can make the women who are concerned comfortable that the myths they are worried about are myths.

Macdonald went on to say that more high-level female executives are needed in the shale industry, and that the ten executives who interviewed her for her current position were all men.

According to The Telegraph, she’s currently spearheading a campaign to convince women of the benefits of fracking.

(via The Independent)

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

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Hulu has acquired exclusive subscription-streaming rights to Syfy’s time-travel thriller “12 Monkeys” under a deal with NBCUniversal.

In addition, under the expanded NBCU deal, Hulu has acquired the full library of programming for series “Battlestar Galactica” and “Saved by the Bell,” which are available to stream now. The deal also adds episodes of popular children’s series including “Bob the Builder,” “Thomas and Friends” and “Barney.”

The first season of “12 Monkeys” will premiere exclusively on Hulu on Feb. 24, available to subscribers. The series, from Universal Cable Prods., will return for its second season on Syfy on Monday, April 18. The deal is structured by NBCU to drive interest in the show by letting viewers catch up on Hulu ahead of the season 2 bow on TV. It’s a tactic NBC and others have used in the past with subscription VOD services.

“12 Monkeys” follows the journey of James Cole, who’s sent back in time to prevent a dark and hellish future from ever happening. The series stars Aaron Stanford as Cole, along with Amanda Schull, Kirk Acevedo, Emily Hampshire, Barbara Sukowa and Todd Stashwick.

Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett (“Nikita”) are executive producers and showrunners, with Charles Roven (“Batman v. Superman,” “Suicide Squad,” “American Hustle”) and Richard Suckle (“Suicide Squad,” “American Hustle,” “The International”) as executive producers. Atlas Entertainment and Roven produced the original “12 Monkeys” film — which starred Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt and Madeline Stowe — on which the series is based.

NBCU is one of Hulu’s parent companies, along with 21st Century Fox and Disney.
55User Rating: 5 out of 5

Review title of Deanne Thank you for still giving users time with this app

(for PC): While it's a decent bookmarking alternative, I dislike the layout and navigation. I'm disappointed that I can't import it into Edge, but it's understandable considering the circumstances. What I found insulting and misleading was the solution: open each link in Edge, one by one, save. It is the solution but it was poorly executed. Moving on, Importing the links as favorites and then manually/optionally saving it within the browser is clearly a better alternative. Ideally, I'd use Reading List as my default bookmarking as it appears to sync seamlessly. Edge is rather limited at this early stage of development. On that note, backing up and exporting favorites in Edge would be nice. (WP8.1) I like using this app on my phone. One request: Disable saving duplicates, if possible. Thank you. via WP10: When I wiped my PC's hard drive I assumed I'd lose my favorites saved to Edge. I was wrong. Importing Reading List into Edge also changed awhile ago. Thank you very much.
The rock icon was 66

Tom Petty‘s death has been confirmed. The US rock icon suffered a cardiac arrest. He was 66. Check out the star-studded tributes to the icon below.

After suffering a cardiac arrest, rumours of the rock icon’s passing spread yesterday. Now, his death has been confirmed by Tony Dimitriades, longtime manager of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Dimitriades confirmed Petty’s death on behalf of the performer’s family.

Petty formed The Heartbreakers in 1976, and their self-titled debut album was released the same year. It featured Petty’s classic song ‘American Girl’. Petty’s breakthrough came with his band’s third album ‘Damn the Torpedoes’ in 1979. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers last released an album in 2014 in the form of 13th LP ‘Hypnotic Eye’.

As well as his career with the Heartbreakers, Petty also co-founded supergroup the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison.

The news of Petty’s death comes following initial confusion and contradicting reports about Petty’s condition.

TMZ were the first outlet to report that Petty was rushed to UCLA Santa Monica Hospital on Sunday night (October 1) after being found unconscious, “not breathing and in full cardiac arrest” at his home in Malibu, California. The report added that Petty had been put on life support and his condition was thought to be “critical”.

Sharethrough (Mobile)

However, the website later reported that “after Petty got to the hospital he had no brain activity and a decision was made to pull life support”. They later issued an update that described previous reports of Petty’s death as “inaccurate”, adding that the musician was “still clinging to life” but “not expected to live throughout the day“.

CBS News had also reported confirmation of Petty’s death, citing a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD was later forced to release a statement saying that it had “no information about the passing of singer Tom Petty” and that “initial information was inadvertently provided to some media sources”. CBS then retracted their original story.

Petty recently concluded a 40th anniversary tour with his band The Heartbreakers. The final date took place at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on September 22.

The music world pays tribute

Tributes have been pouring in following the news of Petty’s death. Bob Dylan has issued a statement and you can see more tributes below.

Nothing left to say A post shared by Taylor Momsen (@taylormomsen) on Oct 2, 2017 at 1:25pm PDT
The battle over marriage equality in Iowa is heating up as Republicans in the State House are moving forward with plans to ban gay marriage and civil unions, an attempt to reverse a unanimous 2009 State Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality. To amend the constitution, “an amendment would require approval by state lawmakers during two legislative sessions, and then approval by voters at the ballot box.” Encouraged by major Republican gains in the midterm elections and the removal of three pro-equality Justices through retention votes, Iowa Republicans have emphasized restrictions on gay-rights and reproductive-rights in their legislative agenda, and Religious Right leader Bob Vander Plaats is pressing for the removal of the entire Supreme Court.

Vander Plaats’s new organization, The Family Leader, recently blasted pro-equality faith leaders in an alert message that questions their faith, stating: “167 ‘religious’ leaders signed a letter delivered to the Iowa Legislature saying that people of faith support homosexual ‘marriage.’ Don’t stay silent while others speak for you and misrepresnt [sic] God.” The group calls on pastors to sign an alternative petition which describes “homosexual behavior” as “immoral and sinful” and “harmful both to the individuals who choose to participate in it and the society that chooses to accept it.”

The mobilization of pastors by The Family Leader comes at a time when, according to the Des Moines Register, Republican leaders are trying to prohibit not only gay marriage but also other forms of legal rights for gay couples such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. The Register reports:
rplotengine: R as a Plotting Engine

Generate basic charts either by custom applications, or from a small script launched from the system console, or within the R console. Two ASCII text files are necessary: (1) The graph parameters file, which name is passed to the function 'rplotengine()'. The user can specify the titles, choose the type of the graph, graph output formats (e.g. png, eps), proportion of the X-axis and Y-axis, position of the legend, whether to show or not a grid at the background, etc. (2) The data to be plotted, which name is specified as a parameter ('data_filename') in the previous file. This data file has a tabulated format, with a single character (e.g. tab) between each column, and a headers line located in the first row. Optionally, the file could include data columns for showing confidence intervals.

Version: 1.0-7 Depends: R (≥ 2.6.2), xtable Published: 2018-08-07 Author: Pedro-Pablo Garrido Abenza [aut, cre] Maintainer: Pedro-Pablo Garrido Abenza <pgarrido at umh.es> License: GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)] URL: http://www.umh.es NeedsCompilation: no CRAN checks: rplotengine results

Downloads:

Linking:
There are new accusations that the Justice Department colluded with the Clinton campaign about the Democratic candidate's court cases, according to new revelations in emails released by WikiLeaks.

The May 2015 email from Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said, “DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in this case this morning, so we could have a window into the judge's thinking about this proposed production schedule as quickly as today.”

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a supporter of Donald Trump, weighed in this morning, telling Tucker Carlson that the corruption of the Justice Department started with then-Attorney General Eric Holder being found in contempt of Congress.

Clarke said that has continued under Loretta Lynch, pointing out her secret meeting with Bill Clinton shortly before the FBI announced there would be no charges against Mrs. Clinton over her private email server.

"The corruption is all throughout the government. It's the courts, it's our institutions of government, the higher-ups at the FBI, the DOJ, the Congress, on and on and on," said Clarke, adding that the only way it will change is through the ballot box.

"I believe that the American people are finally going to have to rise up. It is 'pitchfork and torches' time, to use a metaphor, in America to get these people out of here and for the citizens of America to take this country back."

Carlson pointed out that if people begin to believe that some powerful people are held to a different legal standard, it's a "threat to our system itself."

Watch the full interview above.

Gingrich: 'Republicans Willing to Help Hillary' Belong in the Dem. Party

WikiLeaks Dump: Top Clinton Aides Mock Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity

McCain: 'The Clintons Don't Live by the Same Laws We Do'

Trump: 'Shackles Are Off Me,' Now I Can Fight for America My Way
It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience?

In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.

But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose, that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause of behavior.

In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.

Though the precise way in which the mind could do this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before feeling an actual touch further up our arm. “Postdictive” illusions of this sort are typically explained by noting that there’s a delay in the time it takes information out in the world to reach conscious awareness: Because it lags slightly behind reality, consciousness can “anticipate” future events that haven’t yet entered awareness, but have been encoded subconsciously, allowing for an illusion in which the experienced future alters the experienced past.

In one of our studies, participants were repeatedly presented with five white circles in random locations on a computer monitor and were asked to quickly choose one of the circles in their head before one lit up red. If a circle turned red so fast that they didn’t feel like they were able to complete their choice, participants could indicate that they ran out of time. Otherwise, they indicated whether they had chosen the red circle (before it turned red) or had chosen a different circle. We explored how likely people were to report a successful prediction among these instances in which they believed that they had time to make a choice.

Unbeknownst to participants, the circle that lit up red on each trial of the experiment was selected completely randomly by our computer script. Hence, if participants were truly completing their choices when they claimed to be completing them—before one of the circles turned red—they should have chosen the red circle on approximately 1 in 5 trials. Yet participants’ reported performance deviated unrealistically far from this 20% probability, exceeding 30% when a circle turned red especially quickly. This pattern of responding suggests that participants’ minds had sometimes swapped the order of events in conscious awareness, creating an illusion that a choice had preceded the color change when, in fact, it was biased by it.

Importantly, participants’ reported choice of the red circle dropped down near 20% when the delay for a circle to turn red was long enough that the subconscious mind could no longer play this trick in consciousness and get wind of the color change before a conscious choice was completed. This result ensured that participants weren’t simply trying to deceive us (or themselves) about their prediction abilities or just liked reporting that they were correct.

In fact, the people who showed our time-dependent illusion were often completely unaware of their above-chance performance when asked about it in debriefing after the experiment was over. Moreover, in a related experiment, we found that the bias to choose correctly was not driven by confusion or uncertainty about what was chosen: Even when participants were highly confident in their choice, they showed a tendency to “choose” correctly at an impossibly high rate.

Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be systematically misled about how we make choices, even when we have strong intuitions to the contrary. Why, though, would our minds fool us in such a seemingly silly way in the first place? Wouldn’t this illusion wreak havoc on our mental lives and behavior?

Maybe not. Perhaps the illusion can simply be explained by appeal to limits in the brain’s perceptual processing, which only messes up at the very short time scales measured in our (or similar) experiments and which are unlikely to affect us in the real world.

A more speculative possibility is that our minds are designed to distort our perception of choice and that this distortion is an important feature (not simply a bug) of our cognitive machinery. For example, if the experience of choice is a kind of causal inference, as Wegner and Wheatley suggest, then swapping the order of choice and action in conscious awareness may aid in the understanding that we are physical beings who can produce effects out in the world. More broadly, this illusion may be central to developing a belief in free will and, in turn, motivating punishment.

Yet, whether or not there are advantages to believing we’re more in control of our lives than we actually are, it’s clear that the illusion can go too far. While a quarter-of-a-second distortion in time experience may be no big deal, distortions at longer delays—which might plague people with mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—could substantially and harmfully warp people’s fundamental views about the world. People with such illnesses may begin to believe that they can control the weather or that they have an uncanny ability to predict other people’s behavior. In extreme cases, they may even conclude that they have god-like powers.

It remains to be seen just how much the postdictive illusion of choice that we observe in our experiments connects to these weightier aspects of daily life and mental illness. The illusion may only apply to a small set of our choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. Or it may be pervasive and ubiquitous—governing all aspects of our behavior, from our most minute to our most important decisions. Most likely, the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. Whatever the case may be, our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong.
GLOVERSVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Authorities say the chilly relationship between rival upstate New York ice cream truck operators got out of hand this season, with Sno Cone Joe trying to chase Mr. Ding-A-Ling out of the market.

Gloversville police tell local media outlets two Sno Cone Joe operators face harassment and stalking charges after confrontations last month that included one of them yelling "This is my town!" at a Mr. Ding-A-Ling driver.

The driver told police that Sno Cone Joe owners Joshua Malatino and Amanda Scott followed his truck, playing their music at high volume and trying to lure away customers with promises of free ice cream.

Malatino and Scott were charged Tuesday with second-degree harassment, a violation, and fourth-degree stalking, a misdemeanor. A message left for their lawyer wasn't initially returned Wednesday.
A team led by postdoctoral associate John Heron of Cornell University has developed a room-temperature magnetoelectric memory design that replaces power-hungry electric currents with an electric field. It could lead to low-power, instant-on computing devices.

“The advantage here is low energy consumption,” Heron said. “It requires a low voltage, without current, to switch it. Devices that use currents consume more energy and dissipate a significant amount of that energy in the form of heat. That is what’s heating up your computer and draining your batteries.”

The researchers made their device out of bismuth ferrite, which is both magnetic and ferroelectric, meaning it’s always electrically polarized; and that polarization can be switched by applying an electric field.

This rare combination makes it a “multiferroic” material, allowing for it to be used for nonvolatile memory devices with relatively simple geometries. Other scientists have demonstrated similar results with competing materials, but at impractical cold temperatures, like 4 Kelvin (-452 Fahrenheit).

Their results were published online Dec. 17 in Nature, along with an associated “News and Views” article.

Collaborators from the University of Connecticut; University of California, Berkeley; Tsinghua University; and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where also involved in the research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.

Abstract of Deterministic switching of ferromagnetism at room temperature using an electric field

The technological appeal of multiferroics is the ability to control magnetism with electric field1, 2, 3. For devices to be useful, such control must be achieved at room temperature. The only single-phase multiferroic material exhibiting unambiguous magnetoelectric coupling at room temperature is BiFeO3 (refs 4 and 5). Its weak ferromagnetism arises from the canting of the antiferromagnetically aligned spins by the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) interaction6, 7, 8, 9. Prior theory considered the symmetry of the thermodynamic ground state and concluded that direct 180-degree switching of the DM vector by the ferroelectric polarization was forbidden10, 11. Instead, we examined the kinetics of the switching process, something not considered previously in theoretical work10, 11, 12. Here we show a deterministic reversal of the DM vector and canted moment using an electric field at room temperature. First-principles calculations reveal that the switching kinetics favours a two-step switching process. In each step the DM vector and polarization are coupled and 180-degree deterministic switching of magnetization hence becomes possible, in agreement with experimental observation. We exploit this switching to demonstrate energy-efficient control of a spin-valve device at room temperature. The energy per unit area required is approximately an order of magnitude less than that needed for spin-transfer torque switching13, 14. Given that the DM interaction is fundamental to single-phase multiferroics and magnetoelectrics3, 9, our results suggest ways to engineer magnetoelectric switching and tailor technologically pertinent functionality for nanometre-scale, low-energy-consumption, non-volatile magnetoelectronics.
For The Capital's three-part series, education reporter Cindy Huang examined teacher experience levels across 12 public high schools provided by a 2016 database of school employees, their salaries, years of experience and obtained through a public information request. Also examined was data of classroom teachers, including department chairs to determine how many teachers at each high school began the year with three years or less of experience. The school system provided the turnover rates for teachers. The data includes all employees in the Unit I employee union, which is represented by the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County.

Among those interviewed over four months; teachers and former teachers at once designated "challenge schools"; Superintendent George Arlotto; Speaker of the Maryland House Michael E. Busch; parents, students and union leaders; and national education researchers.
CC Saad Akhtar (CC BY 2.0)​

Vandaag brengen we op onze website een dossier over detachering – het tijdelijk tewerkstellen van EU-burgers uit een lidstaat in een andere lidstaat, waarbij ze hun sociale zekerheid in hun land van herkomst kunnen blijven regelen.

Een aantal zaken valt op.

Ten eerste blijkt detachering sterk toegenomen. Recent onderzoek van het HIVA van de KU-Leuven leert dat het aantal gedetacheerden op tien jaar tijd verdrievoudigd is van 80.000 naar 210.000. In de bouw steeg het aantal gedetacheerden van 45.300 naar 130.000 (terwijl de tewerkstelling voor Belgen met 16.000 eenheden daalde).

Ten tweede is het opmerkelijk dat er tussen 2011 en 2015 – de nadagen van de financiële crisis met nog behoorlijk wat werklozen - in ons land meer banen zijn geschapen voor gedetacheerden dan voor Belgen: 65.000 Belgen kregen een nieuwe baan als loontrekkende of zelfstandige, tegen 87.000 gedetacheerden, vooral uit Oost-en Centraal-Europa. Daarmee willen we niet beweren dat alle gedetacheerden werk van Belgen hebben ingenomen, maar denken dat geen enkele van die 87.000 jobs voor gedetacheerden door Belgen zou zijn ingenomen, is evenmin realistisch.

Ten derde viel ons op dat de ergernis in een sector als de bouw groeit. Zeker bij grote bedrijven worden Belgen stelselmatig vervangen door buitenlanders. Belgen krijgen boudweg te horen dat ze te duur zijn. Dat zet kwaad bloed. Sommigen voorspellen nog meer Brexits als het zo doorgaat, anderen stemmen op het Front National . ‘Op sommige werven ken ik amper nog iemand’, vertelt een Belg die op economische werkloosheid staat en nog een week per maand mag komen werken. Het spreekt voor zich dat vakbonden invloed verliezen als er op de werven amper nog iemand werkt die bij hen is aangesloten. ‘Gedetacheerden gooien onze pamfletten weg’, vertelt Wim Baeyens van ACV Bouw.

Ten vierde is het zo dat de stap naar fraude in die omstandigheden snel gezet is. Als Polen, Roemenen of Portugezen blij zijn met lagere lonen, is het moeilijk om overtredingen te controleren. De controle op de fraude is de voorbije jaren versterkt, maar de nochtans zeer gedreven rechters en sociale inspecteurs zeggen unisono: ‘Wij gaan dit probleem niet oplossen. De politiek heeft het probleem geschapen, hij moet het ook oplossen.’ Gevolg is dat fraude ruim verspreid blijft.

In het onlangs gesloten slachthuis van Tielt – om redenen van dierenmishandeling - werkten werknemers die aangeleverd werden door liefst twintig verschillende “uitzendkantoren” – “bedrijven” gevestigd in gezinswoningen, die personeel aanleveren. Tien jaar geleden werd Tielt al veroordeeld voor sociale fraude. Of het nu even erg is, is onduidelijk bij gebrek aan onderzoek. Maar arbeidsauditeur Danny Meirsschaut stelt de vraag of de kans op dierenmishandeling niet groter wordt wanneer het personeel niet goed behandeld wordt.

Ten vijfde valt op dat België, na Luxemburg, het land is waar detachering verhoudingsgewijs het grootst is. Dat staat wellicht niet los van het feit dat in ons land het verschil tussen nettoloon en de totale loonkost het grootst is. Detachering is een manier geworden om de hoge Belgische loonkosten te omzeilen.

Ten zesde: De politiek maakt aanstalten om er iets aan te doen. De Belgische regering maakt zich sterk dat haar loonkostenverlaging de detachering al heeft verminderd. En wil daar in de bouw nog verder in gaan door de werkgeversbijdragen in 2019 en 2020 met zeshonderd miljoen euro te verlagen. België lijkt zich in gevoelige sectoren dus aan te passen aan het Europese gemiddelde inzake loonkost: if you can’t beat them, joint hem. Eurocommissaris Marianne Thyssen wil dat de gedetacheerden hier niet langer de minimale wettelijke verloning ontvangen maar de doorsnee verloning met alle voordelen voorzien in de CAO’s.

Wat leren we uit dit alles?

1. Dat er zoveel ongelijkheid is in de EU dat ze arbeidsmigratie in de hand werkt. Vraag is of de arme lidstaten de welvaartskloof kunnen dichten door arbeid uit te voeren. Er is zonder twijfel meer nodig: investeringen in mensen en dingen bijvoorbeeld.

2. ‘Als we de detachering te lijf gaan door sociale zekerheidsbijdragen te verlagen, organiseer je zelf de sociale dumping’, waarschuwt professor Jef Pacolet. ‘En bevestig je dat de EU een machine is die sociale bescherming afbouwt. Tenzij je de sociale zekerheid anders gaat financieren.’ Staatssecretaris voor sociale fraudebestrijding Philippe De Backer is het daar niet mee eens: ‘Door de loonkost te verlagen, schep je meer banen, en krijg je meer inkomsten voor de sociale zekerheid.’

3. De kwestie van de detachering heeft ook een belangrijke politieke dimensie. Belgische werknemers die als gevolg hiervan hun baan verliezen, hebben het gevoel dat ze de verliezers van het Europese verhaal zijn. En dat heeft zoals recentelijk bewezen politieke gevolgen. De verliezers van de globalisering en de kleine globalisering-genaamd-Europese-eenheidsmarkt roeren zich. Het kabaal is het grootst in de landen die het neoliberalisme het meest onverdund hebben doorgevoerd: zowel in de VS Trump als het Verenigd Koninkrijk legt een nationalistische overwinning grenzen op aan de globalisering.

West-Europese landen zijn die dans tot nu toe ontsprongen maar de EU zal moeten bewijzen dat ze de mensen kan beschermen zoals de Franse president Macron belooft. Dat het voor rechtvaardige fiscaliteit kan zorgen. Dat het voor een menselijke migratiepolitiek kan zorgen die gedragen wordt. Het detacheringsdossier zit in het hart van dat debat. Niet toevallig zijn er intussen vijfhonderd amendementen op Thyssens voorstel. Hoe organiseer je een Europese arbeidsmarkt zonder sociale dumping in de rijkere lidstaten?

Als Merkel wil dat we als Europa aan een zeel gaan trekken – nu ook op vlak van defensie - dan zal ze voor een sociaal-economisch beleid moeten zorgen dat niet alleen goed uitpakt voor Duitsland maar voor alle landen van de Unie. Dat zal geld kosten. Het zijn spannende tijden.
(CNN) Maybe you noticed that some Target stores have signs in the toy department for "Building Sets" and "Girls' Building Sets."

Perhaps, like Abi Bechtel, you questioned the need for the distinction. The Ohio mother tweeted a picture of the signs in a Green, Ohio, store with the caption, "Don't do this, Target." She found that many people agreed marketing toys by gender is "regressive and harmful." The picture was retweeted more than 2,000 times and prompted dozens of supportive responses.

But toymakers and distributors like Target say consumer demand is the reason for the labeling, reviving the old chicken and egg argument about who's to blame for gendered toys -- toymakers or consumers.

Stores organize products and market them based on consumer feedback, said toy trends specialist Adrienne Appell.

"They're categorized in a way that's easier for the general population to find," said Appell, a spokeswoman for the Toy Industry Association, a trade group that represents toymakers.

Read More
There are many nauseating aspects of the new reality TV series, "America Picks a Prez," which airs around the clock on every single channel on earth: the cynical, open-air conspiracy between our Fourth Estate and Donald “Ratings Viagra” Trump. Ted Cruz uttering the word "prayerfully" while not exploding into a cloud of synthetic piety. Caucasian patriots heroically exercising their right to punch people of color.

Among these, let me nominate one more: listening to Hillary partisans explain to those of us who support Bernie Sanders just how naive we are. Only Hillary, we are told, has a real shot at winning in November. She’s the only one with a realistic grasp of how Washington works, whose moderate (and modest) policy aims might, realistically, be enacted. It often sounds as if Clinton’s central pitch to voters isn’t that she has a moral vision for the country, but that she owns the franchise on realism.

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Bernie, meanwhile, is just a sweet-shouting rube whose quarter-century as a congressman and senator has somehow failed to instill in him an appreciation for the twin plagues of grift and gridlock.

For us benighted hippies, the standard counter-argument at this point is that our man understands all too well the magnitude of Washington’s dysfunction, which is why he’s calling for a political revolution: to obliterate the most heinous aspects of the status quo, starting with corporate-sponsored elections.

I happen to agree with this. But there’s a sadder and more pointed response to Hillary’s reality brigade. Namely, that they need to face the reality of what the 2016 election is going to be like with Hillary at the top of the ticket.

Before I outline that particular shitstorm, let me issue a few sure-to-be-ignored (and therefore pointless) caveats. First, I myself was a Hillary supporter until Sanders entered the race. (More precisely, until I read his policy positions.)

Second, I will enthusiastically support Hillary when and if she is nominated. Years ago, I interviewed the secretary and I say now what I said then: She is a brilliant and compassionate public servant. If presidential elections in this country were based on policy positions and moral intention, on how each candidate hopes to solve common crises of state, Clinton would win going away.

Alas, the reality is that Hillary is among the most hated politicians in America. There is, to begin with, her dismal favorability rating, which stands at 53 percent, with a net negative of 12 percent. (Sanders has a net positive of 12 percent.)

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But even more important is the intensity of the animus against her, and the sad mountain of baggage she carries with her as a candidate.

No matter who the GOP nominee is, the battle plan against Hillary will be the same: a tawdry and unrelenting relitigation of all the phony scandals cooked up by the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that she identified nearly two decades ago.

Cue up the Pearl Jam, folks, because we’re going all the way back to the '90s: Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Lewinskygate, with a little Vince Foster Murdergate, for a dash of blood. But wait—those are just the golden oldies! You’ll also be hearing about the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Pardons. Of course, what respectable slander campaign would be complete without the new material? Benghazi, the private email server, the Wall Street speeches?

The dark corporate money and talented propagandists aligned against Hillary will make the Swift Boat Veterans look like toy soldiers.

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And because our Fourth Estate is driven at this point almost entirely by the desperate promotion of scandal narratives and conflict, every one of these paid attacks will be amplified by so-called free media, or what us starry-eyed hippies used to call journalism.

I’m not blaming Hillary for this sad state of affairs. I’m just trying to be—what’s the word I’m looking for? Ah yes, here it is—realistic about how it’s going to go down.

Republicans tend to lose when they have to talk in specific terms about policies, priorities and solutions. They win when elections are reduced to brawls and/or personality contests. (See Reagan/Carter, Bush/Kerry, et al.)

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But if Donald Trump is the nominee, as seems most likely right now, he will also enjoy two genuine lines of attack against Hillary.

The first is the same one Bernie just used to upset her in Michigan: the fact that free trade pacts are wildly unpopular with many Americans. Trump has been full-throated (and, as usual, somewhat full of shit) in his condemnation of free trade, and it has been one of his most successful pitches. You can bet your bottom yen that he’ll hammer Hillary on this, as if she personally whipped votes for NAFTA. He’ll excoriate various forms of crony capitalism (deals cut with big pharma, bogus military contracts, etc.) that Democrats such as Hillary either endorsed or enabled through timidity. And he’ll blast her for backing our trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq, too.

These accusations will be framed in terms of a larger narrative: that Hillary represents business as usual in Washington, that she’s just another career pol beholden to the donor class and to the Wall Street swells who paid her millions to deliver her secret speeches.

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Trump may be a sexually insecure adolescent with a penchant for inciting racial violence, but the one undeniable aspect of his appeal is that he recognizes the toxic nature of the status quo and will, by sheer force of personality, bring it down.

This promise is about as flimsy as a Trump University diploma. But it’s resonating with voters who feel Washington’s carnival of corruption is beyond redemption.

All of which brings us back to that credulous waif from Brooklyn, by way of Ben and Jerry’s. Donald Trump can holler all he wants about how Crazy Bernie is a socialist. But he (and the super Pacs) won’t be able to distract voters by digging up scandals in his past. Nor will Trump be able to portray him as a corporate stooge.

In fact, the shocking success of the Sanders campaign is predicated on many of the same essential frustrations Trump is exploiting: corporate influence, wage stagnation, trade. This is why polls consistently show Sanders beating Trump more convincingly than Clinton does.

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The right wing knows how to go after Hillary, because they’ve been doing so for 30 years. Within the media and a significant portion of the electorate, the neural pathways have already been carved out. Hillary is defensive, programmed, ethically suspect.

They are going to have a more difficult time smearing a candidate whose biggest liabilities are his “extreme” policy positions, most of which sound more like a common sense corrective to the excesses of capitalism. Higher taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy? Healthcare as a right? A higher minimum wage? Increased funding for education and infrastructure? Good luck demonizing those positions, Big Donald.

None of this is to suggest that Hillary won’t beat Trump, if they wind up as the nominees. Nor that she won’t be a great president. But if Hillary supporters want to claim the mantle of realism, they should start by accepting very real liabilities of their candidate.
Everybody knows mock drafts aren’t real. They are fun, but they are “mocks” meant as, hopefully, educated guesses. What, though, if they were real? A number of team sites around SB Nation are looking at what would have happened since 2010 if teams just went by the final mock drafts of ESPN analysts Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay.

So, let’s join the party. Which players would the Giants have selected since 2010 had they just followed the advice of Kiper and McShay in Round 1? Would they have done better? Worse? What impact might those choices have had.

Let’s go year-by-year.

2010

Giants (15th overall): DE Jason Pierre-Paul

Kiper: OLB Sean Weatherspoon

McShay: MLB Rolando McClain

I think it’s pretty clear that the Giants ended up with the best player. Weatherspoon was a talented player who went 19th overall to the Atlanta Falcons, four picks after the Giants took Pierre-Paul. He has been an injury-prone disappointment, though, playing in only 65 of 96 potential regular-season games (44 starts). He has missed more than half the season twice due to injuries. McClain? Please. A 2013 “retirement.” Two drug suspensions in the past two seasons. He may never play again.

2011

Giants (19th overall): CB Prince Amukamara

Kiper: OT Anthony Castonzo

McShay: RB Mark Ingram

This one is really interesting. Amukamara was a good but not great player for the Giants, but played in only 55 of 80 games. Castonzo has been a six-year starter at left tackle for the Indianapolis Colts. Ingram has averaged 4.4 yards rushing throughout his career and is coming off a career-best season in which he gained 1,043 yards for the New Orleans Saints and averaged 5.1 yards per carry. It’s pretty easy to argue that both Castonzo and Ingram have had better careers than Amukamara, and are currently more important players.

2012

Giants (32nd overall): RB David Wilson

Kiper: TE Coby Fleener

McShay: OT Jonathan Martin

Sadly, injury wrecked Wilson’s career after just 21 games. Could, Fleener, who has 233 career receptions and four straight seasons of at least 50 catches, have been the tight end the Giants have been searching for all these years? What happened to Jonathan Martin in Miami was unfortunate, but he only played three seasons in the league. In the end, seems pretty clear Kiper had the best idea here. Both Fleener and Martin were available when the Giants picked Wilson.

2013

Giants (19th overall): OL Justin Pugh

Kiper: CB D.J. Hayden

McShay: DE Bjoern Werner

Given these three choices, pretty clear the Giants got this one right. Pugh has been a solid player for the Giants and was their best lineman in 2016 before injuring a knee. Hayden has just 25 career starts, only two in 2016. Werner had a non-descript career with just 6.5 sacks in three seasons, did not play in 2016, and has announced his retirement.

2014

Giants (12th overall): WR Odell Beckham Jr.

Kiper: OL Zack Martin

McShay: TE Eric Ebron

Beckham, histrionics aside, is a great player. No real arguing with this choice. Still, I expected the Giants to take Martin with this pick and I think you can still make the case that it would not have been wrong to do so. Martin, like Beckham, has been a Pro Bowler all three seasons of his career. He is also a two-time All-Pro. Little doubt the Giants would be better on the offensive line with Martin. Ebron? He went 10th to the Detroit Lions and has improved each season. His 61-catch 2016 was his best yet. Still, he will never be the impact player that Beckham is.

2015

Giants (Ninth overall): OT Ereck Flowers

Kiper: Flowers

McShay: OL Brandon Scherff

Well, neither Kiper nor McShay are any help here at all. The Giants took Flowers hoping he would be their left tackle of the future, and we know how that’s gone. Kiper would have made the same pick. McShay would have taken Brandon Scherff, who went four picks earlier to the Washington Redskins. For what it’s worth, I still believe Flowers was a consolation prize and that the Giants would have taken Scherff if he had still been on the board.

2016

Giants (10th overall): CB Eli Apple

Kiper: OT Jack Conklin

McShay: Conklin

You know the story. The Giants were widely expected to select either OLB Leonard Floyd or Conklin. Then, the Tennessee Titans moved up to No. 8 and grabbed Conklin and the Chicago Bears jumped to No. 9 to pick Floyd.

Apple had a pretty good rookie year and will be a good player. Conklin was an All-Pro right tackle as a rookie, and you know the Giants’ struggling offensive line could have benefited from that. Conklin was the fifth-highest graded tackle in the league, per Pro Football Focus.

Kiper/McShay/Giants Comparison Year Giants Mel Kiper Todd McShay Year Giants Mel Kiper Todd McShay 2010 DE Jason Pierre-Paul OLB Sean Weatherspoon MLB Rolando McClain 2011 CB Prince Amukamara OT Anthony Castonzo RB Mark Ingram 2012 RB David Wilson TE Coby Fleener OT Jonathan Martin 2013 OL Justin Pugh CB D.J. Hayden DE Bjoern Werner 2014 WR Odell Beckham Jr. OL Zack Martin TE Eric Ebron 2015 OT Ereck Flowers OT Ereck Flowers OL Brandon Scherff 2016 CB Eli Apple OT Jack Conklin OT Jack Conklin

[E-mail Ed at bigblueview@gmail.com | Follow Big Blue View on Twitter | 'Like' Big Blue View on Facebook]
Illustrations by Ben Passmore

You probably aren't getting into heaven if you enjoy watching New Japan Pro Wrestling. You are, at some level, sick. That's okay; we live in a sick civilization. I'm sick too. I love watching dudes hurt each other. Let's watch New Japan on AXS TV together. You don't mind if I get comfortable, right?

Is it weird that part of why I'm addicted to NJPW is that I barely ever know what's going on? Fat yellow letters fill the screen's bottom third: IWGP JR. TAG CHAMPIONSHIP TIME SPLITTERS BECOME 38th CHAMPION. "This match," the announcer says, "is the latest in the interminable battle between Chaos and the Sakuraba Gund." Duly noted. The bouts on a given episode come from different years; they're highlights cherry-picked from intricately bracketed Cups and Tournaments, the structures of which remain obscure.

And now, a commercial break. "I'm... Gregg Allman." Gregg Allman says, in a tone that suggests he might not have been yesterday, "and you're watching (pause) AXS TV."

Read More: In Search of My Childhood Wrestling Heroes

We're back! Cheesy computer-smoke blows in from both sides behind the NJPW logo and triumphant electric guitar fades into driving synth. A battered wrestler peers into the camera through a sunset of facial bruises; his upper and bottom lips are both split. "I will never let anyone speak lightly of Super Junior," he assures us via subtitle. Is that a division, then? Not a person, tag team or faction? Who fucking cares? After no more than thirty seconds of elliptical promo, we're in the ring, inside "Bodymaker Colosseum, formerly known as Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium," to watch a wrestler named Vampire Chicken get massacred.

Some in the audience are wearing surgical masks. There is a shirtless man pacing ringside, presumably invested in the match's outcome, though his presence is not remarked upon. He's wearing a gigantic headpiece reminiscent of Sauron's battle helmet. It looks like a haunted castle is growing out of his shoulders.

The outlook is grim for haggard old Vampire Chicken. He is facing a pretty boy hero wrestler with Masters of the Universe musculature, blonde-streaked boy-band hair, and a surgically idealized face. Above a lantern jaw, the hero's cheeks are round as a Cabbage Patch Kid's. His artificially plumped cherry-red cupid's bow lips smile, revealing luminous teeth. His face is uncannily ageless. Without changing expression, he kicks Vampire Chicken in the head so hard the television shudders on the dresser; his forearm chops leave diagonal, turnip-colored welts. The violence is appalling and yet so compelling, so visceral, so... real. This is "strong style," the notorious Japanese approach to pro-wrestling, now available with English commentary on AXS, a channel I had no idea existed.

The English commentary is key. Mauro Ranallo and Josh Barnett are the best pro-wrestling commentary team in decades. Effortlessly in command of the details and characters, they are superlative, enriching guides to each episode's otherwise disconnected and potentially baffling matches. Their approach is sports-like, and they take the action seriously as presented, integrating bits of backstory with flawless, technically informed play-by-play. They project a sort of Bruce Campbell-ish suavity, presiding over the broadcast like confident friends introducing you around a surreally wild party.

It's all real, you know. — Illustration by Ben Passmore

Ranallo, who's also announced boxing and MMA matches, has a polished, authoritative baritone and a remarkable vocabulary. Barnett, a former combat sports participant, provides an earnest, laid-back counterpoint and knows many of the NJPW wrestlers personally. Barnett's anecdotes span Tokyo, Las Vegas, and Rio de Janeiro, evoking a gritty, glamorous, big-city after-dark showbiz milieu of private suites and international flights. The commentary team's enthusiasm and engagement offer a path into a product that might otherwise be off-puttingly bizarre. When a wrestler cheats, the announcers react with strong disapproval, and their credibility makes it work. Instead of dispassionately evaluating the "heel work" of the villain, I'm nodding in agreement with my cool pals, Mauro and Josh, who are pissed at this asshole disrespecting the sport.

I have not seen any women in NJPW, except in the audience. This is a fantasy realm populated entirely by super-tough men, though the NJPW locker room ranges in body type, fashion, and age; it's a broad palette of violent masculinity. There are young boys and faded stars, the latter variously avuncular, mummified or deranged. This is a world of dandies, beefcake pinups, rough-trade bruisers, stone-faced killers, and quasi-human archetypal wildmen who grimace like gargoyles, bellow like gorillas, pull their own hair and bite whatever comes within range.

[daily_motion src='//www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x23t4j5' width='480' height='270']

The number one reason to watch NJPW—arguably to watch pro wrestling at all—is the wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura. Nakamura, to dip into Japanese cinema, is a Takashi Miike character as played by a younger, more sinewy Beat Takeshi: an otherworldly gangster god whose face alone can hold your complete attention. In more domestic terms, Nakamura is like Omar in "The Wire," the avatar of some mythological force; he transcends not just the show but the medium.

I can try and compare him to idols from other fields, but Nakamura is sui generis, a foppish, world-weary thug in a drum major's jacket who prances to the ring like Michael Jackson. His horrific strikes-- Nakamura is "The King of Strong Style"-- come like the dagger inside a phantasmagoric, florid bouquet of stylized balletic flourishes and gyrations, eccentric upper-body twists and Fred Astaire footwork. His face is that of man exhausted by the effort to control his own violence. Nakamura seems a prisoner of his gifts; deep inner struggle is etched into his expressive features.

When an opponent provokes him, Nakamura appears to experience genuine moral regret, something like disgust at what he's about to unleash. His face changes: he trembles: he surrenders to whatever terrifying entity dwells inside him and launches a spinning, writhing beat-down that would cripple a plowhorse, an unforgettable mix of guitar solo and Hulk Smash.

NJPW offers a few familiar gaijin faces. There's AJ Styles, who is like the AJ Styles of TNA except a hundred times better, and Doc Gallows, previously known as Festus and Luke Gallows in WWE, now wearing Mantaur head-paint. There's also a North American wrestler named Ricochet who moves like a cheat-coded video-game character—some lazy programmer forgot to assign him a weight value. Apparently untethered from earth physics, Ricochet vaults and rebounds and straight-up zooms around the air at will; his conventionally Newtonian opponents appear relics of an earlier evolutionary stage, cavemen trying to swat something flickering through the fourth dimension.

A very strong style. — Illustration by Ben Passmore

Much could be said about what New Japan Pro Wrestling on AXS is not. It exists, of course, in contrast to the delicious McDonald's that is WWE—not only in contrast to, but as an anomaly growing in the substrate of WWE, which remains the global arbiter of what pro wrestling is. NJPW broadcasts on AXS are exciting, brutal and streamlined. Many elements WWE fans are accustomed to, including the soap opera storylines, are absent. The product is purer, heavier yet more sophisticated, somewhere between gonzo porn and art film.

It is difficult to expound on how thrillingly strange NJPW is without straying into exoticism. It is so strange, though. The audience sits in darkness, largely silent except for a scattering of bird-like yelps. The ring announcer is past parody, soaring up into a searing, power-metal falsetto gargle while introducing each competitor. Even the ring bell sounds weird, like it's made of wood.

The matches are far longer, their rhythms and dynamic composition more complex. There is often a "fighting spirit" segment wherein one competitor mercilessly beats on an adversary who refuses to give up or even acknowledge the very real pain he's being subjected to. Hulk Hogan used to do something similar, shaking off blows when he got angry for his comeback, but his opponents did not hit even a tenth this hard. The moves are wilder: the Dragon Screw Leg Whip, the Magic Killer, Mongolian Chops and Mountain Bombs, heinous neck-imperiling drivers and plexes no wrestling fed should still allow. The wrestlers fight on through legit injuries, including mid-match broken jaws.

The violence is reprehensible. I confessed my newfound fixation with NJPW to a friend whose judgment I trust, and found he shared my mix of misgiving and obsession. Watching NJPW, he told me, "I feel I witness more concussions per minute than even the grisliest of World Star compilations. I know I shouldn't like it, but I really, really do."

NJPW wrestlers practice disparate styles, a throwback to the days when UFC featured boxers with one glove vs. a karate guy, clashes of what would seem incompatible in-ring technique. A defrosted, vintage 1980s big-man monster, a pop-eyed grimacing 7-foot slob who throws flailing clotheslines, goes up against a solemn, cyborg-like submission machine who knots opponents into flesh pretzels and chokes them out with their own legs. Who the hell wins that one? Will the giant fat dude really get pretzelled? What will it sound like when his tendons tear?

I first came upon NJPW on AXS by accident, channel-surfing at 1 a.m. in a motel room, and I'd argue that was the ideal introduction. It's quintessential late-night TV that's very rare these days—late-night TV that isn't merely shown late at night but which emerges from a late-night realm, TV you shouldn't let the kids see. It's dangerous and different, gripping and gruesome, a tantalizing window into a fully formed and radically unfamiliar world. It is art, but wow, wow, wow do those motherfuckers hurt each other.
Cards Against Humanity, before it became go-to entertainment for a generation raised on the Internet and saddled with a backward idea of political correctness, began as a crowdsourced, printable game created by a group of old high school friends. A 2011 Kickstarter campaign produced the actual cards. In the promotional video, we’re introduced to half a dozen white guys who explain that it’s for “horrible people,” or at least the type of people who like to jokingly describe themselves as such. Recently, for a Black Friday promotion, they sent 30,000 people boxes of actual bullshit. It’s that sort of thing.

The concept is simple: One person throws out a fill-in-the-blank prompt card, and the rest of the players have to supply the missing words with cards bearing phrases like “pooping back and forth forever” and “not giving a shit about the Third World.” The founders promise that the game is “as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.”

Their success is startling: Cards Against Humanity is the No. 1 bestseller in Amazon Toys & Games, with five expansion sets to date, three holiday packs, and bundles with themes like “nostalgia” and “science.” There are more than 14,000 five-star reviews on Amazon. “That’s a level of devotion that can’t be explained by shock value alone,” wrote Nick Summers in Business Insider, as “the humor is calibrated to startle without being outright offensive.”

Well, that’s not exactly true.

The first time I played Cards Against Humanity, I couldn’t remember having ever laughed so hard. It was at a friend’s engagement party, with 10 people I knew better than just about anyone, our faces turning red and streaming with tears as we envisioned a mopey zoo lion, a frolicking gassy antelope, and Micropenises: The Musical. The hilarity lived in the shock, and each card had us doubled over almost before we could read it.

You’re the “horrible person” who played the cards in the first place. It’s not the game’s fault.

The second time I played, I still laughed a lot, though I started recognizing all the cards. The third time, I realized that some made me uncomfortable. The fifth time I played, I was thankful that my friend had brought an expansion pack, because there are only so many times I can cackle at the idea of Glenn Beck balls-deep in a squealing hog. I’ve played it about a dozen times, and now I’m starting to make a conscious effort to avoid it.

The problems with the game are obvious and two-pronged. On the innocuous side, shock value is a large part of the draw, and it gets old fast—hence all the expansion packs you’re encouraged to buy, each promising further blows to the “easily offended.” The white cards are designed as punchlines to the black cards’ setups. What may be a straightforward concept on its own (“The Trail of Tears”) only transforms into something questionable when paired with “Instead of coal, Santa now gives bad children _______.”

This folds into the other issue: the bar for acceptable crudeness is set by college-educated white guys. “A big dick” would be a funny enough response card, but CAH opts for “a big, black dick” (and, in the expansion pack, “a bigger, blacker dick”). Blackness is what’s supposed to send it over the top. Other white cards considered hilarious include “roofies,” “a sassy black woman,” “praying the gay away,” and “two midgets shitting into a bucket.” The plausibly deniable punchlines of rape culture, anti-blackness, homophobia, and ableism are visible just below the gauze, but hey, you’re the “horrible person” who played them in the first place. It’s not the game’s fault.

“I think the game perpetuates a pretty nasty culture: ‘Hey, look how enlightened I am because I’m beyond race/religion and can make nasty jokes about it!’” said Adrienne Ciskey, a game designer. “It comes across as a game for overly privileged hipsters who believe they are entitled to this lifestyle where everyone worships them to feel ‘in’ on the joke.” She also introduced me to the phrase “Real Wheaton’s Law”: “Don’t be a dick, unless it’s being a dick in certain pre-sanctioned-by-us situations.”

The line about comedy is that no topic should be taboo, and I agree with that. But the more “controversial” the subject, the more carefully it needs to be handled. A good comedian can make a joke about a celebrity, but a great comedian is the one who can gracefully craft a joke about something darker without making the subject the butt of the joke. CAH lets us become the comedians, giving us the setups and the punchlines to mix and match. The trouble is that we’re not great comedians.

The game relies on the concept of the equal-opportunity offender, someone who makes fun of all religions, races, sexes, and anything else. Instead of punching up, they’re ready to just punch. It also relies on a bit of bullying over the idea of being “easily offended.” It is “not for the easily offended.” It is a “political-correctness-free zone.” If you’re the easily offended type, you shouldn’t even look at the cards. And you wouldn’t want to be one of those, would you?

Cards Against Humanity has literally abandoned all chill. 💀 pic.twitter.com/2eJbAhzGEM — Jacks (@JackkieMarrie) December 17, 2014

A quick look at the illustrations of the Cards Against Humanity team still shows a primarily male, primarily white group.

Cards Against Humanity

According to David Munk, one of the game’s designers, the team is aware of the cultural power they hold, and their own privileged viewpoints. “When we find that our game has bullied or marginalized people in a way that we didn’t expect, we apologize and amend the game,” he told the Daily Dot. “We do our best to make jokes about people and institutions in positions of cultural power, and not to bully people.” Which is a good thing, for sure, but spot-fixing things only gets you so far.

“It’s embarrassing to me that there was a time in my life [when] that was funny.”

That policy also differs from what “core team member” Ben Hantoot said in 2011: “Several times, [in testing the game], people have left the room crying. But we’re OK with that. That means the game works!” He suggested removing cards if they’re upsetting, placing the burden on those playing, as if anticipating possible outrage is a waste of the CAH cabal’s time. It’s the sorry if you were offended of card games. It’s entirely possible that in the three years since Hantoot was interviewed, the designers have internalized that fewer people should leave the room crying when playing the game, but the plan still seems to be to see what they can “get away with” before enough people speak up.

So what makes the cut? This year’s holiday pack, titled “Ten Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa,” was a sort of advent calendar where people were mailed daily CAH-themed gifts (including that line mentioned above) for 10 days. I admit it gave me pause, as Kwanzaa is certainly not in the position of cultural power that Christmas occupies. “The joke to us is that we (the white authors of the game) didn’t bother to research that there are actually seven days of Kwanzaa,” said Munk. “It’s a joke that we meant to poke fun at white privilege, ignorance, and laziness.” CAH has also done its part to use the campaign for good. The profits from that box of bullshit were donated to Heifer International, and last year they gave more than $100,000 to DonorsChoose to fund public schools.

But what was meant as a commentary on the type of person who would dismiss Kwanzaa can simply turn into yet another way to dismiss Kwanzaa, as evidenced by the number of people who rephrased the title as “Kwanzaa or Whatever” on Twitter. Are the jokes too smart for their target audience, or are the CAH boys just too cavalier with material that can be quickly misconstrued?

I get why Cards Against Humanity can ‘get away’ with a joke like this. None of them & a lot of us, don’t know anyone who celebrates Kwanzaa. — Isaiah T. Taylor (@Bboy_Izilla) November 12, 2014

(Sorry, this embed was not found.)

CAH does seem to understand that comedy still requires social responsibility, especially as people speak out more about the cards they find disturbing. In June, Max Temkin said he had pulled the “passable transvestites” card after Jonah Miller, a transgender player, posted a photo of himself burning it—with the caption “DEATH TO TRANSPHOBIA”—on his Tumblr. Temkin admitted that he regretted the card and called it a “mean, cheap joke.” “It’s embarrassing to me that there was a time in my life [when] that was funny,” he wrote.

White cards still include “copping a feel” and “surprise sex!”

Meanwhile, Miller faced backlash from around the Web. Many criticized his choice to burn a transphobic card but continue playing with other cards that are arguably racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. Miller eventually wrote a follow-up post, admitting, “I was only looking at the issues which affected me personally, and I was allowing myself to find everything else funny because I wasn’t the person to whom it’s directed.”

Presumably, Cards Against Humanity should be thinking like Miller, anticipating the pain of seeing a card directed at you and empathizing with that, parsing which cards provide a light tease and which are actually hurtful, instead of waiting for fans to force their removal. The list of changes to the lineup is extensive, and includes many justified deletions. But an equal number of harmless cards fall by the wayside, and for every “dwarf tossing” we’ve lost, there’s a “robust mongoloid” or “chunks of dead prostitute” that stays or gets added.

Complicating matters further is an accusation of sexual harassment against co-creator Max Temkin. In a blog post addressing the topic, Temkin writes like a considerate, understanding person about sexual assault and rape culture. He said his lawyer told him he’d have a strong libel case, but he won’t take legal action because he’s “not wild about the precedent that sets for other women to come forward in cases of actual sexual assault.” It’s hard to tell if he’s a legitimate ally or just looking for feminist brownie points. Most women I know lose the ability to distinguish, having been burned too many times.

In the end, he vowed to keep being a “feminist” and hiring women, and reminded us that “We removed all of the ‘rape’ jokes from Cards Against Humanity years ago. We’ll continue to use the game as best we can to ‘punch up’ and not ‘punch down.’”

As of this writing, white cards still include “copping a feel” and “surprise sex!”

When I first began to notice the issues with the game’s humor, I remember purposefully, smugly not playing the “my black ass” card. I figured I wouldn’t play it in front of a black person, so there was no reason for me to play it in a room full of white people. Later that summer, a black friend told me how much she loved the game, and how she always picked the “sassy black woman” card as a winner. I was reminded that I should never make assumptions—that she wouldn’t like that card, or that any other black person would. I was also reminded that it’s as easy to ignore sexism and racism as it is to overzealously take up a controversy on behalf of people who don’t need you to speak for them.

In an essay about the rise of the “Not All Men” meme, Time‘s Jess Zimmerman wrote of the stages men must go through to overcome sexism. Her insights can be applied to other forms of discrimination by those in privileged positions. Once you’ve acknowledged that these power structures exist, you can learn how you’ve been socialized to accept them and benefit from them, and then take active steps to work against them.

The Cards Against Humanity team is stalled in the middle of that narrative: understanding that there is a cultural hierarchy that disenfranchises people, making it clear they’re aware of the privilege they hold, attempting to use their humor to separate themselves from those who don’t get it, and apologizing for their mistakes when they’re called out. And they’ve faced minimal criticism, because, well, those steps are where most fail.

People will apologize once they know they’ve done something wrong, but many won’t try to avoid wronging in the first place—by actively seeking diverse viewpoints and hires, for example. We’ve accepted the offense, as long as the apologies are good enough. Dismantling privilege doesn’t matter, as long as you’ve checked yours.

The hardest I ever laughed in that first Cards Against Humanity game was when a friend answered “What ruined the school trip?” with “soup that is too hot.” It’s perfectly absurdist, first-world-problem humor, evoking images of finicky fourth graders trying to send their bowls back to their teacher, asking to speak to the chef. Those are the golden moments when the game becomes transcendent, when a joke can be understood across contexts, and nobody has to scan friends’ faces for potential blowback over the card they’re about to play. Great comedy doesn’t rely on a laugh that happens in spite of itself.

Photo via Brett Jordan/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The New York Times is reporting the arrest of three RC hobbyists that were flying an RC aircraft at a lake nearby a nuclear power plant. Authorities in France have been searching for suspects in what they call illegal flyovers of their nuclear power plants by drones over the past several months, however they doubt the people that they have arrested are the same people they are searching for. (Original source of story is here in French)

Law enforcement officials told Agence France-Presse that the three did not have criminal records; they were suspected of having illegally flown two drones near the plant. Vincent Bonnefoy, a prosecutor from the area in central France, told reporters that the three were hobbyists who had been trying to film a remote-control boat in a lake near the plant. He said that one of the three flew a drone in the same area in October and made a film of the flight.

According to the story, it would seem that part of the reason for the arrest is the fact that hearing the RC aircraft caused the security team to go into full panic mode by causing “organized provocation” and, “disrupting the surveillance chain and protection of these sites”. The hobbyists were apparently using their small multirotor to capture video of their RC boat. They had also done this a month before without incident.

In this author’s opinion incidents like this highlight the tension between hobbyists and those responsible for security, and also their lack of knowledge of RC aircraft and the technology in general. The key here is there is no behavior analysis to the perceived threat, just over-zealous reaction. Organized provocation can not be blamed on people doing innocent things, even by accident in a restricted area. In reality, an organized threat that wished to use a drone of some sort would not be able to be effectively stopped. But more to the point, a drone or RC aircraft would make a poor choice of weapon for terrorists, so the risk is minimized.
Former UM offensive lineman and Oakland Raiders rookie Jon Feliciano participated in the Duke Johnson Foundation’s charity bowling event on Tuesday at Strike 10 in Gulfstream Park.

Here’s what he had to say in an exclusive interview with the Miami Herald.

“It’s great to be out in Cali, in Oakland, be in such a great atmosphere and a good position. Our O-line group is great – a good mix between veterans, rookies and guys that are in the middle of their careers,” Feliciano told The Miami Herald.

Feliciano added that he’s just looking to compete with the Raiders.

“I’ve got great guys in front of me that have helped me out so far. They’ve done everything I could’ve asked of them and more,” Feliciano said. “I just want to go in there, compete and make the 53-man roster.”

Feliciano is thrilled to remain teammates with fellow Raider Clive Walford. He said he thought the Raiders were actually going to take him in the third round, but when Walford’s name was called, he was happy for his friend.

I was like ‘well, I can’t be mad at that.’ And then to have my name called their next pick was awesome,” Feliciano said.

Feliciano swung by the event, he says, first, to give back, but second, to beat Duke.

“Me and Duke always compete in bowling pretty heavily,” said Feliciano , whose all-time best was a 236.

“Duke’s a good bowler, but I’ve got his number.”

Added Feliciano: “Duke’s always been big about doing stuff in the community, and to set this up and have this go down is amazing.”

DAVID FURONES
Bolivian President Evo Morales warns that the US will have to pay a price if it launches an aggression against Venezuela, and demands that his US counterpart, Barack Obama, "apologize" to Venezuela for his "threats."

Last week President Obama signed an executive order declaring Venezuela a "national security threat" and ordered sanctions be imposed on seven officials from the Latin American country — a possible precursor to sanctions against the country itself, as previously seen in Iran and Syria.

© Sputnik / Mikhail Fomichev Hungarian, Croat Jailed in Bolivia Over Plot to Kill Morales

“Bolivia is the beloved child of Simon Bolivar and this country is prepared to fight to repel any aggression against Venezuela on the part of the United States,” the Noticias24 news portal quoted Morales as saying during an emergency meeting in Caracas of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an intergovernmental organization based on the idea of the social, political and economic integration of the countries of Latin America.

"This is a perfect moment for us to unite even closer in the face of any such threat,” the Bolivian leader said, adding that he would prefer seeing the US as a true defender of peace rather than a country trying to ensure its global dominion by force.

Morales said he wanted the US to be the "great defender of peace in the world", not a country which "dominates in a military way".

"I want to tell you that this unit [ALBA] should be strengthened, I really believe that America is afraid of the process of democratic, peaceful and economic liberation of Latin America and the Caribbean," he said.
Pilot: Drone operator has no 'skin' in the collision avoidance game

To the Editor:

The Post-Standard editorial for May 11 cheerleading the rapid phase-in of commercial drones was myopic. The editors focused exclusively on positive aspects that would benefit news coverage.

In the mid-80s I accumulated about 900 hours as a single engine flight instructor and about 500 hours flying twin turbine commuter aircraft. With manned aircraft, the rule is "see and be seen."

Most drones would be hard for a pilot to see. The drone operator would likely not be constantly sweeping the sky from left to right as pilots are trained to do. An operator safely on the ground would have no skin in the collision avoidance game.

What about loss of propeller power or total loss of control of a drone? What might it hit or where may it fall? Should there be weight, speed and altitude limits? I watched a BBC news clip where a reporter tried to fly a small drone. He lost control and crashed it.

Many drones have unguarded propellors which could cut up a person. Should they be flown over crowds, school yards or residential neighborhoods?

What kind of training might be required for drone operators? Who will conduct it? Who will certify that operators are competent, as pilots are certified? It is no stretch to see that there will be some who fly drones without training or certification. Who will police the use of drones and what might be the penalties?

Since they are controlled by digital radio signal, there will be folks who for fun or profit will hack into drone control systems to try to take them over. What kinds of weapons might be delivered by a non-military drone? Toxins or a bomb?

What operating range will drones have? What will they do if they fly out of operator control range? Autonomous drones would not have the sensibility of a pilot for constantly varying flight situations. Captain Sullenberger quickly decided the best option was to ditch his powerless jetliner in the Hudson River.

And, what about noise and privacy issues?

There should be no rush to get commercial and privately owned drones into the air.

Garry Nichols

Manlius

Editorial failed to address privacy and civil liberties issues

To the Editor:

It is readily understandable that news corporations would want to use drones to record and report news. The imaging capabilities of drones are mighty impressive.

Yes, drones might "enhance the public's understanding of events." And, true, drones may well have been "used to capture footage of massive demonstrations in Ukraine." (Indeed, drones are ideal for identifying and monitoring demonstrators.)

However, your May 11 editorial, "Journalists have right to use drones, too," under analyzed the issue. Sure, news corporations may seek to automate where they can. But working journalists and photographers probably value the right to be gainfully employed and not be replaced by those robots.

Your editorial criticized the FAA for not licensing news corporations to use drones. But it failed to cite the safety concerns around drones that, given the current regulatory vacuum, the FAA must wrestle with. Or, to enhance the public's understanding, your editorial might have addressed drone-related privacy and civil liberties issues. These are local, national and international.

Several months ago our own Common Council wisely and unanimously passed a resolution banning drones over Syracuse absent adequate regulation. Six states even restrict drone use by law enforcement.

On May 9 the Wall Street Journal reported that this past March a U.S. passenger jet nearly collided with a drone over Florida - a disturbing news item, which as far as I know, the Post-Standard didn't publish.

My hope is that your parent company's eagerness to embrace the drone won't lead you to sidestep covering drone problems. Or to downplay anti-drone agitation - for the past four years focused on the drone war crimes emanating from Hancock's 174th Attack Wing.

Ed Kinane

Member, Upstate Drone Action

Syracuse
The story of professional poker star Mike “The Mouth” Matusow is in development as a biopic by 1984 Professional Defense Contractors.

1984’s Adi Shankar and Spencer Silna are producing along with David Uslan. The project is based on Matusow’s 2009 autobiography “Check-Raising the Devil.”

Matusow’s story details his bouts with drugs, depression, promiscuous sex, jail, and suicidal depression along with his success as a four-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and winning the 2005 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions.

His nickname comes from his affinity for razzing other players during poker games.

1984 has also acquired the rights to the 2003 novel “Money to Burn: The Ultimate Bank Heist Thriller,” by first-time writer and current U.S. District Court Judge James B. Zagel. The novel centers around a judge robbing the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago of $100 million in used money that is about to be destroyed.

1984’s credits includes “The Voices,” starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick; Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey,” starring Liam Neeson; and “Killing Them Softly,” starring Brad Pitt.
What is the cure for American health care? That is a question that a lot of people are trying to answer, and it’s a highly debated topic, but the answer is plain and simple. Single payer health care is the best form of health care a nation can hope to have. It is efficient, provides quality and timely access to everyone, and it is cost effective. A single payer health care system is a system in which the government, rather than private insurers, pays for all health costs. The system is funded typically through income taxes and is free at the point of use. Some countries with a single payer system include Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. France is often considered to have the best health care system in the world, but a large group of people (including myself) believe the best system is the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS). This is because of its central and efficient operation, as well as high quality standards, low wait times, and staff quality.

To start let’s dismiss some of the common arguments against single payer health care that come from the opposite side, like a single payer system having long wait lists, or that it is very inefficient and expensive. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, fact a recent Public Library of Science study stated, “Reported efficiency tended to be lower in the private sector than in the public sector…Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector.” It also found that countries with a single payer system also spend less per capita, and that the United States would save over 150 billion annually. That doesn’t even include personal and business savings which would be thousands of dollars annually, would boost the economy, and make the United States more globally competitive.

This is just one example of the several studies on this issue all saying the same thing, that single payer works and it is inherently the best system a nation could hope to have. A study by the World Health Organization also supports this claim and in a world-wide health care ranking, the United States was ranked 37, Canada was 32, the UK ranked 7, and France number 1. All of the countries ahead of the United States had a form of universal coverage and all of the countries in the top 25 had a single payer system. The OECD (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) performed a study on wait times and found that the wait times in the United States increased by 30% in major U.S. cities, and that the U.S. had above average wait times. However, the U.K. and France were below the average wait times and were in the top five worldwide, both operating under a single payer system. Another organization, based in the United States, that has been pushing for single payer and has also conducted multiple studies is the PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program), an organization of thousands of doctors, nurses, and health specialists. PNHP has been supporting and proposing legislation at the state and federal level for years, gaining little ground. A large reason is health insurance company money in politics, and “corporate” arguments propped up, in large part, by the republican party.

To be clear this isn’t a conservative or liberal issue, in fact, in most countries it’s just a given there are no politics involved. The PNHP explained the conservative argument for single payer health care, saying that it would save money by eliminating bureaucracy, boost American business by eliminating health costs and would also save individuals thousands. Which leads into the next point, the method of payment and how it works. As previously explained, a single payer system is paid for through income taxes, so that means you’re going to see a large increase in income taxes right? Actually no, you aren’t. A recent study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that it would call for a 2.2% income tax increase on individuals earning less than $200,000 annually, and cost middle income earners roughly $1,100 that is $3,855 less than the average out of pocket premium. Sadly, even though polls for the last 70 years have consistently shown a majority of Americans support a single payer system, Congress is bought and paid for by health insurance companies.

So, it’s likely there won’t be any action to move to this system, which every major study finds is better, for a whole, on a national level. However, there has been a growing movement for a single payer system on a national level mainly rallied around the Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and even though it might not be possible in the next 4 years, it seems like the inevitable future. At the state level, however, it seems like an increasingly likely outcome within the next few years, and there have been efforts in Vermont, California, and even Minnesota. Current Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has been one of the few Democrats to take the lead on this issue, criticizing Obamacare, supporting a single payer system, and even proposing a public option for MNsure. It is an increasingly likely possibility that Minnesota could adopt a single payer system and we could experience the benefits first hand, however, the current problem is the state legislature doesn’t support any government action on health care and you can probably guess why.

But with midterm elections in two years it’s quite possible things could change and a single payer option could be back on the table. I would like to take a moment to encourage everyone, Conservative or Liberal, to put politics aside and come together on this issue. No one should be denied the right to health care for any reason, and it is important to support candidates who support this basic idea. A local candidate and former member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Andrew Falk, has been one of the few outspoken local political advocates for a single payer system and has taken the lead on this issue. It’s important to rally around candidates like Falk who turn down corporate dollars and put the interests of the people first. If we all do that a single payer system could be a reality sooner than we think.
Mars Observer was one of three NASA Mars missions lost in the 1990s because of technical errors, and not as part of a broader conspiracy. The dark side of space disaster theories Space disasters attract so much public attention and often involve such complex and subtle sequences of events that there’s an entire Internet literature of “crackpot causes” on par with JFK assassination myths. To the degree that innovative analysis is often critical to reconstructing—from partial and often garbled evidence—a shocking causal sequence leading from goodness to disaster, the initial investigation period demands that critical judgment be held somewhat in check so as not to discourage imagination. However, once a logical reconstruction gels, is tested, and then is ultimately verified by being implemented and hence reducing future flight hazards, that official explanation achieves a substantial level of authenticity. But not to everyone’s satisfaction, apparently, as a search of still-thriving non-traditional explanations of the Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 breakdown, the Challenger disintegration, and the Columbia catastrophe, whose fifth anniversary now approaches. For example, in the case of Columbia, YouTube is full of videos from self-styled experts still convinced a freak bolt of ionospheric lightning crippled the spaceship. A famous photograph supposedly shows that bolt, even though space experts have long been satisfied that the bizarre image was merely the result of camera jiggle during a time-lapse exposure. Apart from the comic relief value of such crackpot ideas, there’s a darker aspect of this kind of cultural pathology, just as there are serious analyses pointing to the socially toxic effects of the JFK assassination “alternate theories”. For spaceflight, being distracted by the wrong cause means being tempted by the wrong fix. That’s never amusing, and often can be expensive. For spaceflight, being distracted by the wrong cause means being tempted by the wrong fix. That’s never amusing, and often can be expensive. As an egregious “bad example” of wrong causes, a recent book (Dark Mission, by Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara) spent a lot of time muddying the waters over a series of NASA Mars mission failures in the 1990s. This isn’t just some remote corner of an intellectual ghetto on the Internet—the book came within one tick mark of making it onto the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback non-fiction (it reached #21 nationwide). So as an exercise in cultural self-defense and in proselytizing sound “space safety” history, here is a detailed look at the claims, the delusions, and the errors in that book’s treatment of these space accidents. Mars Observer (1993) Dark Mission portrays the failure of the Mars Observer probe in 1993 as a deliberate act by NASA to prevent the publication of its expected photographs of artificial Martian ruins. But the description of the events is inconsistent with well-documented accounts, reports non-existent events, and omits well-known explanations for important features of the probe’s flight plan. All of this can be easily confirmed through Internet searches. Dark Mission, pp. 87–88: “NASA, in another unprecedented move, had inexplicably ordered Mars Observer to shut off its primary data stream prior to executing a key pre-orbital burn… Because NASA had violated the first rule of space travel—you never turn off the radio—no cause for the probe’s loss was ever satisfactorily determined.” Actually, whether a radio is turned on or off, practically all orbital insertion burns on lunar and planetary missions occur out of radio contact. This is a result of the geometric alignment of the probe passing behind the planet (or moon) and hence having its radio signals blocked. So keeping a probe’s radio turned on during these periods is about as useless as installing windshield wipers. To my knowledge, there is no “first rule of spaceflight” about never turning radios off. Interplanetary probes do this all the time. The “rule” is imaginary. I can’t find any documentation anywhere that provides this “rule”. I suspect that the Dark Mission authors just imagined it. The maneuver that Mars Observer was to perform was not even, as Dark Mission claims, a “key pre-orbital burn”. It was not a burn of any kind. Instead, it was the firing of explosive bolts to open two pressurant tanks that would allow the fuel to be pushed into the probe’s engines several days later. There is nothing “inexplicable” about turning off the radio for the firing of the pyrotechnic bolts. The sharp shock of the detonations was thought to be a hazard to the hot filament in a key radio component, which is much less brittle when cold. Hot filaments can shatter under shocks that cold ones wouldn’t even notice. This is clearly explained in on-ine documents, including the accident report. You only have to search “Mars Observer accident report” to be led right to the 313-page “Failure Investigation Board Report”. Keeping a probe’s radio turned on during orbit insertion burns is about as useless as installing windshield wipers. Why was the radio turned off? “In accordance with the mission’s published flight rules, the transmitter on the spacecraft had been turned off during the propellant-tank Pressurization Sequence on 21 August… To protect the spacecraft radio frequency transmitter from damage during the Pressurization Sequence (albeit a very low probability), the software included a command to turn off the Mars Observer transponder and radio frequency (RF) telemetry power amplifier for a period of ten minutes. This was a standard procedure that had been implemented several times earlier during the mission.” The report gave further details: “This sequence included the firing of two normally-closed pyrotechnic valves, that would allow high-pressure gaseous helium to pressurize the nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer tank and the monomethyl hydrazine fuel tank.” More on p. 25 of the report: “Concern existed in the Mars Observer project team that the pyro-firing event might damage the traveling wave tube amplifiers in the spacecraft telecommunications system if the amplifiers were left on.” Nor is it true that “no cause for the probe’s loss was ever satisfactorily determined”, as Dark Mission claims. To the contrary, in hindsight it was excruciatingly clear what almost certainly happened. “The Board was unable to find clear and conclusive evidence pointing to a particular scenario as the ‘smoking gun’,” the report explained, but “the Board concluded through a process of elimination that the most probable cause of the loss of downlink from the Mars Observer was a massive failure of the pressurization side of the propulsion system. The Board also concluded that the most probable cause of that failure was the unintended mixing of nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) and monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) in the titanium tubing on the pressurization side of the propulsion system. This mixing was believed by the Board to have been enabled by significant NTO migration through check valves during the eleven-month cruise phase from Earth to Mars. This conclusion is supported (but not proven) by NTO transport-rate data acquired by JPL, by NTO/MMH reaction simulations performed by [the Naval Research Laboratory], and by NTO/MMH mixing tests performed by AFPL [Air Force Propulsion Labs].” As to why the propulsions system hardware, adapted from a military prop module that normally needed a lifetime of only 12 hours, was used for a year-long mission, the report added that “Too much reliance was placed on the heritage of spacecraft hardware, software, and procedures, especially since the Mars Observer mission was fundamentally different from the missions of the satellites from which the heritage was derived.” It specifically criticized the propulsion system for “Inappropriate isolation mechanisms between fuel and oxidizer for an interplanetary mission.” “The original [money-saving] philosophy of minor modifications to a commercial production-line spacecraft was retained throughout the program,” the report continued. “The result was reliance on design and component heritage qualification that was inappropriate for the mission. Examples of this reliance were the failure to qualify the traveling wave tube amplifiers for pyro firing shock [and] the design of the propulsion system.” Whether or not this particular proposed failure mode is plausible (and from my own research I’ve concluded it was very plausible), it remains untrue to state (as Dark Mission does) that turning off the radio was “inexplicable” (and a violation of a “rule number one”) and that no satisfactory explanation for the failure was ever determined. Leaving out these easily-available views resulted in a passage that I think was incomplete and misleading. Mars Polar Lander (1999) I noted several Dark Mission references to me personally that deal with the 1999 failure of the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) probe. On page 316: “James Oberg published a story on UPI that accused JPL employees of knowing full well that the MPL was doomed (due to software problems related to the spacecraft’s landing legs) from very early on in the mission.” On page 317 this is called a “bizarre UPI accusation”. The brief account of the UPI article is garbled almost beyond recognition, casting serious doubts on the reading comprehension level of the author who did this section. In the one-sentence summary (“James Oberg published a story on UPI that accused JPL employees of knowing full well that the MPL was doomed due to software problems related to the spacecraft’s landing legs from very early on in the mission”), practically every word is wrong. Alleged foreknowledge of the impending failure had nothing to do with software. The article stated: As explained privately to UPI, the Mars Polar Lander vehicle’s braking thrusters had failed acceptance testing during its construction. But rather than begin an expensive and time-consuming redesign, an unnamed space official simply altered the conditions of the testing until the engine passed. “They tested the [engine] ignition process at a temperature much higher than it would be in flight,” UPI’s source said. This was done because when the [engines] were first tested at the low temperatures predicted after the long cruise from Earth to Mars, the ignition failed or was too unstable to be controlled. So the test conditions were changed in order to certify the engine performance. But the conditions then no longer represented those most likely to occur on the real space flight. “I’m as certain as I can be that the thing blew up,” the source concluded. That potential failure mode was not known “from very early on in the mission”, but only at the very end: “Following the September loss of the first spacecraft due to management errors, NASA had initiated a crash review of the Mars Polar Lander to identify any similar oversights. According to UPI’s source, the flaws in the [engine] testing were uncovered only a few days before the landing was to occur on December 3. By then it was too late to do anything about it.” The brief account of the UPI article is garbled almost beyond recognition, casting serious doubts on the reading comprehension level of the author who did this section. The specific software problem with the landing leg sensor scenario was not known before the landing at all, and the UPI article clearly states that it was discovered after the crash: “The Mars Polar Lander investigation team has also reportedly identified a second fatal design flaw that would have doomed the probe even if the engines had functioned properly. Post-accident tests have shown that when the legs are initially unfolded during the final descent, springs push them so hard that they ‘bounce’ and trigger the microswitches by accident. As a result, the computer receives what it believes are indications of a successful touchdown, and it shuts off the engines. Ground testing prior to launch apparently never detected this because each of the tests was performed in isolation from other tests. One team verified that the legs unfolded properly. Another team verified that the microswitches functioned on landing.” In a simple reading comprehension verification test, this one incident indicates a severe problem with the book’s authors’ ability to understand, and restate, simple English about space technology. In one sentence, there were three swings, and three misses—three strikes. By the way, after NASA’s official denunciations of the UPI story I had written (I have the honor of being the only journalist ever denounced by name in an official NASA press release), the story turned out even worse than I had written. Space engineers hadn’t fudged the test results, after all. My source was wrong about this, this time, the first occasion in a long sequence of accurate leaks. What was far worse was that NASA had decided that any such tests weren’t even necessary. The engine ignition system was never tested at temperatures expected out at Mars, because (JPL said) the engine had already flown in space on some other mission and so didn’t need to be requalified. But NASA press officials, despite repeated inquiries from me and promises of cooperation from them, never disclosed the space mission(s) that these special engines had been originally flown on. The same design engines are installed aboard the Mars Phoenix lander now on route. Hopefully, improvements have been made. page 2: Mars Climate Orbiter >>
Johnson did what he clearly had to do after perhaps the most epic collapse in the Jets’ collapse-filled history. But the uninspiring news conference by Johnson and General Manager Mike Tannenbaum, who seemed to lack detail or conviction about why they fired Mangini and what they wanted in the next coach, certainly did not instill confidence that the Jets were now headed in the right direction. If nothing else, it suggested that Bill Belichick, mocked when he bolted the Jets just as he was about to become their coach, might be even smarter than previously thought.

Still, at least Johnson took some action. Jones, incredibly, is sticking to his guns. After his team failed to show up with so much on the line Sunday, he reiterated that Phillips would be back, saying that continuity was the best way to fulfill the team’s potential.

That point will be debated from now until the Cowboys go to training camp — they want continuity from this season? — but Phillips was one of the lucky ones on the darkest day of every season for coaches. He learned his fate quickly, as did Mangini and Lions Coach Rod Marinelli, who was dismissed early Monday. (Mike Singletary, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was given a contract extension Sunday.)

Consider Cleveland Coach Romeo Crennel. General Manager Phil Savage was fired right after the Browns lost to the Steelers on Sunday afternoon. Crennel did not get word of his dismissal until Monday morning, spending one final sleepless night with the Browns. Worse, it appears Bill Cowher, Cleveland’s prime target, is not interested in the job.

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In Kansas City, Herm Edwards’s wait for a resolution must feel interminable. Carl Peterson is already gone and the search is on for a new general manager, who will almost certainly want input on who should be the coach. But with no hire on the horizon, Edwards is in the agonizing position of beginning off-season preparations with no assurance he will be part of the team much longer.

The St. Louis Rams have started their coaching search and Jim Haslett is among the candidates, reportedly even getting a letter of support from his players. But the team’s somnolent finish after winning two games when Haslett first took over from Scott Linehan cannot help, and so Haslett will join the rest of the state of Missouri in the waiting game.

Tom Cable might have gotten the Raiders to beat just enough teams, and just enough of the ones Al Davis hates (Denver and Tampa Bay, with Jon Gruden) to hold on to the job.

Hanging over all this carnage are the golden boys of the hiring season: Cowher and New England’s vice president for player personnel, Scott Pioli. Everybody wants them. Nobody knows if they will leave their current jobs, but one thing is certain: they will get a vote of confidence, no matter where they land.

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Playing to the End

Last year the Giants charmed the N.F.L. by playing all-out in their meaningless regular-season finale against the Patriots. The Giants, with their starters playing the whole game, gave the Patriots a scare on the way to a perfect regular season, and they gave themselves a shot in the arm that energized them throughout their playoff run. It was a monument to pure competition and a lesson in how to build momentum. But on Sunday the N.F.L. saw the frightening flip side of that decision. The Steelers played their starters in the meaningless finale against the Browns. And near the end of the first half quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was slammed to the ground. He spent at least 10 minutes there, before being removed on a back board with a concussion.

The Steelers have a bye in the first round and Coach Mike Tomlin did not want his starters to get rusty, so he played all but two of them (both were injured). But Roethlisberger has been banged up much of the season, and now the Steelers will spend the bye week sweating out the concussion. Fans have seen what happens when teams rest their starters too long before the playoffs, only to be unable to regain their rhythm when the action starts again. It happened to the Colts in years past (on Sunday Peyton Manning played one series in a meaningless game against the Titans) but now fans are seeing what drives such caution.

Still, with the initial prognosis that Roethlisberger will be available for the playoffs, Tomlin was satisfied with the dominating victory over the Browns. “It was a productive effort,” he said.
3rd R Davis doubled to deep left center, A Avila scored. 0 1

4th A Jackson singled to center, V Martinez scored, J Martinez out at third. 0 2

5th O Infante singled to left, A Escobar scored, N Aoki to second. 1 2

5th B Butler doubled to deep center, N Aoki, O Infante and E Hosmer scored. 4 2

6th O Infante homered to left (392 feet), A Escobar and N Aoki scored. 7 2

7th L Cain singled to left, B Butler scored, A Gordon to third, B Hayes to second. 8 2

7th M Moustakas grounded into fielder's choice to pitcher, A Gordon and B Hayes scored on throwing error by pitcher E Reed, L Cain safe at third on throwing error by pitcher E Reed. 10 2

7th A Escobar singled to left, L Cain scored, M Moustakas to third. 11 2

9th R Davis singled to left, N Castellanos scored, A Romine to third, E Suarez to second. 11 3

9th V Martinez reached on infield single to third, A Romine scored, E Suarez to third, R Davis to second. 11 4
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I recently found out that one of my associates uses her Roth IRA as an emergency fund. Rather than put money into a low yield savings account, or some other cash account, she uses her retirement account as an emergency fund. Technically, the basics of a Roth IRA are conducive to this arrangement. However, you do want to be careful. Think things through before you use your Roth IRA as an emergency fund.

Why Your Roth IRA Could, In Theory, Be An Emergency Fund

In theory, your Roth IRA works as an emergency fund because of the withdrawal rules. You are actually allowed to withdraw your contributions to a Roth IRA at any time, and for any purpose – no matter your age. This means that you can take money out of your Roth IRA with no penalty or tax, as long as you are only withdrawing money that you have sent to the account through regular annual contributions. As long as your withdrawal amount doesn't exceed your overall contribution amount, you don't have to pay a penalty or taxes. Keep in mind that previous withdrawals count against your overall contribution amount.

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You do have to be careful, though. Withdrawing from your Roth IRA can cost you if you don't do it right. If you are under 59 1/2, and you exceed your contribution amounts (except in certain cases), you might be subject to a 10% penalty and to paying income taxes on the amount. Make sure you know what you are doing before you withdraw money from your Roth IRA to shore up your finances in the case of emergency.

Opportunity Cost

While you might not have the expenses associated with penalties and taxes when you withdraw your contributions to your Roth IRA, you are still subject to opportunity cost. Remember: The money in your Roth IRA is working for you. You are earning interest at a pretty good rate (depending on your asset allocation and market conditions), and if you withdraw principal, you miss out. You can't replace the time that your money might have spent in your Roth IRA, growing with the power of compound interest.

On the other hand, though, some insist that the opportunity cost comes when you put that money in a low yielding cash account as an emergency fund. Because your money (theoretically) grows faster in the Roth IRA, the power of compounding interest at a higher rate makes up for the fact that you withdraw some of your contributions for emergencies.

Bottom Line

What you decide to do depends on what you think is likely to work best for you, and provide for your needs. If you plan ahead sufficiently, it should be possible to get quite a bit built up in your Roth IRA. Of course, for it to work, you need to make sure you only withdraw contributions in cases of true emergencies. If you use your Roth IRA as an ATM, you could easily remove all of your contributions quickly — and then move into penalty areas where it starts costing you more. Make sure you carefully evaluate your situation before adopting this emergency fund strategy.

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Greetings fellow Agonians!

Today we wanted to present a development update on the progress of our Early Access Road Map, discuss the contents of our upcoming patch, and give some marketing updates as we prepare ourselves for launch. We will be releasing our next community competition tomorrow where you will be able to submit unique mob names and lore backstories that we will tie into our new unique rare mob spawn mechanics described below. We are at a very exciting time in the development of Darkfall: Rise of Agon as we get closer to our official launch, and all of us at Big Picture Games look forward to the coming months.

Without further ado, let's get into it!

Marketing Update:

Playthrough Convention

The marketing team has been gearing up for the upcoming Playthrough gaming convention that Brad and Michael will be attending this weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. There have been many things we have been working on from banners and fliers to even some giveaways for those who stop by and say hello. This will be the first time that we publicly show off Darkfall: Rise of Agon and we cannot wait to talk about the project and what we have in store for the upcoming launch. Speaking of launch, our official launch date will be announced at the convention on Saturday. We hope to get to meet some of you in our community and invite everyone on Saturday to join us at the Crank Arm Brewing Company at 10:00 P.M. EST only a block away!

Lighting the Fuse

We want to ensure that when the game launches we can provide our players with as many friends and enemies to fight alongside with as possible. In the coming weeks we will be starting our external marketing campaigns that we have been planning internally and will not be letting up until we officially launch. We also have some things planned where you in our community can lend a helping hand to us in this endeavor. Stay tuned for more information as this train is about to leave the station.

Next Patch Update

The development team is currently working on our next Early Access patch which is currently scheduled to land at the end of February or beginning of March. This next patch will focus primarily on our new PvE spawn mechanics and the other changes listed below.

Champion Spawn PvE Mechanics

In the next patch we will be implementing our Champion Spawn PvE mechanics. This is a new system that changes the way certain mob spawns will function and provides a way for players to test their mettle against waves of enemies. This is the way that the system will work:

Upon entering a Champion Spawn the player will notice a new UI at the top of their screen where they can choose to begin the spawn mechanics

Players must kill a certain number of mobs within the allotted time to clear that wave of monsters and move onto the next stage

Players that fail to complete the wave in time will have the spawn reset to the beginning of the challenge

The first wave will consist of numerous monsters of lower difficult, and each wave afterwards will add in new threats and challenges

The final stage will consist of a named Champion Spawn with stronger attributes and a better reward, although they will be guarded by a set number of minions as well

For the initial iteration we will have these mechanics on a few mob spawns, but plan to add more throughout Early Access and after launch. The loot tables will be getting an overhaul as well once we begin to implement our unique recipes and rare items to the game.

Named Unique Rare Mobs

We also will be implementing the mechanics for our new Named Unique Rare Mobs. Although we may only get a few in with the next patch, our upcoming community competition will provide you with the opportunity to create some of the additions we will add throughout Early Access. Once the mechanics go into the game, it becomes much easier for us to add to this system and continuously implement new unique mobs.

These mobs will be named, have stronger attributes as well as better loot tables, and will have a rare chance to spawn at certain mob locations. Eventually we plan to implement backstories to these new monsters where players can unlock the lore of each one in the game. As with champion spawns, we plan to add new unique items to these mob's loot tables at a later date.

Respawn Scaling

Another mechanic coming with this patch is our first iteration of respawn scaling. This will eventually be applied to all new player spawns to help with spawn rates for players who can clear spawns quickly. The faster that you kill mobs, the faster that they will spawn, as well as potentially increase the amount of spawns that occur. This is not dependent on how many people are present at the spawn, rather how efficient you are at clearing the spawn itself.

Decreasing Tedium in Gearing

There are multiple changes coming with this patch to how you can gear and de-gear in the game. The following is a list of what to expect:

One button on the paperdoll to completely degear yourself

Faster equipping of armor

Ability to queue up armor pieces to equip by double clicking on multiple pieces

Cooking Update

We have completed our initial overhaul of the cooking profession and have added around 20 new cooking recipes, as well as many new ingredients. Mana regeneration is also now a benefit that can be found on some food, along with some other benefits.

Other Changes

There are some more changes coming with the patch such as new system messages for skins that do not produce items, changes to Digging, mount/ship/warhulk ownership changes, and a new staff seen below.

Road Map Update

Task System and NPX

We are finalizing the list of tasks and actions that new players will be guided through for initial guidance. There is a lot of work required in order to get the Task System implemented, as it needs new tracking of mechanics and a brand new UI, along with the flexibility to expand it past the new player guidance. This system is currently being designed, along with some changes we can make outside of it to help ease new player experience (such as spawning in Action mode instead of GUI mode).

Wilderness Portals

Our artist Demo has been creating some new assets for our upcoming Wilderness Portal network. We are currently planning to have over 100 portal locations throughout the lands that will be providing one-way travel throughout the world of Agon. We have been working through some issues with placement of these new assets but are on schedule to have the system implemented for launch.

Here are a few teasers of some of the new wilderness portals that have been created:

Deployable Player Vendors

The developers have begun working on the mechanics of the deployable vendors, but the brunt of the work on the coding side still needs to be accomplished. This system is still planned to be implemented for launch, but is not planned for the upcoming patch or the one thereafter.

In the meantime our artist Adam has put together the initial draft of the art asset which you can see below:

Crafting Updates

After this patch we will have gone through the initial crafting changes of most of the professions in the game. We will be focusing on some of the combat updates that we want to work on after the game launches, and part of that will tie into the professions of Armorsmithing, Tailoring and Shieldcrafting. For this reason we will be holding off on making our changes to these professions until we can tie them into the changes we plan to focus on after launch.

Economy Updates

We are currently going through a pretty massive overhaul of the in-game economy, focusing on resource sinks and faucets as well as loot tables and resource locale. This will be a task that we will be working on all throughout Early Access to ensure that we can have a good starting point for the in-game economy when we launch. These changes, along with our persistence changes and monitoring tools we have implemented, will provide us with more insight and control of the economy. It is imperative to have a strong balance of risk vs reward when this game goes live, as that is one of the pillars of this game.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for our upcoming community competition!

Join us for the discussion!

Sincerely,

- The Team at Big Picture Games
Mar 8, 2015; Newark, NJ, USA; New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur (30) is honored as part of the 20th Anniversary of the 1995 Stanley Cup championship team before the game between the New Jersey Devils and the Philadelphia Flyers at Prudential Center. Mandatory Credit: Ed Mulholland-USA TODAY Sports

Kevin Weekes released this article today on NHL.com regarding the release of 6 stamps by Canada Post that will feature six great Canadian NHL goalies of the past.

We’re going to take a stab at guessing at least four of the six. We’ve been given some hints that should make figuring this out a little easier. Let’s see if we can fill out the entire six slots.

“Only a few goaltenders can be considered to be among the best of the best.” “Hundreds of goalies have laced up the skates, put on the mask, pads and blocker, and had the courage to get in front of the net with pucks coming right at them, with the shots sometimes topping 100 mph. Equipment or not, that’s no easy feat and isn’t cut out for everyone.” “Not only did each elite goalie make an impression, each left a legacy. Our game is so much better for them having played it. Each has raised the standard and helped change the perception about not only how critical but also how dominant goalies can be in the NHL.” “Each of these goalies left his stamp on the game. Now six Canadian goalies will be honored in a collection of Great Canadian Goalie stamps, which debuts Oct. 1.” “While I can’t tell you who the six will be, I’ll say this: Five of the six are in the Hall of Fame, four have won the Calder Trophy, and each has won the Stanley Cup (a combined 20 times). Not to mention two have won the Conn Smythe Trophy. That’s pretty impressive, so clearly each is deserving of the honor.” “The confidence that each of these men gave their respective teammates, coaches and fans while taking it away from the opposition is immeasurable. They were game-changers. They were Game Savers.”

Well time for speculation folks as I dig through some old records and awards to see if we can’t identify who the six Canadian legend NHL goalies are. We know 5 of them are hall of famers, with 4 of them being Calder trophy winners. That makes things a little easier.

Going from most recent to oldest Canadian goalies to win the Calder. 08-09 saw Steve Mason win it. Obviously too young to be considered and things got a little rocky after his rookie season.

03-04 saw Andrew Raycroft win it, but it’s definitely not going to be that bust of a goalie.

The first guaranteed is the 93-94 Calder winner Martin Brodeur, future hall of famer and Stanley Cup winner. There’s an easy one.

Another guy who might be featured is 90-91 Calder Trophy winner Ed Belfour who had a lengthy successful career.

Here’s another no brainer. The 71-72 Calder Trophy winner Ken Dryden is an absolute legend amongst goaltenders in NHL history. You can probably pencil his name in.

Another Canadian hall-of-famer who is another NHL goalie legend won his Calder Trophy is 69-70. Tony Esposito had a great NHL career.

Going back a little further, the 55-56 Calder Trophy winner Glenn Hall went on to win 3 Vezina Trophies during his career with 1 Stanley Cup coming in 1961.

Delving back even further, how about 52-53 Calder Trophy winner Gump Worsley? He went on to win 4 Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens.

Lastly in 50-51 legend Terry Sawchuk won the Calder Trophy, and also went on to win 4 Stanley Cups.

Now we know only four of the six being featured on these stamps were Calder Trophy winners. So which four of the above do you think are going to be featured by Canada Post?
A downtown councillor will ask the city to extend the deadline for heritage grants available to preserve 1800s-era Gore Park storefronts set for redevelopment, even though the owners have no interest in applying for the money.

The city is offering up to $1.1 million for restoration of the facades of the buildings along the south leg of King Street, but the developer says it would take double that to preserve them and he isn't interested unless someone else comes up with the additional money.

They want to keep the facades, fine. Someone will have to pay for that. - Dave Blanchard

"The buildings are collapsing as we speak," said David Blanchard, who is a partner in the development company that bought the buildings in 2000. "They want to keep the facades, fine. Someone will have to pay for that."

It's been a year since Coun. Jason Farr pushed forward an urgent call to designate the buildings historic and halt their impending demolition.

The developers appealed that decision to the provincial Conservation Review Board, which pushes the debate over the properties' status to at least March. And now the buildings are set to head into a second winter with their interiors exposed, their condition worsening.

The city had pre-approved $1.1 million in grants if the developers would designate the buildings historic. Those grants have not yet been applied for.

On Wednesday at city council, Farr will push to extend the deadline for the developers to take advantage of those grants up until the end of 2015.

"We're all trying to work this thing out," Farr said.

Blanchard estimates the restoration of the facades to cost at least double what the city is offering, more like $2.5 million.

"We don’t want the historic parts particularly — other people do," he said. "Because it’s expensive. ... If someone’s willing to pay to keep it up and fund it, fine, we’ll try to work with that."

'They’ve been sitting there for two years with water running through them'

Farr said the council already changed and enhanced the historic designation grant process in a way that would raise the amount available for the Gore Park buildings to the $1.1 million. The Royal Connaught project also benefited from that change, Farr said.

Council was "very generous to help the issue along by changing that previous condition," he said. "I think that speaks volumes."

Blanchard toured city officials through the buildings when he first bought them in 2000.

"We bought the buildings knowing they were a tear-down. Everybody knew that," he said. "Then we nursed it on for another 12 or 14 years. They’ve been sitting there for two years with water running through them."

Blanchard said the buildings are full of mould and unsafe to send his staff into. When he thinks back, he said, "We should’ve demolished it immediately."

Blanchard said he was grateful to hear about Farr's intention to extend the grant deadline. But he laughed at questions about how soon he might try to restore the facades and comply with the city's historic designation rules.

"They gave us a demolition permit to rip it down!" Blanchard said. "So, I mean, it’s a little schizophrenic."
By the end of 2017, every smartphone manufacturer has embraced the 18:9 aspect ratio screen model. The users too have shown these new displays a lot of love and this trend will probably evolve in 2018. However, a minor adjustment that comes with the new aspect ratio is the positioning of the navigation keys. Earlier, handsets used to have the physical keys just below the display. Whereas now, they’re on-screen buttons. But not everyone loves on-screen navigation buttons. So, some phone makers like Apple and Vivo have opted for gestures on the iPhone X & Vivo X20. Now it’s OnePlus 5T.

Fresh news is that the OnePlus 5T is also soon going to join their ranks and completely do away with navigation buttons. OnePlus CEO, Pete Lau (Liu Zuohu), in Chinese OnePlus forums, talked about the virtual navigation keys. And it seems that many users too want them to get replaced by gestures. Pete Lau said that the feature is in the works and a future update will see it arrive.

He hasn’t mentioned what kind of gestures will the OnePlus 5T have. Will they be exactly like the iPhone X or they will mimic the Vivo X20? This remains to be seen. It seems we might even see this new feature in the Oreo stable update. However, we’re not sure about it.

Meanwhile, Android Oreo development is ongoing for both the OnePlus 5/5T and we’re hoping to see stable builds start dropping in January.
Look on the bright side: This’ll make for one hell of a Slate column once he gets back.

I can only assume they didn’t recognize him, as the opportunity to scalp one of the world’s foremost atheists surely would have been irresistible.

I dont know if you find this as news worthy or not, but Christopher Hitchens is currently in Beirut sponsored by the same group that owns that crap NOW Lebanon. He got in a few nights ago and surprisingly went out drinking. On his way out of the bar he saw an SSNP poster and wrote on it “Fuck the SSNP”. There just happened to be some SSNP thugs near by–most likely asking people for their ID, and most likely to no avail–and saw him write on the poster and kicked his ass. He is still walking with a limp.

Abu Muqawama says he’s confirmed the story. The SSNP is, of course, a Hezbollah ally that advocates a Syrian anschluss of Lebanon (and Israel, natch). Consider Hitch a minor martyr to the cause of the Cedar Revolution here. Exit question one: More or less unpleasant than being waterboarded? Exit question two: Er, isn’t Ace there with him? Has anyone heard from Ace recently?

Update: Belated exit question three: Is it time for me to organize a mighty atheist army and lead it on a march to Damascus for justice? Yes.

Update: Forbes says Totten was in the mix.

But later that night, three of our “scoop” brigade–Jonathan Foreman, Michael Totten and Christopher Hitchens–got involved in a street brawl with some thugs of a Syria-loving skinhead party called the SNPN after Hitchens rather gallantly insulted their swastika flag. On our way to a meeting with Minister of State Nissib Lahoud, Hitchens showed me the gashed knuckles and bruises suffered during the punch up. The attackers had apparently come out of nowhere on posh Hamda Street, where they had gone to buy shoes. “I was on the ground,” Hitchens said, “and getting it in the head.” It was a miracle they didn’t pull Kalashnikovs.

Note: I changed the headline to reflect that the attackers were pro-Syrian, but not necessarily Syrian in origin.

Update: Ace sets the record straight.
Tata Group boss Ratan Tata launches the purifier

The Indian industrial conglomerate Tata Group has launched a new low-cost water purifier, aimed at lower-income households in rural areas.

The Tata 'Swach' purifier is less than one metre tall, and does not need running water or electricity to work.

The firm is hoping to revolutionise the business of providing clean water, a lack of which affects almost one billion people globally.

Tata says the device is the result of a decade of research and development.

The Tata Group includes India's largest carmaker Tata Motors, and also has interests in steelmaking, IT, and chemicals.

Major hurdle

Its Swach water device - named after the Hindi word for clean - will cost under 1,000 rupees ($21.50; £13), according to one Indian report.

This is opening up a complete new market

Tata Chemicals' boss R. Mukundan

Water shortages forge huge market

According to the latest Indian government survey of rural wages, in 2007/08, daily pay in rural areas can range from about 45 rupees a day for herd-keeping, to about 110 rupees a day for well digging.

The Swach uses ash from rice milling to filter out bacteria, and also uses tiny silver particles to kill harmful germs that can lead to diseases like diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid.

The health consequences of poor water quality are enormous for developing countries like India, with millions of people affected.

Trying to provide safe drinking water for them has cost the government billions of rupees, but it continues to be a major hurdle.
The birth of the Traveling Wilburys was a happy accident. Warner Bros. Records’ International Department had asked that George Harrison come up with a B-side for “This Is Love,” a single from his Cloud Nine album. At the time it was customary to couple an A-side with a never-before-heard track, giving the single extra sales value.

This was mid-1988. Cloud Nine was just out. George, along with cowriter Jeff Lynne and their friends Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison, had been hanging out in Dylan’s studio. I suppose George figured that as long as his pals were on hand, why not use them to knock off this flipside?

A couple of days later George came by my office to play the new “B-side.” We went next door to A&R head Lenny Waronker’s office so he could hear it too. George played us “Handle With Care.” Our reaction was immediate. This was a song we knew could not be wasted on some B-side. Roy Orbison’s vocal was tremendous. I really loved the beautiful guitar figure that George played. The guys had really nailed it. Lenny and I stumbled over each others’ words, asking, “Can’t we somehow turn this into an album?” (I also had a suspicion that perhaps George had been hungering for another band experience.)

We urged him on. George felt the spontaneity of it, felt its driving force. He always had great instincts. Being as smart as he was he had a remarkable ability to pull people together. Think about The Concert For Bangladesh — only George Harrison could have made that happen.

Once the idea of a full, collaborative album was in front of us, George took over. The five frontmen (Harrison, Lynne, Petty, Dylan, and Orbison) decided not to use their own names. George and Jeff had been calling studio equipment (limiters, equalizers) “wilburys.” So first they named their fivesome The Trembling Wilburys. Jeff suggested “Traveling” instead. Everyone agreed.
The return of point guard Mo Williams to the Cleveland Cavaliers was news that made sense on a number of levels, especially in regards to financial and depth issues related to the team. Williams, who will turn 33 in December, will have a new role in this comeback, one that will hopefully protect the team from the disaster that very likely cost the Cavaliers their first NBA title.

Williams can still put points on the board, which is one reason why signing him appealed to the Cavs’ front office. Still, the question about exactly what Williams can provide to the team’s offense is one that remains.

During his previous two-plus seasons from 2008-11, Williams was a fixture in the team’s backcourt. In his first season, he was part of a squad that won 66 regular season games, a record for the franchise. That season, Williams reached a peak in scoring by averaging 17.8 points per contest.

Those numbers would begin to decline until hitting bottom during his one year with the Portland Trail Blazers in 2013-14, when his scoring average dipped to 9.7 per game. However, a resurgence took place this past season, when he again became a part-time starter and averaged 14.2 points while playing for both the Minnesota Timberwolves and Charlotte Hornets.

The clearest indication of what Williams could still do with the ball was shown during the Timberwolves’ January 13 game at Indiana. Connecting on 19 of 33 shots from the field, Williams torched the Pacers for 52 points, one of eight games with Minnesota in which he tallied more than 20 points.

After heading to Charlotte, he had a 12-game stretch that began in late February that saw him average 21 points a game.

Outside of his rookie year and the aforementioned 2013-14 campaign, Williams has always averaged double-digits in scoring, and has never been shy about launching up shots. He also still has a knack for being able to effectively dish the ball to teammates, something LeBron James can attest to from their two previous seasons together when Williams averaged 4.6 assists per game.

That year with Portland and his only full season with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2011-12 were years in which Williams was strictly a reserve, which will be his role with the Cavaliers. In that season with the Clippers, he averaged 13.2 points per game.

Combining those two seasons means that Williams was good for approximately 11.5 points a game. While that doesn’t overwhelm anyone, compare them to the average production of Matthew Dellavedova during his two seasons with the Cavs: 4.7 points.

Williams averaged roughly 26 minutes per game in those two reserve years, compared to Dellavedova’s 19 per contest. Even taking into account the additional time on the court that Williams spent still makes him a more productive option.

Plus, Williams does have experience as a shooting guard, which could allow head coach David Blatt to shift the guard over on those inevitable nights when J.R. Smith (assuming he re-signs) is ice-cold with his outside shot.

Of course, the underlying idea behind giving Williams more minutes is to keep Kyrie Irving refreshed, and more importantly, healthy. Irving’s scary injury history and the impact it had on the NBA Finals is etched into the mind of every Cavalier official, player and fan.

In many ways, Williams is like Smith, a free-wheeling shooter who can fall victim to cold spells when it comes to his shot. However, Williams won’t be looked upon as an integral part of the lineup, just a potentially valuable chip to have when needed.

Plus, Dellavedova will still be around to inject some fire into the team when necessary. The NBA Finals unfortunately showed that Dellavedova’s threshold for effectiveness reaches a certain point before quickly diminishing. Using him as a third option will allow his all-out energy to be maximized.

Williams gives the Cleveland offense just a little more push, with the starters providing much of the support in that area. Whatever he can give will undoubtedly be more than what was provided last year, which in turn will hopefully lead to a happier ending.

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Coding ● May 2016 The unintended byproducts of refactoring code

Whenever I start on a large refactoring, I need to justify that the exercise is truly worthwhile. Am I objectively and unequivocally improving the understandability of the codebase? If I’ve finished and the codebase is no more readable or maintainable than it was when I began, I’d argue there were better ways to have used my time.

While the goal might seem obvious, executing on it is often trickier than you’d think.

The two goals of any refactoring

Every refactoring has two goals. The immediate goal is technical. I have something in my code that doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps it’s a leaky abstraction, a convoluted dependency, repeated code, or a poorly encapsulated concept that festers throughout the entire application.

I then start laying out the roadmap to get from the code-at-present-moment to the glorious vision of my future code. With the completion of each small step, I re-run my automated tests, commit, then move on. After enough iterations, my plan slowly begins aligning like the pieces on a Tetris board. Eventually, I get to that one final, satisfying refactoring step—the long piece, if you will.

Ahhh….the long-awaited completion of a refactoring

It is at this point where the abscess has been removed and whatever smelled in my codebase no longer smells. I’m ready to pull the fresh new code into our master branch. However, It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming the work is done.

That’s because the second goal of a refactoring is the more important one. Has the understandability of the codebase actually improved? If you’ve achieved the technical goal (the leak is gone!), then, you’d think the codebase would automatically be more readable and maintainable. But, I’ve found that the tunnel-vision attention required to achieve the technical goal-at-hand can blind me to this second—more critical—goal.

That new refactoring smell

If refactoring is like carpentry, then, accomplishing its technical goals will leave some unwanted byproducts— discarded pieces left unknowingly on the workbench or a film of sawdust hovering over the entire body of work. In order to make a refactoring truly complete, we need to go back, wipe up our workspace, and apply some polish.

After you celebrate the technical achievements of your newly-updated code, look back at your work holistically to see if you haven’t inadvertently introduced some new smells. Make sure you haven’t simply traded off old technical debt for new technical debt that you’ll need to pay back later.

Code appendages

A refactoring sometimes introduces a bunch of appendages into your code. Are there any no-longer-necessary parameters passed into refactored methods? Are there local variables that are now lying around with nothing specific to do? For instance, if you’re moving a piece of functionality out of a method that’s doing too many things, it’s very likely that the original method now has extra references that just aren’t needed anymore.

In the midst of the refactoring, you may be so focused on the extraction, that you forget to clean these bits up. And, by cleaning it up, you may uncover a trail of other code that can go into the trash bin as well. Without this cleanup, you’ve just added the debt of useless code to your system. That might make the newly refactored codebase just as hard to read.

Misleading names

When you’ve moved code around your application to get the pieces fitting just right, revisit how you’ve named the methods, properties, and classes that have undergone the facelift. Do these names still make sense? Do the comments around these methods still apply?

When you’re in the same code daily, you might not even notice that the name of a variable or method is misleading because you’re so familiar with it. But, to someone coming into the codebase fresh (or, if you happen to take a few weeks off and come back later), misleading names will be detrimental to their understanding of the system.

Uncovering other smells

Often, a refactoring of one thing uncovers other code smells that weren’t as obvious before. In a recent refactoring I did, my end goal was to standardize how we handle business-level permissions. The technical goal was to consolidate this code to a single class and move the responsibility of using this class from lower-level classes to higher-level classes. By doing so, I also exposed some places in our code where the same permissions checks were now being done multiple times in these higher-level class.

This redundancy was always there. It just wasn’t obvious—it had been hidden because the calls were done lower in the chain by separate methods. Had I stopped the refactoring without taking another look at the code after the fact, I may have missed the opportunity to keep the code DRY. I’d be leaving in (now more obvious) technical debt.

For most of the unintended cruft left after a refactoring, there are tools at our disposal that can help us. As a .NET programmer, a tool like Resharper can detect these common smells so we don’t have to go hunting them down ourselves. In the end, a refactoring isn’t truly complete until we’ve re-assessed our work and can objectively say the code is now more understandable.
Dr Samuel Brisbane becomes first doctor in west African nation to die, as second US healthcare worker is infected

One of Liberia's most high-profile doctors has died of Ebola, a government official said on Sunday, and a second US healthcare worker has been infected in what the World Health Organisation (WHO) is calling the largest outbreak ever recorded of the disease.

Dr Samuel Brisbane is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak, which the WHO says has killed 129 people in the west African nation. A Ugandan doctor working in the country died this month.

Brisbane, who once served as a medical adviser to the former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, was working as a consultant with the internal medicine unit at the country's largest hospital, the John F Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia.

After falling ill, he was taken to a treatment centre on the outskirts of the capital, where he died, said Tolbert Nyenswah, an assistant health minister.Under the supervision of health workers, family members escorted the doctor's body to a burial location west of the city, Nyenswah said.

He said another doctor who had been working in Liberia's central Bong County was being treated for Ebola at the centre where Brisbane died.

The situation "is getting more and more scary," Nyenswah said.

Last week Sierra Leone's top Ebola doctor fell ill with the disease and in Liberia, Samaritan's Purse, a Christian charity, announced at the weekend that an American doctor was infected. Dr Kent Brantly had been isolated at the group's Ebola treatment centre at the ELWA hospital in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

A second American, Nancy Writebol, later tested positive for the virus at the same medical compound, said Ken Isaacs, of Samaritan's Purse. Isaacs said Writebol, who works with the allied aid group SIM, was in a stable but serious condition at a hospital near Monrovia.

Brantly received intensive treatment on Sunday and was talking to his medical team and working on his computer, said Melissa Strickland, a spokeswoman for Samaritan's Purse.

"We are hopeful, but he is certainly not out of the woods yet," Strickland said.

In Nigeria, officials announced on Friday that a Liberian official had died of Ebola after flying from Monrovia to Lagos raising fears that other passengers could take the disease beyond Africa. The WHO says the outbreak has also killed 319 people in Guinea and 224 in Sierra Leone.

Liberia's president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, used her Independence Day address to discuss a new taskforce to combat Ebola. Information minister, Lewis Brown, said: "It will go from community to community, from village to village, from town to town in order to increase awareness."

There is no known cure for Ebola, which begins with symptoms including fever and sore throat but then escalates to vomiting, diarrhoea and internal and external bleeding.

Experts believe the west African outbreak could have begun in January in south-east Guinea, though the first cases were not confirmed until March.

Since then, officials have tried to contain the disease by isolating victims and educating populations on how to avoid transmission, though porous borders, satellite outbreaks and widespread distrust of health workers have made the outbreak difficult to bring under control.
The Samsung Group is a South Korea-based conglomerate company that includes a number of subsidiaries. It's one of the largest businesses in Korea, producing nearly one-fifth of the country’s total exports with a primary focus in the electronics, heavy industry, construction, and defense industries.

Other major subsidiaries of Samsung include insurance, advertising, and entertainment industry businesses.

Samsung History

With only 30,000 won (about $27 USD), Lee Byung-chull started Samsung on March 1 in 1938, as a trading company based in Taegu, Korea. The small company of only 40 employees started as a grocery store, trading and exporting goods produced in and around the city, like dried Korean fish and vegetables, as well as its own noodles.

The company grew and soon expanded to Seoul in 1947 but left once the Korean War broke out. After the war, Lee started a sugar refinery in Busan that was called Cheil Jedang, before expanding into textiles and building the (then) largest woolen mill in Korea.

The successful diversification became a growth strategy for Samsung, which rapidly expanded into the insurance, securities, and retail business. Samsung was focused on the redevelopment of Korea after the war with a central focus on industrialization.

Samsung entered the electronics industry in the 1960's with the formation of several electronics focused divisions. The initial electronics divisions included Samsung Electronics Devices, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Samsung Corning, and Samsung Semiconductor & Telecommunications. Samsung built their initial facilities in Suwon, South Korea, in 1970, where they started producing black and white television sets.

Between 1972 and 1979, Samsung began selling washing machines, changed to Samsung Petrochemical and then Samsung Heavy Industries, and by 1976, had sold its 1 millionth B&W television.

In 1977, they started exporting color TVs and established Samsung Construction, Samsung Fine Chemicals, and Samsung Precision Co. (now called Samsung Techwin). By 1978, Samsung had sold 4 million black and white television sets and started mass producing microwave ovens before 1980.

1980 to Present

In 1980, Samsung entered the telecommunications hardware industry with the purchase of Hanguk Jenja Tongsin. Initially building telephone switchboards, Samsung expanded into telephone and fax systems which eventually shifted to mobile phone manufacturing.

The mobile phone business was grouped together with Samsung Electronics which began to invest heavily in research and development throughout the 1980's. During this time Samsung Electronics expanded to Portugal, New York, Tokyo, England, and Austin, Texas.

In 1987 with the death of Lee Byung-chull, the Samsung group was separated into four business groups leaving the Samsung Group with electronics, engineering, construction, and most high-tech products. Retail, food, chemicals, logistics, entertainment, paper, and telecom were spun out among the Shinsegae Group, CJ Group, and Hansol Group.

Samsung grew as an international corporation throughout the 1990's. The construction division of Samsung secured several high-profile construction projects, including one of the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, Taipei 101 in Taiwan and the half-mile tall Burj Khalifa Tower in the UAE.

Samsung 's engineering division also includes Samsung Techwin, an aerospace manufacturer that manufactures aircraft engines and gas turbines as well as supplying parts used in jet engines on Boeing and Airbus aircraft.

In 1993, Samsung began to focus on three industries — electronics, engineering, and chemicals. The reorganization included selling off ten subsidiaries and downsizing. With a renewed focus in electronics, Samsung invested in LCD technology, becoming the largest manufacturer of LCD panels in the world by 2005.

Sony partnered with Samsung in 2006 to develop a stable supply of LCD panels for both companies, which had been an increasing problem for Sony, which had not invested in large LCD panels. While the partnership was nearly a 50-50 split, Samsung owned one share more than Sony, giving them control over the manufacturing. At the end of 2011, Samsung bought Sony's stake in the partnership and took full control.

Samsung's focus in the future is centered on five core businesses including mobile, electronics and biopharmaceuticals. As part of its bio-pharma investment, Samsung formed a joint venture with Biogen, investing $255 million to provide technical development and biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in South Korea. Samsung has budgeted nearly $2 billion in additional investment to pursue their bio-pharma growth strategy and leverage the advantages of their joint venture.

Samsung has also continued to expand in the mobile phone market, becoming the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in 2012. To remain a dominant manufacturer, Samsung has earmarked $3-4 billion to upgrade their Austin Texas semiconductor manufacturing facility.

Samsung announced the Gear VR in September 2014, which is a virtual reality device developed for use with the Galaxy Note 4. Also in 2014, Samsung announced that they would begin selling fiber optics to glass manufacturer Corning Inc.

By 2015, Samsung had more US patents approved than any other company, being granted over 7,500 utility patents before the end of the year.
CTV British Columbia

A Vancouver woman is selling her used Volkswagen in exchange for the trendy new online currency known as Bitcoin.

Sarah Yu is making headlines for listing her white 2006 Jetta for just eight Bitcoin. That may not sound like a lot, but with one Bitcoin currently valued at $932, the asking price amounts to nearly $7,500.

But why not just ask for cash? “I believe in Bitcoin, I really do,” the 30-year-old told CTV News. “I think that cash is on its way out, cash is very devalued and Bitcoin is the future.”

The crypto-currency is an electronic way for people to pay each other or retailers for goods and services either over the internet or a mobile network.

Bitcoins can be bought in a number of places – a special ATM opened up at Waves coffee shop in Vancouver in late October – and through online and in-person meetups.

Yu said she considers Bitcoin an investment, despite the currency seeing high volatility over the last few months.

In late October, one Bitcoin was worth more than $200. One month later it skyrocketed to $1,200, then plummeted back down to $500 in December before rising back up to $932 per Bitcoin.

“It does have a reputation for being volatile, but I’m not worried at all. For me it’s a long-term strategy,” she said. “I’m not looking to buy some Bitcoin and sell it at a profit…it’s not like the stock market. It’s another form of currency to me.”

Bitcoin expert Graham Williams said more and more people are getting into using Bitcoin as the number of retailers who accept the online currency rises. According to Williams, everywhere from pizza parlours to shoe retailers to online gambling sites are beginning to accept Bitcoin.

“I think we will start to see people sell houses for Bitcoin,” he said. “It has intrinsic value to it, so seeing people who actually make transactions for high-value items – not surprising at all.”

But Williams doesn’t consider the currency to be mainstream yet – saying it must overcome a number of hurdles before that happens.

Because Bitcoin isn’t backed by a mint, transactions are not subject to the same regulations as other currencies. While every single transaction made using Bitcoin is posted publicly, the identity of the user remains anonymous -- making it hard to track perpetrators in the case of theft.

The now-defunct online drug market Silk Road was an early driver in Bitcoin’s growth, taking advantage of the currency’s ability to provide anonymity to users.

“I think that overcoming that stigma is going to be one of the main challenges for Bitcoin,” Williams said. “I think you’re going to see it stabilize as more ways for people to use Bitcoin come onboard…In the meantime it will be a little bit volatile, but I mean, even the dollar is volatile.”

According to Williams, only 21-million Bitcoins will ever be available.

Despite the risks, Yu said she’s sticking to her asking price and hopes she’ll get a buyer soon.

“It’s here to stay, so it’s just a matter of time before everyone else jumps on board.”

With a report from CTV British Columbia’s Shannon Paterson
For much of his life, former South Carolina defensive back Andre Goodman had a purpose to blanket wide receivers and make tackles and interceptions. Now the 10-year NFL veteran, who will be introduced as part of the 2015 SEC Football Legends Class in December, has a different purpose as the Gamecocks' Director of Football Student-Athlete Development.

"My job has a lot to do with grooming players for life after football and helping them transition from high school to college, and then from college to the real world," Goodman said. "We talk a lot about career development, job placement, time management and balancing your personal life with school, academics and your profession. We want the (student-athletes) to maintain that sense of balance once they leave the playing arena and enter into the real world."

Goodman played cornerback for South Carolina from 1998-2001. He earned second-team All-SEC honors by the league's coaches as a senior and was named to the SEC Academic Honor Roll during his career. He was selected in the third round of the 2002 NFL draft by the Detroit Lions, and also played with the Miami Dolphins and Denver Broncos during his decade in the NFL. Now in his fourth year on the job with his alma mater, Goodman knows that a professional playing career is short, and that most student-athletes won't be playing professional football.

"Managing expectations and helping student-athletes remain realistic is key," Goodman said. "It is tough, even if they do make it to the pros. They have to be realistic because it's a violent sport, and it doesn't take much to go from playing to not playing in the matter of just one play. Helping them become realistic is the toughest challenge, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not here to kill their dreams. I'm here to give them tools and resources to help them transition."

As he focuses on off-the-field activities of the student-athletes and serving as an important resource in balancing the demands of academics, athletics, community outreach, and their personal lives in their transition in and out of college athletics, Goodman noted that one of the most important factors for being successful in his role is trust.

"When they can actually sit down and have a conversation outside the game of football that they normally wouldn't have with someone else, it means a lot," Goodman said. "It can be tough for some of them to talk about personal issues, so anytime they can trust you enough to open up, that trust is probably the most gratifying thing. If they can see my sincerity so that they can open up to me and trust the reason why I am here, which is solely to help them, then I feel like I'm doing what I should be doing."

It's so easy and natural for athletes to overcome adversity, but handling prosperity can be a lot tougher. Andre Goodman

Goodman understands the difficulty in making transitions from personal experience, and he wants the student-athletes to know that he's been there.

"You want to be great at everything you do, but you don't realize how tough it is," Goodman said. "Staying centered and keeping a mental balance is always the toughest part. Since I retired (from the NFL), it's a daily challenge because my intensity and my energy are still at the NFL level, but the world doesn't move as fast. The NFL is daily evaluations and competition. We can use that in the real world, but we don't get up with that same intensity every day. It's hard because if I ever feel like I can't be great today, then I feel like I'm wasting my day."

Goodman saw highs and lows during his Gamecock career, which included a 1-21 record during his first two seasons, followed by back-to back Outback Bowl victories in his last two years.

"It's so easy and natural for athletes to overcome adversity," Goodman said. "But handling prosperity can be a lot tougher because when you feel like you have ‘arrived,' what keeps that fire burning inside of you? Not becoming apathetic is tough. I try to relate it in football terms to the guys because it is all about life after football.

"Whatever your goals may be, once you get there, if you don't set another goal then you're really just going through the motions. That's not what the journey is about. The journey is where the energy should be; not the destination. The journey is endless."

Among the 37-year-old's best memories of his playing days at South Carolina are beating top-ten ranked Georgia in 2000 and a victory over rival Clemson as a senior in 2001. Goodman will represent South Carolina as part of the 2015 SEC Football Legends class, which includes 14 former stars who excelled on the gridiron and helped write the rich history of the sport at their respective institutions.

"It takes a lot to get me excited, but I am very excited," Goodman said about being named to the Legends class. "I've never been big on accolades, but any time someone appreciates your efforts, it's always rewarding. I don't need a lot of fanfare, but this feels like a nice ribbon on my career. I'm very humbled and appreciative. It means a lot."

Always thinking ahead, Goodman looks to apply this honor to his work with current student-athletes.

"Any bit of credibility you can get with these kids, so I can gain trust with them and have conversations with them, gives me purpose," Goodman said. "My life now is all about purpose"

The Legends class will be honored at the 2015 SEC Football "Weekend of Champions" December 4-5 in Atlanta, Ga. The annual SEC Legends Dinner presented by AT&T will be held December 4 at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, and the group will also be recognized prior to the SEC Football Championship Game, which will be held at the Georgia Dome on Saturday, December 5.

Goodman and his wife, Shana, have four children, Fabian, Andre, Kennedy and Mason.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Taliban’s reliance on extortion and kidnappings, along with narcotics and illegal mining operations, is transforming it from a group driven by religious ideology into a criminal enterprise hungry for profit, U.N. sanctions monitors said in a new report.

Taliban fighters pose with weapons at an undisclosed location in southern Afghanistan in this May 5, 2011 picture. REUTERS/Stringer/Files

The latest annual report by the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team on the Taliban was distributed to reporters on Friday, a day before Afghans vote in a run-off presidential election.

“In addition to voluntary or forced donations from Afghan businesses outside the country as well as voluntary donations motivated by religious or ideological convictions, the Taliban have established a fairly sophisticated system to generate resources inside the country,” the report said.

“Increasingly Taliban finances also rely on abductions of wealthy businessmen for ransom.”

The report said executing civilians and aid workers helps the Taliban reassert their power, block security improvements and prevent economic development 13 years after it was ousted from power by a U.S. invasion. It also creates new funding sources for the Taliban, hardline Islamists bent on toppling the Afghan government.

“However, these activities increasingly change the character of parts of the movement from a group based on religiously couched ideology to a coalition of increasingly criminalized networks, guided by the profit motive,” the monitors said.

Taliban revenue generation is uneven. In provinces such as Nimroz and Kandahar, the Taliban are financially self-sustaining, while others depend on payments from the central leadership.

In Kandahar, the Taliban raise $7 million to $8 million a month from narcotics, extortion and mining, the report said.

20 PERCENT GOES TO FIGHTING GOVERNMENT

The report includes details on Helmand, which it said is the Taliban’s main province for generating funds. Helmand is the top opium-producing region in Afghanistan, with some 100,000 hectares of land cultivated with poppy in 2013.

In the worst case, it said, Afghan officials expect $50 million yield from this year’s Helmand poppy harvest. Most of Helmand’s poppy farmers can expect to pay 10 percent of their opium production as tax for the Taliban.

Another lucrative Taliban business is illegal marble mining, which the monitors said is the second major revenue source in Helmand.

“The illegal and unlicensed mining sector in the province appears to be several times larger than the legal mining sector,” the report said. “The Team has currently identified from 25 to 30 illegal mining operations in southern Helmand.”

Most of the illegal mines are near the Pakistani border, enabling the illegal miners to quickly smuggle the marble across the frontier and move it onto the international market.

“The Team’s preliminary assessment is that this Taliban revenue stream is significantly larger than $10 million a year,” the monitoring team said about marble mining.

The monitors recommended that the Security Council sanctions committee warn U.N. member states about the Taliban’s use of illegally mined marble for financing.

In Helmand, the Taliban’s “Financial Commission” transfers its funds to the Quetta Shura, a group including the top Taliban leadership, who arrange for the transfer of narcotics to Pakistan for sale.

The money is then transferred back to the Quetta Shura in cash or via “hawala” agents, an informal system based on trust used to transfer money without actually moving any physical currency. The monitors said the Taliban spend 20 percent of the money on fighting the government in Helmand, while the Quetta Shura get 80 percent to redistribute to needier Taliban elsewhere.

The Taliban has been under U.N. sanctions since 1999. The sanctions include an international asset freeze. Many individual members face U.N. travel bans and asset freezes.
I didn't think I would be writing about this, but, then again, I seem to say that fairly frequently. Be that as it may, on Friday I wrote about a letter sent to Lee Goldman, MD, the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University complaining about Dr. Mehmet Oz's promotion of pseudoscience on his television show, which reaches millions. When I wrote my post, my first reaction was somewhat supportive, but with reservations. However, as I read your comments and thought about it some more, I started having second thoughts. Then, over the weekend, I had a rather prolonged exchange on Twitter during breaks in the action at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Meeting in Philadelphia, which I'm attending now. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this letter, written by Dr. Henry I. Miller of the Hoover Institution, and signed by several doctors with ties to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), was an incredibly bad idea. This evolution in my thinking was helped along by other developments over the weekend.

I'll explain. I also might regret having continued my commentary, but, then, when did that ever stop me before? (Actually, you'll never know when, if, or how many times that's ever happened.)

In my post, I also described my discomfort with Dr. Miller and the signatories of his letter. For instance, the Hoover Institution isn't exactly known for its promotion of good science, given its history of denialism with respect to human-caused global climate change. Then, of course, I'm not exactly a big fan of ACSH, either. It's frequently on the right side of science, but seemingly only when that position aligns with industry positions. It's the reason why I didn't accept an offer to be on the board of scientific advisors of ACSH a few years ago.

Before I go on further, in the interests of full disclosure, I must confess my own issues with the approach Dr. Miller and his cosignatories took. As many of you know, there have been several attempts by quacks and antivaccinationists over the years to make trouble for me at my place of work. Not too long ago, a patient of Stanislaw Burzynski complained to my dean about my posts deconstructing her testimonial that she has been telling as "evidence" that Burzynski cured her of advanced breast cancer. As odd as it seems given how vociferously critical I have been of Dr. Oz's promotion of quackery on his TV show (remember, I'm the one who coined the term "America's quack" to describe him), I must admit that seeing Miller make trouble for Oz at his job over his extracurricular activities rubbed me the wrong way. True, I suppressed my distaste when I wrote my post last Friday, so powerful is my dislike for Dr. Oz and what he does on his TV show. But it didn't stay suppressed for very long. It has been argued that with Oz it's different, because Oz promotes quackery while I promote (or at least like to think I promote) good science and medicine, but even if that's true I can't help but remember that a key purpose of a letter to a person's employer is intimidation into silence or, in Oz's case given his popularity and the security of his position, to cause embarrassment and to provoke a response.

Now here's the problem. Regardless of whether I think it's a good idea or not or simply an attempt at bullying to write a letter like this, and even though Miller's letter was correct from a scientific standpoint about Dr. Oz, if you're going to write a letter like this it's generally a good idea to know what your goal is in doing so. What, exactly, is it you're trying to accomplish by writing a letter like this? Is it to get Dr. Oz fired? That's never going to happen, given that Dr. Oz has tenure and, unfortunately, it would take a hell of a lot before a university would try to remove a tenured professor. Indeed, as I've sarcastically mentioned, given that Dr. Oz is the director of the "integrative medicine" program at Columbia, promoting the "integration" quackery with science-based medicine is basically a big part of his job description! In a real world, that wouldn't be the case and what Oz does would be a problem, but, thanks to quackademia, it's no longer shameful to do that; whole divisions and departments in various academic medical centers are devoted to it. Oh, sure, quackademics like Oz wouldn't accept that characterization of what they do as valid, but I would counter that, other than featuring psychics like John Edward or Theresa Caputo on his show, what Oz does on his show is not really much different in terms of message than what he probably at Columbia: Promote acupuncture, naturopathy, homeopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Again, surely Dr. Miller must know this. so I assume that his goal was not to actually get Dr. Oz fired. Indeed, Columbia issued a statement supporting Oz on the grounds of academic freedom very rapidly, and, even in the unlikely event that Columbia were to fire Dr. Oz over his show, it would remove one of the likely strongest restraints that keeps Dr. Oz from going even deeper into the woo.

So what was Dr. Miller's goal?

Obviously, it was to create embarrassing publicity for Dr. Oz and Columbia University. After all, if Dr. Miller were really looking to cause problems for Dr. Oz he should have at least mentioned that Dr. Oz did a "made for TV" clinical trial he dubbed the "Green Coffee Bean Project" without bothering to obtain institutional review board (IRB) approval, something that is a direct violation of Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Hospital's (NYP) Human Subject Research Protection Program, which explicitly requires IRB approval for any clinical trial done by any Columbia University faculty member and NYP-affiliated faculty regardless of regardless of the location where the research is done. Now, as I pointed out, there is a slight gray area here, because clearly Oz's dubious green coffee bean clinical trial was not federally funded, but institutions that receive federal funding are required to abide by the Common Rule, which requires IRB approval of all human subjects research. Miller was either unaware of this issue, didn't realize that this was really the only "in" skeptics have to get Columbia to pay attention, or didn't care about it because what he really cares about is Oz's attack on GMOs. Mentioning that Oz conducted a dubious clinical trial for TV that was not approved by the Columbia/NYP IRB would have been a far more damning thing to mention with respect to possibly forcing Columbia to do more than issue a brief statement full of bromides about "academic freedom" than his pointed mention that Dr. Oz trashed GMOs on one of his shows.

In any case, as thoughtlessly as Miller and the ACSH acted, they did managed to get a fair amount of national press coverage, and the ACSH is virtually giddy over the press reaction:

Although, for years, Oz has been criticized in countless blogs and opinion pieces, which have appeared on a wide variety of websites, this is the first time that a coordinated effort to expose Oz for who he really is has generated a massive and unified response. It also puts Columbia University in the position where they have to either take action or defend their actions, or lack thereof. ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom, a long time, vocal critic of Dr. Oz said, “Every once in while the right thing happens. This is one of those times. The line between ‘doctor’ Oz and ‘TV personality’ Oz has been blurred for a long time, leading many American’s to equate the two, and, in doing so perpetuating the ‘fame equals credibility’ myth. Dr. Miller’s letter has done much to dismantle this myth. It is well past the time that people finally learn the difference between real medicine and entertainment.”

Um. No. Dr. Miller's letter created a momentary press kerfuffle that is fading. One little letter to Dr. Oz's dean is not going to "dismantle" the myth that "fame equals credibility." To claim otherwise is the height of hubris. In fact, if there was a recent event that did more to tarnish the Dr. Oz brand, it was Senator Claire McCaskill's magnificent roasting of Dr. Oz in front of her Senate panel over his breathless promotion of various dietary supplements as the latest, greatest weight loss miracle ever. Then, late last year, the British Medical Journal published a study that showed that half of what Oz recommends on his show has either no or little evidence to support it. Indeed, if you want to see how far Dr. Oz's star has fallen, just witness what happened last November, when Dr. Oz's social media team asked Twitter to ask him questions under the hashtag #OzsInBox and Twitter went wild mocking him for his promotion of quackery.

In fact, part of the reason I've come to conclude that Dr. Miller's letter was a spectacularly bad idea is that it appears ready to backfire on him. That's because one thing Miller accomplished without a doubt is to piss off Dr. Oz. (No doubt that was intended.) Don't get me wrong. I'm all for pissing off Dr. Oz over the TV snake oil peddler he's become, but, I wonder, did Miller stop to think what the consequences might be if he actually succeeded in publicly embarrassing Dr. Oz in the national media without a clear idea of what his endgame would be? I don't think so, and Dr. Oz is in the process of responding. First, Dr. Oz released this statement on Facebook:

I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves. We provide multiple points of view, including mine which is offered without conflict of interest. That doesn't sit well with certain agendas which distort the facts. For example, I do not claim that GMO foods are dangerous, but believe that they should be labeled like they are in most countries around the world. I will address this on the show next week.

Basically, you can see where this is going. Dr. Miller is a huge booster of GMOs, having served as the founding director of the FDA Office of Biotechnology, and you can bet that it didn't pass unnoticed that what provoked Miller to write his letter was not so much Dr. Oz's promotion of quackery but rather a specific fear mongering segment on The Dr. Oz Show about GMOs, in particular the non-browning apple. Not suprisingly, in his response, Dr. Oz is painting himself as not being anti-GMO but only "pro-information." What will Oz say in his show next week? I think there's a good hint in the insinuations in his brief statement above.

While Dr. Oz is, for the moment, predictably taking the high road, his admirers and fellow travelers, equally predictably, were not. Predictably, they were attacking Miller and his cosignatories as industry shills. The batshit crazy version of this shill gambit comes from—who else?—Mike Adams, in a pair of posts, entitled Vicious attack on Dr. Oz actually waged by biotech mafia; plot to destroy Oz launched after episode on glyphosate toxicity went viral and Mainstream media FAIL: Sleazebag doctors attacking Doctor Oz have histories of criminal fraud and ties to Monsanto's "Discredit Bureau". Indeed, if you want to see a textbook example of an ad hominem attack, look no further than to Adams' repeating allegations against John Entine that he physically abused his wife, which, even if true (and I haven't been able to find any source other than Mike Adams to back up this claim, although the court documents look authentic), has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not his arguments about GMOs are correct from a scientific standpoint.

Mike Adams was, as far as I could tell, first out of the gate with the shill argument, and, Mikey being Mikey, he turned the crazy up to 11. However, there are people who are much more in control of their impulses and whose business model doesn't depend on being as incredibly outrageous and incendiary in his rhetoric as Mikey's does. For instance:

It is important for physicians who invoke their medical degrees while endorsing products to make their allegiances and financial ties very transparent — and Dr. Oz deserves to be held to this standard. But by that standard, Dr. Miller and other self-described “distinguished physicians” on this letter also have some explaining to do. Miller, whose employer, the Hoover Institution, is often described as a “Republican-leaning” or “conservative” think tank, has interests of his own. A molecular biologist by training, Miller spent 15 years at the FDA before his fellowship at Hoover; throughout both jobs, he has been a consistent and ardent promoter of genetically engineered foods (or GMOs — the “O” standing for “organism”). And in his advocacy, Miller is positively prolific. A quick web search reveals dozens upon dozens of articles and opinion columns touting the benefits of GMOs to consumers, developing economies and agribusiness — and a seemingly equal number attacking those that warn about the possible risks of what are sometimes called “Frankenfoods.” Miller was a leading voice in opposition to California’s Prop. 37, the 2012 ballot initiative seeking clear labeling of products containing GMOs, and, in the 1990s, was an equally prominent voice in a tobacco industry-backed campaign to discredit the science linking cigarette use and cancer.

You get the idea.

The same meme is showing up in even mainstream media accounts. For instance, in this segment Bob Arnott, former NBC Chief Medical Correspondent echoes the very same "shill" argument, saying that all ten signatories have "industry ties" and that the industry is "furious that he's [Dr. Oz] has taken on genetically modified crops" and described the letter signatories as "industry henchmen who are after Dr. Oz." He even mentioned that the current acting president of the ACSH, Gilbert Ross, spent time in prison for Medicaid fraud. Heck, Arnot even accused ACSH and Miller of astroturfing. True, he does say that Dr. Oz peddles misinformation that would be like a "Brian Williams scandal" if it were on network TV and unfavorably compares Dr. Oz with Sanjay Gupta on CNN, but his attack on Miller and company is devastating.

And, yes, this is the way that Dr. Oz is going to go, as shown in this story on CNN Money (appropriately enough). Dr. Oz is planning to devote a full episode, probably Thursday's, to a response to the accusations of quackery. In other words, he's taking advantage of the letter to gin up his ratings, and his attacks will resemble, no doubt, a toned down version of Mike Adams' attacks. No, he won't mention domestic violence, but you can bet that he'll mention Dr. Ross' conviction for Medicaid fraud and Dr. Miller's past advocacy. You'll be amused at the rationale:

The special episode "is the last thing we want to do," a person associated with the show said on Sunday. But Oz and his representatives have concluded that it is necessary because of the "intimidation" they perceive from the doctors.

Nonsense. Dr. Oz's producers see a chance to take advantage of the publicity and to strike back at the same time. Dr. Miller threw his best punch, and now Dr. Oz is going to punch back:

Oz won't just read the one-paragraph statement he issued last Friday. Instead, he'll devote the majority of the episode to his response. "We plan to show America who these authors are, because discussion of health topics should be free of intimidation," a spokesman for the show said. The details, including the Thursday air date, are subject to change. The episode will be taped on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Can Miller take what Oz dishes out? Probably. Does it matter? Probably not. Is Miller's message about Dr. Oz's promotion of quackery and pseudoscience going to get lost in the counterattack that will paint him and his cosignatories as industry shills seeking revenge on Dr. Oz for having questioned whether GMOs are safe? Almost certainly.

In fact, I'll go even further and suggest that Miller's letter, after the initial embarrassment it caused Dr. Oz, is probably now seen by him and his producers as a godsend that gives them the pretext to counterattack and to tar all the physicians—not just Dr. Miller and company, but other bloggers, me, and all the rest of us who have been criticizing Dr. Oz for the last five years over his promotion of quackery and pseudoscience—as being industry shills of some kind and to make it stick in the public mind. I'm sure he'll find a way to go after Julia Belluz over at Vox.com as well, given that her excellent article on the making of Dr. Oz as a quack (my interpretation) was published the same week as Miller's letter. That's the narrative Dr. Miller has handed to Dr. Oz on a silver platter.

I tend to be a bit conservative in my preferred tactics taking on pseudoscience like that promoted by Dr. Oz, tending to prefer countering his misinformation and supporting activities like Ben Mazer's careful documentation of patients who have been harmed by Dr. Oz's medical advice. More recently, Ben has been working to persuade the AMA to issue a public statement that "reiterates the importance of evidence and transparency to the profession" while asking the AMA "to craft guidelines on how doctors can ethically use the media to help the public" and "to issue a report on what disciplinary pathways might be available for doctors who continue to spread bogus medical information in the media."

I'm not opposed to splashy PR moves in general. I just think that they should be smart and thought through, with a definite goal in mind other than stirring up trouble. Dr. Miller's little publicity stunt failed this test on every level, and, worse, could wind up backfiring spectacularly, leaving the rest of us who care about all the quackery Dr. Oz spreads, not just his fear mongering about GMOs, to deal with the consequences.
Overview (3)

Mini Bio (1)

Widely regarded as one of greatest stage and screen actors, both in his native Great Britain and internationally, twice nominated for the Oscar and recipient of every major theatrical award in UK and US, Ian Murray McKellen was born on May 25, 1939 in Burnley, Lancashire, England, to Margery Lois (Sutcliffe) and Denis Murray McKellen, a civil engineer. He is of Scottish, Northern Irish, and English descent. During his early childhood, his parents moved with Ian and his sister Jean to the mill town of Wigan. It was in this small town that young Ian rode out World War II. He soon developed a fascination with acting and the theater, which was encouraged by his parents. They would take him to plays, those by William Shakespeare, in particular. The amateur school productions fostered Ian's growing passion for theatre.

When Ian was of age to begin attending school, he made sure to get roles in all of the productions. At Bolton School in particular, he developed his skills early on. Indeed, his first role in a Shakespearian play was at Bolton, as Malvolio in "Twelfth Night". Ian soon began attending Stratford-upon-Avon theater festivals, where he saw the greats perform: Laurence Olivier, Wendy Hiller, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Paul Robeson. He continued his education in English Drama, but soon it fell by the wayside as he concentrated more and more on performing. He eventually obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1961, and began his career in earnest.

McKellen began working in theatre over the next few years. Very few people knew of Ian's homosexuality; he saw no reason to go public, nor had he told his family. They did not seem interested in the subject and so he saw no reason to bring it up. In 1988, Ian publicly came out of the closet on the BBC Radio 4 program, while discussing Margaret Thatcher's "Section 28" legislation, which made the promotion of homosexuality as a family relationship by local authorities an offense. It was reason enough for McKellen to take a stand. He has been active in the gay rights movement ever since.

Ian resides in Limehouse, where he has also lived with his former long-time partner Sean Mathias. The two men have also worked together on the film Bent (1997) as well as in acclaimed stage productions. To this day, McKellen works mostly in theater, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 for his efforts in the arts. However, he has managed to make several quite successful forays into film. He has appeared in several productions of Shakespeare's works including his well received Richard III (1995), and in a variety of other movies. However, it has only been recently that his star has finally begun to shine in the eyes of North American audiences. Roles in various films, Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Apt Pupil (1998) and Gods and Monsters (1998), riveted audiences. The latter, in particular, created a sensation in Hollywood, and McKellen's role garnered him several of awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod. McKellen, as he continues to work extensively on stage, he always keeps on 'solidifying' his 'role' as Laurence Olivier's worthy 'successor' in the best sense too, such as _King Lear (2008)_ directed by Trevor Nunn and in a range of other staggering performances full of generously euphoric delight that have included "Peter Pan" and Noël Coward's "Present Laughter", as well as Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land", both in acclaimed productions brilliantly directed by Sean Mathias.

McKellen found mainstream success with his performance as Magneto in X-Men (2000) and its sequels. His largest mark on the big screen may be as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, which he reprized in The Hobbit trilogy.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Peacham

Trade Mark (2)

Rich and flawless voice, combined with Shakespearean bearing.

Distinctively calm style of speaking.

Trivia (71)

He was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 1991 Queen's New Year Honours List for his services to drama.

Has played the vampire in the music video "Heart" by Pet Shop Boys

Originated the role of Antonio Salieri in the Broadway production of "Amadeus".

Had a tattoo of the Elvish character for 9 along with seven other members of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

Was offered the part of Mission Commander Swanbeck in Mission: Impossible II (2000). He was not able to accept the role, due to a prior theatre engagement in London. The part eventually went to Anthony Hopkins

He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1979 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to drama.

According to an interview, one of the last things Margaret Thatcher did as Prime Minister was recommending him for a knighthood.

The original Lord of the Rings books, and X-Men comics, both feature a character named Sauron, and a book entitled "The Return of the King". The X-Men graphic novel "The Return of the King" is, appropriately, about the return of Magneto.

He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 1985 (1984 season) for Best Actor in a Revival for "Wild Honey".

He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 1991 (1990 season) for Best Actor in "Richard III" at the Royal National Theatre.

Before performing the role of Gandalf, he listened to a recording of J.R.R. Tolkien reading Gandalf lines from the novel. He used this as a base for creating the character, and imitated the accent used by Tolkien in the recording.

Began acting as a means of escape from mourning after his mother's death and constant bullying at school from fellow students.

He was awarded the 1989 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor for his performance in "Othello".

He was awarded the 1984 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor for his performance in "Coriolanus".

He was awarded the 1989 London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre Award) for Best Actor for his performance in "Othello".

Graduated with a 2:2 in English from Cambridge University.

Studied at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, when he was 18, with Sir Derek Jacobi , and with whom he had been "desperately in love", as he confessed on Inside the Actors Studio (1994). In an article in "The Advocate", issue dated December 11, 2001, he further explained that what he had felt for Jacobi in their youth was "a passion that was undeclared and unrequited".

Originally aspired to be a journalist.

Was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon at the same time as Patrick Stewart

Wore a prosthetic nose to play Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Has played cult characters in two of the biggest franchises; he played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Magneto in the X-Men film series.

Won Broadway's 1981 Tony Award as Best Actor (Play) for originating the role of Antonio Salieri in "Amadeus". He was nominated in the same category in 1984 for "Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare".

He used the phrase "old friend" in both the X-Men film series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In both cases (to Christopher Lee as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Patrick Stewart as Xavier in X-Men) it is said to an ally who has become a nemesis and "old friend" is said mockingly.

Has worked with two Faramirs. Prior to appearing in the Lord of the Rings films with David Wenham , he appeared in the film Plenty (1985), with Andrew Seear . Seear played Faramir in the BBC radio adaptation, opposite Ian Holm

He said that appeal of the X-Men films to him was the concept of mutants being shunned, something he says he identifies with as he was repeatedly shunned as an open homosexual.

Like his The Da Vinci Code (2006) character, Sir Leigh Teabing, he has been knighted. As such, prior to being cast, he spotted two errors in the book's portrayal of Knighthood. Knights neither receive ID badges nor are granted any of the special privileges Teabing demands as a result of Knighthood.

Only performer to receive an acting Academy Award nomination for Peter Jackson 's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the Independent of Sunday 2006 Pink List - a list of the most influential gay men and women - he came no. 1, up from no. 2, knocking Elton John from top spot.

He was awarded the Companion of Honour in the 2008 Queen's New Year Honours List for his services to drama and to equality.

Ranked #45 in the 2008 Telegraph's list "the 100 most powerful people in British culture".

Was Head boy at Bolton School.

Marched at London's Gay Pride Parade July 5, 2008.

Had not read either "The Golden Compass" (aka "Northern Lights") by Philip Pullman , or any of the Lord of the Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkien before he was cast in the movie adaptations.

Played Magneto in three consecutive films - the only other actors to play comic book criminals in three films, as of 2008, are James Franco as Harry Osborn, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and his X-Men (2000) co-star, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique.

Received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ulster on February 3, 2013.

Had Maggie Smith play his mother in Richard III (1995), and then played her on an episode of "Saturday Night Live". In the BBC Radio production of "Goldfinger", he worked with her real son, Toby Stephens . Smith's former husband, Sir Robert Stephens , also played Aragorn in the BBC Radio version of "The Lord of the Rings".

Has English, Northern Irish, and Scottish ancestry.

At 74 years old, he is the oldest actor to be cast in the role of Sherlock Holmes.

Revealed in December 2012 that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

"The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling" (with Gregory Peck ) in 1966 would have been his feature film debut but for the hostile snowy Swiss location weather. The production, a World War I film with a script by Roald Dahl to be directed by David Miller , was abandoned after 5 weeks filming.

Although he was 56 when he played the title character in Richard III (1995), King Richard III was only 32 years old when he died on August 22, 1485.

Although he played Maggie Smith 's son in Richard III (1995), he is less than five years her junior in real life.

He was offered the role of King Charles VI of France in Henry V (1989) but he turned it down. Paul Scofield was eventually cast.

Was considered for the role of Clayton in Tarzan (1999).

Turned down the role of Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). He was quoted saying "I had enough trouble living up to one legend. Two would be too much to hope for." (referring to his role as Gandalf in "Lord of the Rings").

Was considered for the role of Judge Claude Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).

He was awarded he 1998 Back Stage Garland Award for Outstanding Performance for "An Enemy of the People" in a Royal National Theatre production at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, California.

Was offered $1.5 million by Sean Parker to officiate at his Tolkien-themed wedding in 2013, in costume as Gandalf, but declined, saying "Gandalf doesn't do weddings".

His grand grand father on his mother side, Robert Lowes had been an active member of a institution, that campaigned to get "half of a day" holiday on Fridays for workers of industrial age in Manchester in 1890's. This campaign, that had got successful and underlie weekend concept of modern times.

Strangest career encounters usually involve avid fans who tell him that they've seen and love all the Harry Potter films.

Ian's mother Margery died when he was 12 and his father Denis died when Ian was 24 .

Began and abandoned work on his autobiography, returning a million dollar advance from his publisher, after he found the experience of researching his life too painful.

Of Clan McQuillan.

Personal Quotes (41)

[on his first theatre experience, "Peter Pan"] I wasn't over-impressed. For one thing it wasn't a real crocodile and I could see the wires.

I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.

Many unthinking people just don't like the idea of gays joining in their games, nor in the military and, it would seem, in the movies.

When I, as Gandalf, meet Bilbo or Frodo at home, I bump my head on the rafters. [ J.R.R. Tolkien ] didn't think to mention it.

I am encouraged by the theatricality of [ J.R.R. Tolkien 's] readings - full of rhythm and humor and characterization. Without question Gandalf is like Tolkien but then so, I suspected, are Frodo and Aragorn.

I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors.

I ... think of the Bible as great literature rather than great history; great imagination rather than reliable witness. Whatever, it is not as a law book that I respect the Bible.

Acting is no longer about lying. It's now about revealing the truth. People are at ease with me now. Honesty is the best policy.

"The Lord of the Rings" is a mythology, it is a fairy tale, it's an adventure story. It never happened. Except somewhere in our hearts.

It wasn't exactly a mistake, but if there's anything I regret, it's probably having disguised my own native accent. Actors of my generation all tended to speak RP [received pronunciation]. Of course, it's all different now and drama students are encouraged to keep their regional accents and be able to do RP when required. Even at the BBC these days there's no standardised accent, and I rather think that's a good thing.

[12/5/03, about the cheering fans outside the InterContinentel Hotel, where he was staying in Wellington, New Zealand:] It's like several Christmases all come at once. They all love Gandalf, but I'm like Father Christmas in the shop. I'm not the real one.

[12/5/03, on initially thinking it crazy to release the LOTR trilogy 12 months apart] I thought people wouldn't remember what happened a year ago. But I hadn't factored that they would be so successful at the box office, and that so many people would buy the DVD and videos in between the release of each film. I had thought the whole enterprise was doomed, because of the release pattern. I'm very happy to have been proved wrong.

They'll let me play a gray-bearded wizard, but they still wouldn't cast a young gay actor - who was out - in a straight romantic lead.

They didn't call it marriage, although you can call it anything you want. The one thing you cannot mention is God, that is absolutely verboten. I suppose I'm a bit mean-spirited, but I really can't see why the government couldn't just say gay people can get married - that would have been true equality and so much simpler. But that hasn't been done because they couldn't face the furore. So they've passed a law that is not available to straight people - straight people cannot have a civil partnership, they have to get married - extraordinary.

If The Da Vinci Code (2006) had been filming in a place where it rains a lot, I probably wouldn't have done it. Quite low down in the list is "How much am I going to be paid?" I'd say I was quite cheap, but my main feeling about money is that I don't want to feel as though I'm being taken advantage of. Certainly, I'm cheaper than Anthony Hopkins . The other actors they asked to play Gandalf wouldn't go to New Zealand on that money for that length of time. I thought it would be a bit of an adventure. Tony Hopkins didn't think it would be an adventure. Tony is part of Hollywood. I'm an eccentric English actor, and there's a lot of us around.

If I was a star, it would be difficult to go off and do Coronation Street (1960). So I guess I'm not a star.

Nobody has ever looked to Hollywood for social advance. Hollywood is a dream factory. I love the way that conservatives think that Hollywood is a bed of radicalism - it couldn't be more staid and old-ladyship if it tried. The audience don't give a blind whatever about the sexuality of actors. Gay people fancy straight people and vice-versa. It's all in the head, so what does it matter? You're not going to meet 'Heath Ledger'. You're not going to find out . . . It's the image you're looking at and falling in love with. There will be girls who go and see those two unhappy gay cowboys and go home and have fantasy dreams about them. Lovely!

It may be my rather puritanical upbringing at odds with my inborn laziness that makes me feel guilty at the end of the day, unless I am able to point at some achievement. But this need be no more impressive than cooking a meal or going for a long walk.

I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer at the front saying, "This is fiction." I mean, walking on water? I mean, it takes an act of faith.

It is very, very, very difficult for an American actor who wants a film career to be open about his sexuality. And even more difficult for a woman if she's lesbian. It's very distressing to me that that should be the case. The film industry is very old fashioned in California.

My confidence only really peaked when I was 49 and said, "Yes, I'm gay."

In theatre, I have been able to take parts I didn't think I could do - you have time to rehearse and learn. In movies, they want you to do what they know you can do - there isn't the time.

I looked down from my terrace hanging over the Thames one morning. It was low tide and there, stranded on the pebbles, was a four-legged corpse - hairless, white and bloated. Was it a calf or a sheep or a goat or a dog? I stared at it until the tide rose and washed it away. For 24 hours I was off my food. When I started eating again, I couldn't face meat - fresh or tinned. Overnight I was vegetarian and I have been for 15 years or more. I've seen the pictures of factory farming and followed the politics of mad cow disease and felt effortlessly superior. Yet it's not reason or conscience that keeps me off meat and fowl--and these days fish, too--just a memory of that unidentifiable, decomposing body on the beach.

About the 2008 death of Brad Renfro : "I first caught sight of Brad Renfro when he was kicking a football around with Bryan Singer on the half-built set of Apt Pupil (1998) in Hollywood. He was a kid having fun and that's how I shall always remember him. But he was more than that. He was a proper actor and when we worked together he was determined to be accepted as such. On set, he was blusteringly confident although it was obvious he would have benefited from training as an actor. Yet, as Todd, the disturbed teenager in Apt Pupil, he tapped into an inner demonic world and carried the film on his young shoulders. He longed to belong in the alien world which perhaps in the end overwhelmed him. He was only 25 and it is dreadful we shan't see all that he might have achieved."

I didn't like my character. He didn't seem very deep. He just seemed a representative of evil. - On Apt Pupil (1998).

When I act, some people fancy me and some of them are women. There we are! What's the problem? They don't believe me when I say I am in love with a woman?...They don't believe me when I say I am a wizard? They believe me even though they know I am not. It's all nonsense. Everyone knows we are acting. [In a Reuters interview, responding to those who say that gay actors shouldn't come out because then no one will find them believable in romantic scenes with actors of the opposite gender.]

Don't give up the projects you really want for some extra time with your girlfriend or because you don't want to miss a holiday with your family. They'll understand. Just don't have any regrets.

I often get mistaken for 'Dumbledore'. One wizard is very much like another.

[on 'coming out' as being gay] I immediately felt better in every way. I felt relieved that I wasn't lying. You know, when I was growing up in England, there were no gay clubs I knew about. There were no bars. Homosexuals were shamed publicly and imprisoned. You were on your own, looking over your shoulder all the time, hoping in the handshake of a stranger that he might be somebody gay. The first film role I deliberately chose to play after I came out was a raging heterosexual, John Profumo. I was just a little bit worried about whether I could carry out the bed scenes.

I'm a snob about standards. But I don't find anything odd at all in being known for playing Gandalf. I couldn't be happier about it. Other people tend to get snobbish on my behalf. 'It must be dreadful to always be thought of as Gandalf', they say. Well I can't always be thought of as Richard III.

Peter [Jackson] and I were just so thrilled that Gandalf the White wasn't in 'The Hobbit'. We prefer Gandalf the Grey. He can have a smoke and a drink and a chat , and do a few little tricks. It was a great relief.

I don't approve of titles. I think they get in the way. I do however approve of medals for public service, and that's how I choose to look at it.. [But] other actors said to me, 'Please we need a knighthood. Because when a knight knocks on the door of a government office, it has to open'.

I like fantasy movies, I like musicals, I like variety shows, I like Tony Bennett - it's all the same to me. The fact that some things are more popular than others doesn't make them better, and it certainly doesn't make them worse.

I get offered a lot of parts that require long beards. I've turned down God on a number of occasions.

[at a reunion, to observer Michael Fassbender ] I just want to say how lovely it is to be back in California. I feel safe here now that you've got rid of Proposition 8. I'm looking for a husband. It's great to meet you Michael.

I don't think I'm top choice. In theatre - for Shakespeare - I'm quite near the top, but not for all directors. In film, I'm way, way down. Spielberg's never asked to work with me, Tarantino has never asked, Sam Mendes has never asked. It isn't as if there's a long list of films I've turned down but there are plenty I wish I'd had a go at. That's the truth.

I've always loved dictionaries and encyclopedias. Now you get all that on your computer. It's fantastic. You're looking up something about Dickens and you're invited to explore more and more. I don't know if that's wasting time or not but it doesn't help me to learn lines.

[on the Oscars] My speech has been in two jackets ... 'I'm proud to be the first openly gay man to win the Oscar.' I've had to put it back in my pocket twice. [2016]

[on the Academy Awards] If you are trying to have a career, as a black or Hispanic actor in a state - California - where white people are now the minority, and you are being judged by an Academy where the vast majority are white, male, middle-aged and old ... well, perhaps that is the wrong yardstick. [2016]

Before Michael Mann had devised Miami Vice (1984) he directed The Keep (1983) and produced it and wrote it. He cast me as the heroine's father, a Romanian academic who gets caught up with Nazis and a monster trapped deep in the Keep. Ever-diligent, I had specially made my first trip to Bucharest and then had a couple of lessons from a dialect coach in London. So by the first day of filming I was ready to sound and feel authentically Romanian. Just before my first take as Dr. Cuza, Michael said: "Drop the accent - make him more Chicago." Well, if the writer/producer/director makes a request, you jump to it. [June 2000]

Salary (2)
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Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary

Nauru is a small island (about eight square miles) half way between Hawaii and New Zealand made largely of bird droppings. If that does not sound particularly promising consider two further points. First, that its European discoverer named it Pleasant Island in 1798: it was once extraordinarily beautiful. And second that the bird droppings can be mined as phosphates, which are worth a lot of money. The following morality tale has, in fact, a lot to do with money…

Money… Everyone wanted a piece of Nauru. It is enough to list the island’s owners over the last two hundred years. For most of the nineteenth century the Nauruans ruled themselves and spent a lot of that time fighting each other with firearms brought by European traders. In 1888 Germany intervened to end the war and in an amnesty – and encouraged by the threat that tribal leaders would be executed – over seven hundred guns and rifles were handed over to the new authorities; enough to attempt an invasion of Belgium.

The island remained in the German Empire until 1914 when it was occupied by Australians on behalf of the Allies. In 1919 the British created the British Phosphate Commission that ran the island in the interests of Australia, New Zealand and the wider Empire, though not necesarily the Nauruans. In 1923 Australia took over the running of Nauru. In 1942 Japan occupied and Nauru had its worst years: a leprosy outbreak was dealt with by sailing a boat of the afflicted out into the ocean and sinking it. In 1945 a joint New Zealand, Australian and British trusteeship was set up, then in 1968 the island was finally given independence.

Nauruans, Germans, Australians, BPC, Japanese, Commonwealth Trusteeship and Nauruans again. Nauru became a kind of Pacific Krakow passing constantly between powers. It would be interesting to see if any other spot in the Pacific rivals Nauruans in terms of the multiplicity of owners. Beach is tempted to quote Kissinger: ‘if they had grown carrots there no one would have given a damn.’

From 1968 the Nauruans should have had a happy or at least wealthy existence. After all, they now had the phosophate for themselves. And for a while the government was immensely rich, particularly given how small the population was. It also proved though immensely stupid and the money was wasted. Nauru is a nice example of the Dutch disease. Never give your kids an oil well.

By 2006 the phosphates had run out, as had the money, and the island experienced an environmental catastrophe, much of it having been strip mined to water or rock: note the central moonscape in the image above. The lawyers managed to claw some money back through suing Britain, Australia and New Zealand for overexploitation. But the compensation didn’t last either. And then desperation and creativity set in. In 2003, the island briefly tried to get on the US’s patronage list by helping North Korean defectors escape!

90% of the Nauruans are now unemployed and most of those that have jobs owe them to the authorities: hardly Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Still at least Nauru has survived its colonial masters and the passing of the guano. Here’s to a brighter future for one of the world’s most obscure territories. Let’s hope the birds will return.

Beach is always on the look out for ‘forgotten kingdoms’ even when they are republics: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The funeral of Lian Zaher Nasser was held in the Arab-Israeli town of Tira on Jan. 3. Nasser, 19, was killed in Istanbul’s Reina nightclub when a gunman opened fire on New Year’s Eve revelers, killing 39 and wounding dozens of others.

Thousands attended the funeral, among them hundreds of young Arab-Israeli women who came to pay their last respects to Nasser but also in defiance of those who cast aspersions on Nasser’s moral character, claiming her death was divine retribution for celebrating a Christian holiday in mixed company with men at an amoral alcohol-soaked affair. Such claims were first expressed in mosques and then erupted onto social media sites, where stormy arguments developed. “Moderate” posters wondered what a group of Muslim girls was doing in an Istanbul nightclub, and some went so far as to compare the club to a brothel.

Her relatives said Nasser was murdered twice: once by an Islamic State (IS) terrorist and a second time by sympathizers of the movement within the Arab-Israeli community. At the end of the funeral procession, her father, Zaher Nasser, reacted to those seeking to sully his daughter’s name. “My daughter was murdered through no fault of her own. All she wanted was to enjoy herself, and that’s not forbidden. The fact that she’s a Muslim does not prevent her from having a good time, and Islam does not call for murder and such violence,” he said.

During the funeral procession, Arab Knesset member Ahmad Tibi said angrily, “We are sad and pained but also angered by the crimes. People who cannot find a kind word should just keep silent and be ashamed of themselves.”

The chairman of the Joint List, Knesset member Ayman Odeh, wrote on Facebook that he was deeply shocked that instead of mourning the murder of a young woman in a terror attack carried out by Muslim fanatics, Arab society was concerning itself with the lifestyle of young women unwilling to accept the religious Muslim way of life preached by IS. “I’m surprised to see reactions that are light years away from the spirit of our people, reactions of primitive derision and hatred fostered by the murderous ideology of the Islamic State,” he wrote. Odeh’s fellow Knesset members called for the eradication of extremist Islamist elements that have infiltrated Arab society.

The debate generated by Nasser’s choice to spend New Year’s Eve partying at an Istanbul club falls on a fault line within Arab society in Israel — a struggle between religious Muslims and Muslims who do not adhere to a religious way of life. (They tend not to use the term “secular.”) This is largely an intergenerational clash between parents and grandparents and young Arabs born into a traditional, religious and conservative society but heavily influenced by secular Israeli environment.

And so, these tensions and confrontations do not just pit religious and nonreligious Muslims against each other, but also the older generation against the younger. These young people are defining a new, unique identity: a minority group intent on throwing off the shackles and isolationism of their society and leading an independent lifestyle. The strict Muslim rules of conduct and morality contrast starkly with those of the pluralistic and individualistic Israeli society in which they live, leading them to see their extended families, the atmosphere in their village or neighborhood and Arab society in general as oppressive.

One of the manifestations of this mindset is a strong desire to attend university, which they view as the door to their integration into Israeli society and out of the so-called Arab ghettos. For most, getting a higher education and acquiring a profession is an opportunity to extricate themselves from the stifling embrace of their traditional society and to achieve a modern, independent way of life.

Anan Mansour, a 23-year-old from the Arab village of Taibe, told Al-Monitor that he and his friends were not surprised by the disturbing and outrageous comments after Nasser’s murder. They are used to criticism over their lifestyle, which is different from that of other Arab-Israelis, he said. “I know this from home already, and I’m a man. I’m not a woman whose parents guard her and seek a match for her wedding. Lian was a dental assistant who went out to party with her friends, one of them a dentist herself. All of them are young, educated Arab women who have been exposed to Israeli society. We live in an open society with aspirations and desires that are very different from the desires and dreams of our fathers and grandfathers. This manifests itself in a contemporary worldview but mainly in concern over the shape of our future. Should we, too, sit home and cry over our fate?”

Mansour added that he has seen and heard the incitement against Nasser, not just from older people but also from young Arab-Israelis who do not lead a religious or conservative way of life and yet cannot accept young Arab women who refuse to behave according to the moral code instilled in them at home.

The new film by Arab director Maysaloun Hamoud, a resident of the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, offers a fascinating glimpse of the currents shaking up Arab society. “Not Here, Not There,” which hit Israeli movie screens Dec. 30, revolves around three young Arab women who rent an apartment in the center of Tel Aviv, but are forced to conceal their liberal lifestyle from their families. This feature film's characters are fictional, but the plot is based on the real lives of Arab-Israelis. For most Israeli viewers, it will be their first glimpse of the lives led by young Muslim men and women seeking a free, independent way of life, one in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not take center stage.
A Los Angeles police officer was sentenced to 36 months in jail Thursday for assaulting a South L.A. woman in an incident that was caught on video by a police cruiser camera.

Mary O’Callaghan’s sentencing comes amid intense scrutiny and criticism nationwide of police use of force. The last 20 months of her sentence were suspended meaning she’ll likely spend a little more than a year in county jail.

A downtown L.A. jury last month convicted O’Callaghan, 50, of assault under color of authority after a prosecutor argued that the video recording showed the officer used unnecessary force during the 2012 arrest of Alesia Thomas.

In the video, O’Callaghan jabbed at Thomas’ throat with an open hand and threatened to kick her in the crotch. O’Callaghan then raised her boot and struck Thomas, whose body shook in response.

Click here to read the full story on LATimes.com.

Clarification: O’Callaghan was sentenced to the maximum term, 36 months, but 20 months of that sentence was suspended by the judge, meaning her sentence comes to 16 months in jail, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
A north Idaho police officer, the target of widespread protest following his shooting of a 2-year-old black lab in July, has had his pay cut.Coeur d'Alene Police Officer David Kelley, a 17-year veteran of law enforcement, shot and killed the dog, named Arfee, through the window of a van parked outside a Coeur d'Alene coffee shop. While Kelley maintained that he was afraid of being bitten by the dog—initially reported by police as a "vicious pit bull"—a review of the incident concluded that his decision to fire on the animal violated the department's deadly force policies.A public records request has revealed that Kelley's hourly wage was cut by nearly 10 percent.Outrage over the dog shooting spilled beyond the North Idaho city onto the internet, where the Facebook page Justice for Arfee served as a hub for anger. Earlier this summer, Internet activist group Anonymous issued a pair of threats to the Coeur d'Alene Police Department, demanding a full investigation into the incident.
RE: Host for POTUS in Miami

From:ReedA@dnc.org To: SnowdenK@dnc.org, Bobby_Schmuck@who.eop.gov, MARSHALL@dnc.org, ReynoldsL@dnc.org, DaceyA@dnc.org CC: RivardC@dnc.org, MarquezK@dnc.org, KaplanJ@dnc.org, CoxC@dnc.org Date: 2016-05-12 13:59 Subject: RE: Host for POTUS in Miami

I lean no to hosting but could be ok with attending. He was vetted and passed to host an event on Feb. but I think that was for the event that were cancelled. Coincidentally, it was the same day the article came out. Bobby, Brad? Hello everyone, We were also asked to vet the following for POTUS hosting. The only issue is Roy Black. New issues have come up since his last vet in February 2016. Thanks, Kevin Roy Black- NEW 2016: Black defended Jeffrey Epstein, who was prosecuted this year for multiple charges of sexual abuse against at least 34 underage girls between 1999 and 2007. 2015: Represent Justin Bieber after his 2014 DUI charge; Wild reputation, has defended unsavory characters (Rush Limbaugh, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis), parties with flagged celebrities, accused of ethical violations by former US Attorney; Represented Alex Rodriguez in 2013 steroid case; unable to locate why he was let go by A-Rod 832 S Greenway Drive Coral Gables, FL 33134 DOB: 2/1945 EMPLOYER/OCCUPATION: Self/Attorney NOTES: Co-hosted a February 2007 Obama fundraiser at his home with wife Lea Black. * See Below NGP VET HISTORY: * 2/12/2016; Passed 6OK; POTUS host * 5/14/2015; Passed 6OK; Revisiting for POTUS * 5/14/2015; Issue 6OK; ok per WH * 1/15/2014 - Issue 6OK; revisit for POTUS * 2/13/2012 - Issue 6OK; OK per VC for FL045, revisit for POTUS * 2/13/2012 - Issue 6OK; Bad News * 10/20/2008 - Pass 3OK CONTRIBUTIONS: Yes FREDERICA S. WILSON FOR CONGRESS 6/10/2011 $250 FRIENDS OF PATRICK MURPHY 3/31/2011 $2,500 KENDRICK MEEK FOR FLORIDA INC 10/6/2010 $1,000 KENDRICK MEEK FOR FLORIDA INC 3/17/2009 $2,300 JOE GARCIA FOR CONGRESS 9/29/2008 $1,000 JOHN MCCAIN 2008 INC. 8/12/2008 $1,000 UDALL FOR US ALL 4/1/2008 $500 TADDEO FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2008 $500 JOE GARCIA FOR CONGRESS 3/25/2008 $1,000 CONYERS FOR CONGRESS 11/29/2007 $450 BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT, INC. 9/17/2007 $500 JOHN EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT 6/22/2007 $500 LAUTENBERG FOR SENATE 5/2/2007 $250 OBAMA FOR AMERICA 4/25/2007 $2,300 RICHARDSON FOR PRESIDENT INC. 1/23/2007 $500 EVENTS: None LOBBYIST/DOJ FARA: None EARMARKS/TARP/ARRA: None LIENS: None JUDGMENTS: None BANKRUPTCIES: None CRIMINAL RECORDS: None LEXIS-NEXIS/INTERNET SEARCH: Yes NEW 2016: * Fred Grimm: Billionaire sex offender from Palm Beach enjoys a special kind of justice. Prosecutors meted out a special kind of justice for Jeffrey Epstein, larded with fawning obsequiousness, secret dealings and an astoundingly lenient sentence. After all, billionaires -- even billionaire sex abusers -- aren't like you and me. Investigators documented that at least 34 underage girls, some as young as 13, were repeatedly exploited by Epstein and his buddies for their carnal amusement at his Palm Beach mansion from 1999 to 2007. According to court documents, the girls were required to administer "topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself." Occasionally, "the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse." State and federal prosecutors happily reduced what amounted to hundreds of federal and state sex crimes to two state charges -- soliciting prostitution and procuring a person younger than 18 for prostitution. Meanwhile, the feds not only promised not to ring him up on federal charges, they granted immunity to his various co-conspirators. The federal prosecutors -- who seemed cowed by Epstein's high powered attorneys, including Roy Black, Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz -- worked out the secret plea deal without bothering to inform victims that their abuser would be spared federal charges. The failure to notify the victims has been at the crux of a federal lawsuit filed in West Palm Beach against the U.S. attorney's office in 2008 by two of the young women, identified as Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2. On Wednesday, their attorneys filed a 57-page motion demanding a summary judgment in their favor. Whether or not, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra grants the motion, the document (along with the scores of attachments containing nearly apologetic emails and letters from prosecutors to Epstein's legal team) sure as hell prove that billionaires are treated with special deference in the U.S. justice system. The correspondence shows prosecutors trying mightily to contrive a sweet plea deal that could be finalized before the victims or the media got wind of it. One exchange suggested that he plead guilty in Miami, "which would hopefully cut the press coverage significantly." No wonder. Epstein received a piddling 18-month sentence for a crime that got less exalted sex offenders in Florida 10 or 15 years hard time. His less-than-hard-time amounted to 13 months in the Palm Beach County stockade. Except he was allowed to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week at his nicely appointed office as part of a work-release program. He then served the balance of his sentence under house arrest -- quite an imposition for someone with a luxury mansion on the barrier island. Consider that this occurred at a time when low-rent sex offenders were forced to live like apocalyptic trolls beneath Miami's Julia Tuttle Causeway without water, toilets, electricity. Of course, super rich Epstein, 62, managed to avoid such indignities. Nowadays, the convict is occasionally featured in tabloid photos, snapped as he flits about New York in the company of young, beautiful women. Justice -- the special justice for billionaires -- has been served. [The Miami Herald Feb 12, 2016] 2015: * Justin Bieber Hires High-Powered Lawyer Roy Black in DUI Case: Justin Bieber is bringing in the big guns in a bid to beat his DUI charge. The singer, who was arrested in Miami early Thursday morning for DUI and drag-racing, has hired high-powered lawyer Roy Black to represent him. Black, who is married to Real Housewives of Miami star Lea Black, is a civil and criminal defense trail attorney best known for getting Kennedy family member William Kennedy Smith acquitted of charges of rape in 1991. He has also represented Kelsey Grammer, race car driver Helio Castroneves, Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis and conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh. The 19-year-old pop star, who is Canadian, is being charged with DUI, driving without a valid driver's license out of the state of Georgia and resisting arrest without violence. The police say Bieber admitted that he had consumed alcohol, had been smoking marijuana and had taken prescription medication. [People; Jan 23, 2015<http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20779032,00.html>] * JEFFREY EPSTEIN ATTORNEY ROY BLACK DENIES ALLEGATIONS IN LETTER BY EX-U.S. ATTORNEY ALEXANDER ACOSTA Attorney Roy Black is disputing claims that he, and other attorneys representing Jeffrey Epstein, pried into federal prosecutors' personal lives in attempting to disqualify them from investigating the billionaire sex offender. Black also denies Epstein's attorneys "negotiated in bad faith," while attempting to reach an agreement with federal prosecutors. In a written response Tuesday to the Palm Beach Daily News, Black disputes claims made against Epstein's defense team by former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta. Those and other allegations by Acosta were contained in a three-page letter printed Friday in the online publication The Daily Beast. Acosta was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time Epstein was being investigated on federal charges related to multiple sex crimes with minor girls. Black, the Miami attorney who successfully defended William Kennedy Smith against rape charges, was part of Epstein's legal dream team. Epstein was never charged with a federal crime. He and his attorneys struck a deal with federal prosecutors, which was outlined in a non-prosecution agreement. According to the agreement, Epstein had to plead guilty to two state charges, register as a lifelong sex offender and serve 18 months in jail. If he successfully completed those terms and served one-year of probation, then Epstein would not be prosecuted on federal charges as they related to approximately 30 to 40 victims. In a written response to the Daily News, Black said, "We did present argument after argument why a proposed federal prosecution against Mr. Epstein was unsupported by the evidence. We detailed the so-called evidence during many meetings with prosecutors and agents. "We were quite candid in disclosing all the evidence we had gathered in our investigation and I believe we made a convincing case why charges were not appropriate. I still believe that today." According to Acosta, now dean of the Florida International University College of Law, federal prosecutors and agents met with Black in the summer of 2007. The prosecutors presented Epstein a choice: plead guilty to state felony charges resulting in two years imprisonment, registration as a sex offender and restitution for the victims or prepare for a federal felony trial. What followed, Acosta said, was that Epstein's defense team launched "a yearlong assault on the prosecution and the prosecutors. "I use the word assault intentionally, as the defense in this case was more aggressive than any which I, or the prosecutors in my office, had previously encountered," Acosta said in his letter. Among the "legal superstars" on Epstein's defense team: Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, Jay Lefkowitz and several others, including prosecutors who had formally worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office and in the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department. Acosta said that one member of the defense team warned him "the office's excess zeal in forcing a good man to serve time in jail might be the subject of a book if we continued to proceed with this matter." Black said he's never heard anyone mention writing a book about the Epstein case. "Mr. Acosta claims we negotiated in bad faith by appealing to the Department of Justice in Washington," Black said. "Any person under investigation by a United States attorney, meaning any of the 94 such offices in the country, has the right to seek review by the Department of Justice and it is so provided for in their manual. Thus I cannot imagine invoking this right could be construed as bad faith. "In our system of justice, people are given the right of appeal and there should be no implication of wrong doing by exercising it. "Finally Mr. Acosta mentions we looked for personal peccadilloes of prosecutors," Black said. "I am not sure what he refers to but this never happened. We did point out misconduct and over-reaching by certain people involved in the investigation. Not only is there nothing wrong with this but it is a necessary part of the process. There will always be people who abuse the great power of the government and we can not stand by silently when it occurs." The non-prosecution agreement was sealed in Epstein's state felony file until victims' attorneys successfully argued to make the document public in September 2009. [Palm Beach Daily News-March 30, 2011] * A-Rod escalates war with Yankees; team responds with a challenge: "Embattled Yankee Alex Rodriguez escalated his war with team higher-ups via comments from his new New York lawyer suggesting the team purposely mistreated him medically, and Yankees president Randy Levine responded Saturday afternoon with a strong challenge for Rodriguez. Levine offered to release all the team's medical records while simultaneously asking A-Rod to release his records of treatment with Anthony Galea, the disgraced sports doctor who treated Rodriguez and was convicted of smuggling HGH... Tacopina, showing no signs of shutting up, came out blasting after he was recently hired by Rodriguez as the latest in a long string of prominent Rodriguez legal people. Rodriguez and noted Miami defense lawyer Roy Black parted ways, but A-Rod is believed to retain sports attorney David Cornwell, plus labor law firm Cohen, Weiss and Simon, plus Jay Z's legal group at Reed Smith. Tacopina's comments came a day after 60 Minutes reported that members of the A-Rod camp leaked Biogenesis documents linking Ryan Braun and teammate Francisco Cervelli to Biogenesis, the now-defunct "wellness" clinic that provided PEDs to baseball players and is at the center of MLB's PED case..." (http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/writer/jon-heyman/23196126/arod-escalates-war-with-yankees-team-responds-with-a-challenge) Reputation: * RUSH LIMBAUGH'S DEFENSE ATTORNEY, ROY BLACK, HOSTS FUNDRAISER FOR PATRICK MURPHY "Memo to Patrick Murphy: If you want to win street cred with the 99 percent, don't have Rush Limbaugh's lawyer host your fundraiser. Murphy, the Democratic congressional candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Allen West, has opened himself up to a lot of bad jokes with the fundraiser slated for tomorrow night in Coral Gables. The event is being held at the home of Roy Black, the famed criminal attorney who defended Rush Limbaugh when Palm Beach prosecutors accused him of "doctor-shopping" for pain pills. Black is currently representing John Goodman, the Wellington polo mogul accused of driving drunk and causing a car accident that killed a 23-year-old last year. Guests at Black's home will shell out $500 to $5,000 for the soiree. They'll also get to rub shoulders with a genuine celebrity: Black's wife, Lea, who has been a cast member on The Real Housewives of Miami. Just to recap: Republican Allen West defends tax breaks for the wealthy, and Democrat Patrick Murphy holds a fundraiser at the home of a famous criminal lawyer and a reality-TV star. Ain't politics grand? [Broward/Palm Beach New Times-December 6th , 2011 http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2011/12/rush_limbaugh_attorney_roy_black_fundraiser_patrick_murphy.php] * LET'S GET DRUNK: ROY BLACK, POLO BOSS JOHN GOODMAN'S LAWYER; HOSTS YEARLY SHINDIG "International Polo Club Palm Beach founder John Goodman, whose alleged killing of a 23-year-old man in a car crash last month is still under investigation, was nowhere to be found among those who paid homage to high-profile South Florida attorney Roy Black. Funny thing, because when it comes to celebrities attending The Blacks' Annual Gala in Miami Beach Saturday night, Black and his wife Lea can always count on those he extracted from the criminal justice system. And yes, there may be some of future clients of Black's there, too. Girls Gone Wild's Joe Francis was one of them. He once had tax and public morals problems, but Black made it all better. So he came to the Fontainebleau Miami Beach for the big party. "He wins every case," Francis said. "His approach is different from other lawyers, partly because he never worked for the government as a prosecutor. He believes in your case 100 percent, and I don't know any other who does that." Three-time Indianapolis and Dancing With The Stars winner Helio Castroneves showed up. Black got him out of his little tax evasion issue last year. Yet John Goodman, who could soon be facing DUI and manslaughter accusations but hasn't been charged, was MIA. And who could blame him? Roy Black, after all, kicked off the open bar, three-course fiesta with this announcement to the 1,000-plus guests who'd paid up to $1,000 each: "If you guys don't get drunk and dance on the tables, then this party has failed!" The Blacks party, which could rival most Palm Beach shindigs in the wealth and notoriety of participants, has long been a staple of Miami's social life. And it raises millions for educational charities. It gathers usually well-known figures from all facets of life. The legal community, for example, was represented with the likes of Harvard prof Alan Dershowitz, who represented Palm Beach millionaire perv Jeffrey Epstein with Black; O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, unrecognizable after years of plastic surgery; and Jim Ferrara, a successful local litigation attorney. Also there: rapper Rick Ross; shoe designer Lisa Pliner; TV chefs Ron Duprat and Bobby Flay; The Real Housewives of Atlanta's Kim Zolciak; poker star Noah Schwartz; Bob Seger saxophonist Alto Reed; Gov. Charlie Crist and his lovely bride, Carole Crist; singers Natalie Cole, Paulina Rubio and Gloria Estefan; boxer Lennox Lewis; former Miami Heat star Alonzo Mourning; Girls Gone Wild's Joe Francis; and others. (See them all by clicking here or on the photos) Gov. Charlie Crist, who's running for U.S. Senate, was received like a rock star. Despite the polls showing he's behind Marco Rubio among Republicans, Crist pressed the flesh with a vengeance and showed he's still popular among the beautiful people. And despite stories saying that his wife of a little more than a year is nowhere to be found, the First Lady was glued to her husband. "He's a brilliant attorney who has extraordinary admiration of a lot of people," the governor said of Black. "He's a hard worker, and those usually get lucky." Well, there was one failure that night: the Blacks couldn't auction off a Bugatti Veyron, the world's most expensive car. But then, who in this economy could get someone to bid $2.75 million on anything? [March 1, 2010--http://www.page2live.com/2010/03/01/lets-get-drunk-roy-black-polo-boss-john-goodmans-lawyer-hosts-yearly-shindig/] NOTES: RE: Vet Committee: Roy Black Schmuck, Bobby Bobby_Schmuck@who.eop.gov<mailto:Bobby_Schmuck@who.eop.gov> Seems fine. All, Finance would like approval for Roy Black to attend/photo/donate for one of the POTUS events in Miami. His wife Leah passes vet. I'm ok with him but defer to Bobby and others if there are objections. ___________ 8550564 2/13/2012 I'm fine for just meetings with Messina. On Feb 13, 2012, at 3:03 PM, "Rufus Gifford" RGifford@barackobama.com<mailto:RGifford@barackobama.com> wrote: The second two issues aren't a concern and the first one seems to be largely hearsay and unsubstantiated. I would say ok. Hello everyone, Teal asked that I send this to VC2 for your input. Let us know what you think. Thanks. I say no, but think it's a question for Vet2. I am ok One more addition: Lea Black - 95398880 Roy Black - 72082869 Hi there, Can we vet the following folks to host POTUS in Miami please. Robert Rubenstein - 100621684 (no spouse) Hala Mnaymneh - 55343632 Sami Mnaymneh - 99673956 Jane Toll - 100762168 Robert Toll - 99817408 Thank you! Karina Marquez Deputy Regional Finance Director South, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest Democratic National Committee 202.488.5018<tel:202.488.5018> | marquezk@dnc.org<mailto:marquezk@dnc.org>
Loans

Most credit unions come into their own for loans of smaller amounts, under £3,000. Many people who borrow these amounts would otherwise only be able to resort to doorstep lending or payday loans as an alternative. Compared to those, credit unions have halos. See the loans section below for more info.

You can also use the loan to buy white goods via Co-operative Electrical - this scheme's offered through more than 100 credit unions, so ask yours if it participates. Another way to buy electricals is via the Smarterbuys scheme. This is a collective buying project that allows you to pay for goods via a credit union loan as a way to avoid payday loans, weekly payment stores or loan sharks.

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Current accounts

Around 60 credit unions now offer current accounts. If your union provides a bank account facility, it'll operate very much like a Basic Bank Account.

Mortgages

These are only offered by a few credit unions, Glasgow, Scotwest & Capital Credit Unions (all in Scotland) and No 1 Copperpot Credit Union (for police staff). However, never pick a mortgage without looking at the whole market. See Cheap Mortgage Finding for how to locate the best deal.

Prepaid cards

Around 40 unions around the UK offer a prepaid card service. See the Prepaid Cards guide for how the cards work.
The nuclear agreement between the U.S., Iran, and other world powers cleared an important congressional hurdle in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, but don't expect former vice president Dick Cheney to be happy about it.

Despite holding no elected office, former vice president Dick Cheney has emerged as one of the most visible—and hawkish—opponents of the Iran deal, delivering a blistering speech Tuesday morning alleging that the accord "will give Iran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland."

“I know of no nation in history that has agreed to guarantee that the means of its own destruction will be in the hands of another nation, particularly one that is hostile," Cheney told the audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank, to mark the return of Congress after a summer recess.

According to Cheney, the deal—which has garnered widespread support from all corners—will "facilitate and enable the Iranian regime’s support for terror and terrorist groups, including those who have attacked the United States and are threatening our security, our allies and our interests." He also claimed the deal threatens the security of "our Arab allies across the Middle East," Europe, and "the Jewish People."

However, just 15 minutes into his speech, Cheney was interrupted by a young woman bearing a different message.

"Dick Cheney is a war criminal. We want peace," yelled Michaela Anang, an organizer with the anti-war group CODEPINK. Holding a banner which read: "Wrong in Iraq, Wrong in Iran," Anang was swiftly escorted from the room, but not before momentarily derailing Cheney's speech—and engaging in a game of tug-of-war with an unidentified audience member, who aggressively sought to seize her cloth sign. The incident was captured in the following video footage.

"Dick Cheney is a notable war criminal, has committed atrocities during his time as vice president and beyond, and is a known supporter of torture," Anang told Common Dreams following the direct action. "That is something I am not OK with, as a young person and an activist. My generation wants peace. We're tired of war, and we're tired of war mongers like Cheney."

Anang was not the only person on Tuesday to question the former vice president's track record. The following video, released by the White House, is entitled, "Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now."

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There was another key show of opposition to Cheney's anti-diplomacy agenda on Tuesday.

Shortly after the former vice president delivered his speech, three key Senate Democrats declared they will vote in favor of the Iran deal, bringing its total number of public supporters in the Senate to 41. This threshold gives backers of the deal enough votes to prevent passage of the disapproval resolution, meaning there will be no need for a presidential veto. The public commitments followed a grassroots pressure campaign, waged by people in Iran, the diaspora, and across the United States.

The development was embraced by backers of diplomacy.

"This victory, which countless organizations and individuals contributed to, proves the power of grassroots advocacy," said Rabbi Joseph Berman, government affairs liaison for Jewish Voice for Peace. "This achievement demonstrates that advocates of peace and justice can win over the well-financed advocates of war."

Unclear if deliberate or coincidental, but flood of key Senators announcing Iran Deal support right after Cheney spoke is funny either way. — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 8, 2015

However, the deal's backers say that efforts are far from over.

"Now that there is sufficient support in Congress to protect the agreement, we should move swiftly to implement its terms," declared Global Zero, an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, in a statement released Tuesday.

And Phyllis Bennis, who directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, argued last week: "Now we have to look to the future and figure out strategies to win new victories over the existing wars, occupations, and real—not imagined—nuclear weapons, all enabled and furthered by U.S. policies, that continue to create millions of new refugees, escalating violence, and instability across the Middle East and beyond."
Take action! The principle of integrated education is under attack like never before in this country following the Government’s announcement that it will introduce a new generation of state schools that can religiously discriminate against children for all of their places. We are encouraging everyone to write to their MPs to speak out, and we’ve provided a facility through which it’s possible to do so.

In line with its ambition to deliver 500 new free schools by 2020, the Government has given the green light to 11 new religious schools in its latest wave of 77 free school approvals. The schools are the first to be approved since the Government announced that it will move to scrap the requirement that new ‘faith’ schools keep at least half of their places open to local children, irrespective of religion or belief. If these plans go ahead, all 11 schools will be able to religiously select 100% of their places. The British Humanist Association (BHA) has stated that the latest free school approvals are yet another sign of the Government’s backward approach to improving integration in the education system.

Of the 11 religious schools given approval, nine are either Church of England or Christian in character. They are:

Derby Cathedral School, a Church of England secondary

A Level Sixth Form School, Bury St Edmunds, a Church of England school for pupils aged 16 to 19

The Trinity College, an all-through Christian school in Colchester

Bishop Arden Church of England Free School, a secondary in Hillingdon

Emmanuel Community School, a Christian primary school in Waltham Forest

Cathedral Free School, a Church of England primary in Liverpool

Cathedral Enterprise School, a Church of England secondary in Bristol

East Village C of E Academy, a primary school in Swindon

Middle Wichel CE (Primary) Academy also in Swindon

In addition, two new Hindu schools have been approved, the Avanti Leicester School and the Avanti Brent School. Both are being set up by the Avanti Schools Trust which currently operates five other existing Hindu schools in England.

The approval of these new religious schools comes just days after the Government announced the removal of the so-called ‘50% cap’ on religious selection, meaning that both new and existing free schools may soon be able to religiously discriminate for all of their places when previously they have only been able to do so for up to half. The move has been strongly criticised by a range of individuals and organisations, with Conservative Party grandee Ken Clarke MP asking the Education Secretary Justine Greening to ‘reconsider pretty fundamentally the announcement’, and Professor Ted Cantle CBE of the Institute for Community Cohesion Foundation calling the move ‘retrograde’ and ‘deleterious to integration’.

The Catholic Education Service, which has been largely responsible for encouraging the Government to drop the 50% cap, has already announced its intention to open 35 to 40 new religiously selective free schools. This follows the Church of England’s announcement over the summer that they would establish more than 100 new schools in the next four years, equivalent to a quarter of the Government’s target number.

BHA Education Campaigner Jay Harman said, ‘In the last few days the Government has stated unequivocally that it wants to tackle segregation in our education system and ensure that children from different religious and non-religious backgrounds are able to learn with and from each other as they grow up. Unfortunately, it has also set out that it intends to achieve this by allowing religious schools to become even more mono-cultural than they are, and approving new religious schools that will divide communities and discriminate against local families. This is quite remarkable.

‘If these policies continue to be pursued by the Government, our education system and our society will become a great deal more divided than they already are. All those who would rather see schools be inclusive, fair, and open to all children, must join us in opposing this entirely counter-productive approach.’

Notes

For further comment and information, please contact BHA Education Campaigner, Jay Harman, on jay@humanism.org.uk or 020 7324 3078.

See the full list of approved free schools: https://humanism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016-02-09-List-of-proposed-Free-Schools.xlsx

Read the BHA’s previous news item ‘Comment: Government moves to drop restrictions on religious selection in new faith schools’: https://humanism.org.uk/2016/09/09/comment-government-moves-to-drop-restrictions-on-religious-selection-in-new-faith-schools/

Read the Government’s green paper, where it sets out the proposals: https://consult.education.gov.uk/school-frameworks/schools-that-work-for-everyone/supporting_documents/SCHOOLS%20THAT%20WORK%20FOR%20EVERYONE%20%20FINAL.pdf

Read more about the BHA’s work on ‘faith’ schools: https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/faith-schools/

The British Humanist Association is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. It promotes a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.
De la forma en que Marita juntaba sus pesitos no quita ni suma nada a la historia, salvo por el detalle que los medios también lo han ocultado para que "la verdad no arruine una buena nota". Todos ganaron con el caso de Marita Verón.

Ya había escrito algo sobre la prostitución y la trata aquí: Querido Eugenio

Hacia el año 1997se quería poner linda para el jubileo del año 2000. Había plata y las tasas de interés estaban por el suelo.Se pusieron a invertir de tal manera que generaron un boom inmobiliario que hizo que el rancho se les llenara de albañiles turcos (que después se fueron a), africanos y de los países delHubo tal migración que surgió un problema: las putas europeas eran caras para los salarios de los obreros. Por cuanto ante ese desbalance comenzaron a migrar trolas de losque si bien habían dejado la guerra atrás la crisis los comía vivos.Las primeras prostitutas independientes que entraron fueron rumanas y búlgaras, las primeras víctimas de las mafias de trata de personas fueron las albanesas cuyo país aun estaba asediado por la guerra de exterminio.Así comenzó la última ola de trata de personas en Europa, que recién se pudo contener hacia 2005 cuando eldio por finalizada la existencia de mafias relacionadas al secuestro para alimentar el mercado de la prostitución.Una simple y bestial situación de oferta y demanda. Hay que considerar además que la demanda era de baja calidad. Por eso un campesino turco que se pasaba el día fratachando una catedral por 60 euros y dormía en un contenedor podía violarse a una pobre mujer drogada y a veces atada sin muchas vueltas al asunto.A la par del problema surgieron -cuándo no- estudiosos del fenómeno que fueron financiados para tranquilizar las culposas almas europeas. Esos estudios sobre trata de personas tenían su base europea en. Cuando se les acabó el curro de la trata de personas, psicólogos, sociólogos, politólogos y cualquier otra especialidad de esas que no generan nada productivo, descubrieron la "violencia de género", otro regalito que también exportamos oportunamente.La creencia de que enexisten redes al estilo de organizaciones mafiosas, con jerarquías y estructuras mafiosas relacionadas con la trata de personasCuando en realidad. Por cuanto, cuál sería el valor práctico de secuestrar mujeres para obligarlas a prostituirse, con el riesgo legal (bajo, es cierto) que eso conlleva y con, supongo, el disgusto de quienes consumen prostitutas, de tener que cogerse un cacho de carne drogado, atado a una cama. Porque si buscaran eso, me imagino, se cogerían a sus esposas en lugar de buscar prostitutas.El casolo vengo siguiendo desde antes de iniciado el juicio. Me leí el auto de procesamiento, la elevación a Juicio, la mayoría de las testimoniales y seguí vía web, on line, muchas de las audiencias claves. Lo que digo me da paja referenciarlo pero está ahí, googleen en formatos doc y pdf y aparecerán las actas, todo. Busquen en medios locales independientes, entren en los foros de esas provincias.Si creen o no, es cuestión de fe, la misma fe metafísica que tienen algunos en creer el cuentito de la mujer buenaza que salió a buscar a su hija y andaba luchando contra las mafias. Repiten como loritos que liberó 100, 300 mujeres. ¿De dónde sacan esas cifras? Todo verso.Si algo se notó desde el principio es que estábamos en presencia de un gran fraude. Fraude basado en la incorporación de testigos truchos, cuyos discursos se armaron en lacon el asesoramiento de dos abogadas más truchas que la propia Trimarco y que habían sido oportunamente ofrecidas porPor tanto, si quieren putear, puteen al fiscal de Juicio y a la Procuración (que son el verdadero brazo del Poder Político) y no a los jueces a los que les llegan las pruebas cocinadas y deben decidir sobre su veracidad. Principalmente en un caso en que, como se dijo no se pudo componer la prueba con documentales, ni nada. Sólo testimoniales.. La absolución era cantada. El aprovechamiento que se haga de ahora en más del caso, pertenece a otra dinámica pero el juicio tuvo su control de legalidad en los más de 10 abogados defensores. Desconozco la calidad de los jueces que intervinieron pero no hay que serpara estimar que son unos zaparrastrosos, corruptos e influenciables. Pero hay que admitir que hasta el más impresentable queda registrado para la posteridad en sus fallos, sobre todo cuando adquieren esta trascendencia.Imagínense qué burdo ha sido todo que hasta se habrán visto imposibilitados de condenar a esos zopencos para calmar al viejerío.En principio, la fiscalía de instrucción y luego la de juicio compusieron la prueba de la acusación sólo basada en testimoniales, cuestión de por sí ilegal, pero alcanzó para los procesamientos y creyeron que podía pasar en el Oral. Los testigos fueron aportados en su totalidad por Susana Trimarco. No investigaron nada. Es cierto que la primer fiscal intentó avanzar en otras pistas pero fue eyectada de la causa.De parte de la fiscalía, salvo una mujer, el resto de los testigos se encontraban o estuvieron alguna vez, asistidas financieramente por la, que a su vez es financiada por el Ministerio del Interior y antes por el de Justicia. Las asistencias van desde préstamos para microemprendimientos productivos, capacitación, vivienda y cualquier otro rubro que se les pueda ocurrir que es fácil chorearse la plata sin justificarla.¿De donde vinieron esas testigos? de los famosos operativos que realizaba la Trimarco desde 2007 en adelante.. La construcción del personaje de Susana Trimarco como una mujer valiente, que recorría el norte liberando esclavas fue generado por lade la delegación más poderosa que tiene la Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado como es la de(donde además cobran sus dineros la piara de cibermilitantes que rompen las pelotas en las redes sociales luego de haberse desfinanciado el curro que les había armado).Por ejemplo, una mujer que declaró como testigo, al ser impugnada por encontrarse con un contrato de la Fundación Marita Verón, afirmó haber sido liberada de la esclavitud sexual en la que se encontraba por Susana Trimarco. Sin embargo se demostró que vivía a al menos cinco cuadras de ladonde había sido "liberada", que convivía con su marido y vecinos refirieron que diariamente llevaba a sus hijos al colegio. No fue imputada por falso testimonio.Como tampoco investigaron a otra "liberada" enuna tucumana que no pudo nombrar la calle que seguía a la que supuestamente estaba viviendo, no pudo decir de qué color era la Casa de Gobierno provincial (a pesar de domiciliarse a una cuadra del centro cívico), ni identificar datos de la terminal de ómnibus que teoricamente tomaba.Varias testigos afirmaron cobrar $3.000 mensuales de la Fundación por actividades que no pudieron precisar.El procedimiento era más o menos así. La SIDE identificaba algún puterío (que no perteneciera al Poder político), le pasaba el dato a la Trimarco y ésta, sola o acompañada a veces pory agentes de inteligencia, les caían encima.Te allanaban, entraban a las patadas y a los gritos, te tiraban todo el poder del Estado. Las pobres minas en bolas, medio en pedo, solas, pobres, alejadas de sus hijos, explotadas. Trimarco les ofrecía dinero, contratos, subsidios, etc. Imaginen qué iban a decir esas mujeres cuando se les pedía que dijeran que estaban secuestradas?Durante los últimos cuatro años, la fiscalía admitió esa calidad de testimonios para lograr la imputación a todo evento de los acusados, una banda de gordos impresentables que sus buenas cagadas se habrán mandado, pero coincidirán conmigo, amables lectores, que es insoportable pensar que se condene a alguien sin pruebas.Todo el andamiaje legal se basa en la confianza en que las condenas sean producto de pruebas admitidas y validadas en un juicio con garantías constitucionales. Porque podemos aceptar que un culpable se escape del cargo punitivo pero jamás que se condene a un inocente o a alguien que parezca culpable pero no se lo pueda demostrar.Bueno, algunos dirán que estos acusados eran culpables de otras cosas (por eso serán juzgados en La Rioja) o de la misma desaparición de Marita. Pero lo que nos diferencia de otras bestias es que tal vez algunos no queremos vivir en un país que condena sin pruebas y sin garantías.Pero la novelita de, ya había calado en el corazón de las viejas que se habían emocionado y llorado con la historia guionada. El personaje y la épica ya habían sido construidos., como refiere. ¿Si la historia está bien contada y es verosímil, porqué no creerla? Además, si algo de ingrata tiene la verdad (y la realidad) es que depende de las percepciones.El casoy toda la histeria que se observó en las Redes Sociales luego del veredicto ni siquiera sirve para elevar la conciencia crítica de las personas. Porque esa histeria parte de la proyección de miedos infantiles. El abuso, que mamá desaparezca, la violación, el terror a la pobreza propia, etc. Y el miedo, ese gran, gran, gran aliado y socio de la señora manipulación.La Trimarco es una pobre mujer (y era una mujer pobre) a la que le desaparecieron a su hija. Pero lo que tenía de pobre lo tiene de viva. Vio que había una desesperación de la progresía por financiarle sus delirios y matarle la angustia y el hambre y agarró viaje. Fue funcional. Simbiótico.Susana Trimarco, consta en el expediente, en 2003 no tenía $5 (cinco pesos) para prestarle a Marita (que tenía una infección). Y ahora anda con chofer, tiene una casa que no vale menos de U$S 200 mil (en 2003 el lugar en el que vivía no tenía calefón), se viste y viaja como la gerente que es deEso lo sabe todo, por eso es que los medios, pese a instarlo, no lograron que nadie, salvoy algún otro colectivo de colectivizados saliera a protestar por el fallo.Y en medio de este desastre, observamos a los políticos argentinos de la oposición haciéndose los enojados, entristecidos, abrumados por el fallo.. Si nuestra oposición, para logar un "me gusta" eno un RT en, no tienen la pelotas suficientes para enfrentar a la gente y decirles que, qué nos espera., como su madre, era una pobre mina. Pobre, pobrísima. Ejercía la prostitución en elal menos dos días a la semana. Esto consta en el expediente y fue señalado por vecinos, amigas y representantes de ONGs. Una enfermera refirió que le regalaba los profilácticos. Que era prostituta su mamá lo supo en 2005 y prefirió callarse.A Marita la volvieron a desaparecer un montón de veces. Y la peor de ellas, luego de la física, fue la que le provocó su propia madre. La que ocultó y minimizó que una chica instruída, sana y despierta como era ella, debiera tener que entregar su cuerpo a cualquier borracho a cambio de esos pesitos que le permitieran alimentar a su bebé.Perdió su oportunidad de denunciar el mundo de mierda en el que vivía su hija, un mundo de desocupación, miseria, desesperanza y abuso. En una provincia que es una vergüenza y una ofensa al sentido común.Todos menos la pobre Marita Verón.
"I'm here because I have a vote and, basically, I've been told what to do with it," one Irishman told a London reporter. "Thank God they will all shut up now," a Dublin pensioner told a German newspaper. Both had just voted yes in this past weekend's Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, whose passage removes one of the last remaining obstacles to ratification of a document that will, among other things, create a president and a foreign minister of Europe. Both had voted no during the first referendum last year, when the treaty failed to pass.

Both had changed their minds because they were tired of hearing politicians endlessly urging them to do so. Some also felt that, during the worst recession in recent memory, they might need Europe's help. Not many Irish seem to have been inspired by the high ideals and lofty aspirations of what is sometimes called "the European project": Although a whopping two-thirds of Irish voters said yes to the treaty, there wasn't much audible or visible enthusiasm. A few politicians in Ireland and across the continent hailed the referendum as a "great victory for Europe," but no one believed them. And thus did Europe take another, limping step toward the creation of a unified foreign policy apparatus, complaining bitterly all the way.

Which is not a bad thing: If Europe is to have a single apparatus to make its foreign policy, it is important that nobody has too many illusions about it. When the referendum failed last year, I wrote that it was for the best, since "European" foreign policy has always been most successful when it represents the wishes of the national governments of at least two or three large countries plus several small ones, and has always been most disastrous when carried out by bureaucrats in Brussels who don't represent anyone in particular. I hesitate to use the tainted expression "coalitions of the willing," but actually they work very well, in diplomacy as well as in military conflicts.

Still, since I don't feel like railing against the inevitable this week, and since I suspect that there really will be a European president and a European foreign minister in the near future, it's worth contemplating what that might mean. Clearly, the real test of whether Europe's most powerful countries are taking this new treaty seriously wasn't the Irish referendum. The question of whether the recalcitrant Czech president will finally be browbeaten into signing the thing is irrelevant, too (and if he does, it will certainly not represent a "triumph of the European ideal," whatever they say in Brussels).

But do watch closely, over the coming months, to see who is selected to fill these jobs, and, more important, how they are chosen. Traditionally, leaders of multilateral institutions are selected through a process of elimination: The person who is the least interesting, least opinionated and least influential gets the job, precisely because nobody else objects. Yet this is not how the president or prime minister of a country is selected: He gets the job because he has convinced the electorate that he is better than somebody else. I'm not saying that democracy always produces the most gifted leaders, but it does frequently produce politicians who are willing to argue loudly in favor of some things and against others. By contrast, people often wind up running multilateral institutions -- and not just European ones -- because they are not willing to argue about anything at all.

Here, then, is how to evaluate the Lisbon Treaty: If there really is a coalition of the willing in favor of a common European policy, then it will support the selection of forceful and opinionated leaders. Europe will then have, in Henry Kissinger's immortal phrasing, a phone number to call when America (or Russia, or China) wants to talk. And if there is no such coalition? Then you won't hear much about the president or the foreign minister of Europe again, so it doesn't really matter.

applebaumletters@washpost.com
Live coverage following Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti, in which tens of thousands are feared to have died and three million displaced. Bodies are piled up on the rubble-strewn streets of the capital. Rescue workers are in a race against time to find survivors.

0000 The BBC is discontinuing this live update page for the night. For the latest developments, please go to our main news page. The BBC is discontinuing this live update page for the night. For the latest developments, please go to our main news page.

2346 Survivor Jackson tells the BBC he has just found his wife under the rubble: "We just got married. I just married my wife, and now I don't know what to do. She spent three days under the rubble of the building, and today I found her." "We just got married. I just married my wife, and now I don't know what to do. She spent three days under the rubble of the building, and today I found her."

2342 Time magazine reporter Saul Schwarz says he has seen at least two downtown roadblocks made out of bodies of earthquake victims and rocks - Reuters. "It's getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help," he tells the news agency. Time magazine reporter Saul Schwarz says he has seen at least two downtown roadblocks made out of bodies of earthquake victims and rocks - Reuters. "It's getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help," he tells the news agency.

2325 Louis Ballinger of Oxfam tells the BBC: "People are pretty calm, I have to say. There were no scenes of chaos or aggressivity or anything else. People are pretty shocked still. A lot of families and friends and neighbours have gathered together in parks in Port-au-Prince, so you can see the ones that are homeless now are sticking together and trying to help each other out, waiting for aid to come along." "People are pretty calm, I have to say. There were no scenes of chaos or aggressivity or anything else. People are pretty shocked still. A lot of families and friends and neighbours have gathered together in parks in Port-au-Prince, so you can see the ones that are homeless now are sticking together and trying to help each other out, waiting for aid to come along."

2319 US mobile phone users send more than $5m to the Red Cross for disaster relief, by texting "Haiti" to the number 90999. US mobile phone users send more than $5m to the Red Cross for disaster relief, by texting "Haiti" to the number 90999.

2308 The BBC's Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince says: "There are more aid flights getting in, large numbers of international personnel are here - they are getting ready before setting out... But it feels as if it could take a very long time for anything to happen." "There are more aid flights getting in, large numbers of international personnel are here - they are getting ready before setting out... But it feels as if it could take a very long time for anything to happen."

2246 Presidents Obama and Sarkozy agree to work together to prepare a conference on reconstruction and development in Haiti, "with Brazil, Canada and other countries directly concerned" - AFP. Presidents Obama and Sarkozy agree to work together to prepare a conference on reconstruction and development in Haiti, "with Brazil, Canada and other countries directly concerned" - AFP.

2240 Bhatiap tweets: "From walking around most of the day I estimate that one-third to half of the houses are or will be demolished."

2235 US National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer tells the BBC: "It's all hands on deck here on this effort to try to make sure not only that the United States is doing all it can but the president himself is working the phones, talking to world leaders, trying to again coordinate international assistance. This is not only a US effort - we have to work with the United Nations, NGOs and the world community to help Haiti in this desperate time of need." "It's all hands on deck here on this effort to try to make sure not only that the United States is doing all it can but the president himself is working the phones, talking to world leaders, trying to again coordinate international assistance. This is not only a US effort - we have to work with the United Nations, NGOs and the world community to help Haiti in this desperate time of need."

2211 The BBC's Barbara Plett at the United Nations says: "The UN says 36 of its personnel were killed in the Haiti earthquake, and 188 staff members are still unaccounted for. UN officials acknowledged that in coming days careful rescue efforts will switch to recovering bodies, and dozens more UN staff could be confirmed dead. It's a huge blow for the organisation, which is scrambling to coordinate a massive relief effort for Haiti." "The UN says 36 of its personnel were killed in the Haiti earthquake, and 188 staff members are still unaccounted for. UN officials acknowledged that in coming days careful rescue efforts will switch to recovering bodies, and dozens more UN staff could be confirmed dead. It's a huge blow for the organisation, which is scrambling to coordinate a massive relief effort for Haiti."

2205 Aid organisation CARE tweets: "The Santo Domingo [Dominican Republic] airport is full of aid workers, rescue teams. It is turning into the humanitarian hub."

2144 Veteran NBC news anchor Brian Williams tells Veteran NBC news anchor Brian Williams tells the Huffington Post the situation is comparable to the 2004 Asian tsunami: "It's very reminiscent of what we saw in Banda Aceh. There were 35,000 dead in our time there. There's no way to express it, no way to explain it, it just becomes other-worldly."

2125 Haitian President Rene Preval says 7,000 victims have already been buried in a common grave - Reuters. Haitian President Rene Preval says 7,000 victims have already been buried in a common grave - Reuters.

2055 Harry Brown in Macau e-mails: "Just getting word - via my sister in Montreal - that 11 family members in Carrefour aged between 18 months and 60 years have survived. To what extent, we don't know yet. The relief is mixed with guilt. I am relieved to have received positive news yet there are thousands upon thousands of families hit by this tragedy." "Just getting word - via my sister in Montreal - that 11 family members in Carrefour aged between 18 months and 60 years have survived. To what extent, we don't know yet. The relief is mixed with guilt. I am relieved to have received positive news yet there are thousands upon thousands of families hit by this tragedy."

2033 The BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York says: "So many tears are being shed in Brooklyn's Haitian community - information is scarce, communications with Haiti are virtually non existent, and the longer that goes by without contact from loved ones, the harder it is. At the Savoir Faire music shop, a focal point for Haitians in Brooklyn, people are gathering, donating money and supplies for Haiti." "So many tears are being shed in Brooklyn's Haitian community - information is scarce, communications with Haiti are virtually non existent, and the longer that goes by without contact from loved ones, the harder it is. At the Savoir Faire music shop, a focal point for Haitians in Brooklyn, people are gathering, donating money and supplies for Haiti."

2024 The BBC's Andy Gallacher in Port-au-Prince says: "People are starting to get frustrated, and there is a sense that the mood could change. Bodies are starting to pile up ... and there is a stench filling the air... The help really isn't here yet."

Andy Gallacher describes his first daylight view of the damage in Port-au-Prince. "People are starting to get frustrated, and there is a sense that the mood could change. Bodies are starting to pile up ... and there is a stench filling the air... The help really isn't here yet."

2001 Fredodupoux, in Port-au-Prince, tweets: "HELP IS NEEDED! People still alive under College Canapé Vert are screaming for help to get them out of the rubble."

1943 US military officials say aid flights to Haiti have resumed after being suspended because of overcrowding at Port-au-Prince airport - Associated Press. US military officials say aid flights to Haiti have resumed after being suspended because of overcrowding at Port-au-Prince airport - Associated Press.

1927 The BBC's Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince says: "The injured lie among those who have already died, in the ditches running along the roadside you may pass a body or indeed several bodies. In the heat, the smell in places is becoming too strong to stomach. Haiti's needs are massive, as ever in an earthquake - food, water and medicine. It also needs bulldozers and heavy lifting equipment, but perhaps more than anything it needs someone to take charge here." "The injured lie among those who have already died, in the ditches running along the roadside you may pass a body or indeed several bodies. In the heat, the smell in places is becoming too strong to stomach. Haiti's needs are massive, as ever in an earthquake - food, water and medicine. It also needs bulldozers and heavy lifting equipment, but perhaps more than anything it needs someone to take charge here."

1859 A spokesman for the A spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office says: "We are beginning to repatriate the first British Nationals. They have also located and checked on over 30 other Brits, who have confirmed they are safe and well, and are coordinating with US, Canadian and EU partners to facilitate the evacuation of any British Nationals who wish to leave Haiti. We have no reports at present of British casualties."

1850 The The Red Cross says it believes 45-50,000 people died in the earthquake and another three million have been injured or left homeless.

1826 UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband writes UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband writes in his blog : "We have all seen the horrific pictures from Haiti. I will speak to Ban Ki-Moon later about the terrible loss for the UN... The whole international community wants to do everything it can. The situation is just awful."

1800 "Sometimes, though, you have to wonder if the planet itself is not conspiring against this humble little nation," writes Leonard Pitts Jr "Sometimes, though, you have to wonder if the planet itself is not conspiring against this humble little nation," writes Leonard Pitts Jr in the Miami Herald.

1751 Medecins Sans Frontieres says it has not been able to get in touch with all its Haitian staff or with patients who were in MSF buildings when the quake hit.

1745 Kathy Johnson in the UK, who has relatives in Haiti, told the BBC: "We are desperately worried because my uncle and six of his children are missing in Port-au-Prince. The area is devastated, the church and graveyard near his house destroyed. And I am stuck here thousands of miles away. I feel so frustrated, all I want to do is to jump on a plane and go and help." "We are desperately worried because my uncle and six of his children are missing in Port-au-Prince. The area is devastated, the church and graveyard near his house destroyed. And I am stuck here thousands of miles away. I feel so frustrated, all I want to do is to jump on a plane and go and help."

1721 The BBC's Andy Gallacher at a cemetery in Port-au-Prince says: "It's a mass grave, there are maybe ... 20-30 or more bodies which are just lying there, I'm not sure exactly how these bodies are going to be disposed of but at the moment they are just in a pile, at the edge of this cemetery." "It's a mass grave, there are maybe ... 20-30 or more bodies which are just lying there, I'm not sure exactly how these bodies are going to be disposed of but at the moment they are just in a pile, at the edge of this cemetery."

1710 Joel Achenbach in Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post says rebuilding with reinforced concrete would literally create a more stable country. "Obviously the US will send aid and relief workers, but we should do more than that: for a small fraction of what the United States is spending to bail out banks and auto firms we could help Haiti rebuild with reinforced concrete.... This is the 21st century - and yet people around the world are living and working in buildings that are certain to crumble when the earth moves."

1704 A US rescue team spent five hours freeing one man from rubble in Port-au-Prince. One of the rescuers, Sam Gray said there was "an incredible amount of devastation and an incredible amount of people who will probably lose their lives" in the country. "Honestly the hardest part is knowing how many people aren't going to be saved," he said. A US rescue team spent five hours freeing one man from rubble in Port-au-Prince. One of the rescuers, Sam Gray said there was "an incredible amount of devastation and an incredible amount of people who will probably lose their lives" in the country. "Honestly the hardest part is knowing how many people aren't going to be saved," he said.

1658 Firesideint, in Port-au-Prince, tweets: "Things are usually not as bad as the news says. Sincerely, this is worse Dead bodies everywhere. City starting to smell like rotting flesh. Men are starting to collect bodies off of the streets. Saw a truck piled high. Recovery efforts are underway but SMALL. A person here or there. No heroics. Just desperation. Many people praying as they walk."

RAMhaiti in Port-au-Prince tweets: "I'm hearing planes and/or helicopters. Yesterday there were none to speak of. It changes the atmosphere. I hope there is help on the ground."

1654 Cameron Sinclair of Architecture of Humanity, writing Cameron Sinclair of Architecture of Humanity, writing in a blog on the Huffington Post, urged those involved in the relief effort to plan very carefully. "In a developing country like Haiti the biggest danger is the effects of bad post-disaster planning and construction. Waterborne diseases spread like wildfire in temporary camps and dumping sub-standard materials not only is dangerous but undermines an existing yet fragile construction industry."

1651 The BBC's Paul Adams in Washington says: "For the second time in two days, President Obama went before the cameras to outline what his administration is doing. He was flanked by half a dozen senior members of his administration and it's been reported that former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush have agreed to lend their support - a clear sign the president wants this to be a national effort which transcends all partisan politics." "For the second time in two days, President Obama went before the cameras to outline what his administration is doing. He was flanked by half a dozen senior members of his administration and it's been reported that former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush have agreed to lend their support - a clear sign the president wants this to be a national effort which transcends all partisan politics." Obama: "Nothing less than devastating"

1640 Jean Claude Fignole of Action Aid in Haiti tells the BBC: "Conditions are catastrophic - absolutely catastrophic. I have seen some of the most horrible things I have seen in my life. I am putting out a plea to the government, to any of the authorities co-operating with Haiti, to help clean up the bodies on the streets because the health and the sanitation of this situation for the city are potentially of epic proportions." "Conditions are catastrophic - absolutely catastrophic. I have seen some of the most horrible things I have seen in my life. I am putting out a plea to the government, to any of the authorities co-operating with Haiti, to help clean up the bodies on the streets because the health and the sanitation of this situation for the city are potentially of epic proportions."

1633 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says "overall security and public order is being maintained" in Haiti. The 3,000 UN peacekeepers in the country are assisting with aid distribution. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says "overall security and public order is being maintained" in Haiti. The 3,000 UN peacekeepers in the country are assisting with aid distribution. Ban Ki-moon: "Dozens of UN staff still missing"

1625 US broadcaster CBS News has US broadcaster CBS News has footage of the second the quake struck, showing buildings collapsing as people run for cover.

1625 Barbara Jones, a Haitian living in the UK, e-mails: "I have not heard from my mother or my cousins. My aunt is also missing. She gave me my education and I owe her so much, she was a huge part of my childhood. My family live in Port-au-Prince. I haven't heard from any of them." "I have not heard from my mother or my cousins. My aunt is also missing. She gave me my education and I owe her so much, she was a huge part of my childhood. My family live in Port-au-Prince. I haven't heard from any of them." Haiti earthquake: your stories

1614 A-cui from Beijing e-mails: "Sichuan people suffered the pain of earthquake on 12 May 2008, when some hundreds of thousands of lives were taken away. Now people in Haiti suffer the same, I wish them go strongly, and also we others around the world should support them as soon as possible. Pray for people dead in earthquake, wish live people safe, and hope the Haitians overcome this quickly." "Sichuan people suffered the pain of earthquake on 12 May 2008, when some hundreds of thousands of lives were taken away. Now people in Haiti suffer the same, I wish them go strongly, and also we others around the world should support them as soon as possible. Pray for people dead in earthquake, wish live people safe, and hope the Haitians overcome this quickly."

1610 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says one UN staff member was rescued from under 4m of rubble and sent to Argentina for medical treatment. "It was a small, small miracle during the night which brought few other miracles," he said. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says one UN staff member was rescued from under 4m of rubble and sent to Argentina for medical treatment. "It was a small, small miracle during the night which brought few other miracles," he said.

1608 Jesse Hagopian, a US doctor, was on holiday in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit and is now helping with the aid effort. He told Jesse Hagopian, a US doctor, was on holiday in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit and is now helping with the aid effort. He told Democracy Now: "The injuries just kept coming all day long - head injuries, people with multiple broken legs, people catatonic who couldn't speak. Everybody is asking for medicine. You know, we don't have [the] basics."

1600 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon confirms that 150 UN personnel are missing - about 100 were inside the UN headquarters, based in a hotel, when it collapsed. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon confirms that 150 UN personnel are missing - about 100 were inside the UN headquarters, based in a hotel, when it collapsed.

1555 Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says $100m (£61m) will be made available to Haiti "very quickly", in the form of extended loans.

1546 Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero calls on the world to react with "strength and energy" to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. He says Spain, which holds the EU presidency, has mobilised "all the resources and all the capabilities" of the union. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero calls on the world to react with "strength and energy" to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. He says Spain, which holds the EU presidency, has mobilised "all the resources and all the capabilities" of the union.

1540 Volunteer Emerson Tan, heading from the UK with non-governmental organisation Mapaction to provide emergency mapping for aid agencies, e-mails: "Had to unload and check all the kit, then a long sleepless wait for the aircraft to show up. Now it's all go. Dog teams and lightsearch first with heavy rescue to follow this afternoon. Reports from the ground sound bad. Think it will be a long day." "Had to unload and check all the kit, then a long sleepless wait for the aircraft to show up. Now it's all go. Dog teams and lightsearch first with heavy rescue to follow this afternoon. Reports from the ground sound bad. Think it will be a long day."

1540 The BBC's David Loyn in Dominican Republic says: "The UK is one of the few countries whose search teams are classified at the highest level by the UN to do so called heavy rescues - the ability to burrow deep into collapsed buildings and bring out survivors. The most valued members of the party are two Labradors who will go in first. Holly and Echo are trained to sniff out the faintest traces of life amid the chaos and smell of death which will confront them in the devastation of Haiti." "The UK is one of the few countries whose search teams are classified at the highest level by the UN to do so called heavy rescues - the ability to burrow deep into collapsed buildings and bring out survivors. The most valued members of the party are two Labradors who will go in first. Holly and Echo are trained to sniff out the faintest traces of life amid the chaos and smell of death which will confront them in the devastation of Haiti."

1535 UK-based aid agency UK-based aid agency Save the Children says many children in Haiti will be "petrified and in danger". Spokesman Gareth Owen tells Reuters: "Many will have been orphaned or be badly injured themselves and in urgent need of medical help. Thousands more will have lost all contact with their families and friends and are now struggling to survive alone in the rubble."

1525 Landon Yarrington email from Port-au-Prince:Our passports, computers, clothes, and medicine are all buried in the house we were staying. All that we have with us now are the clothes on our backs. Our passports, computers, clothes, and medicine are all buried in the house we were staying. All that we have with us now are the clothes on our backs.

1515 US President Barack Obama outlines a massive aid effort from the US and announces $100m (£61m) in relief funds. He says it will take time for everything to arrive in the quake zone, but emphasises that "help is on the way". US President Barack Obama outlines a massive aid effort from the US and announces $100m (£61m) in relief funds. He says it will take time for everything to arrive in the quake zone, but emphasises that "help is on the way".

1510 Bill Clinton, UN special envoy to Haiti, has Bill Clinton, UN special envoy to Haiti, has written optimistically in Time magazine about Haiti's future: "Before this disaster, Haiti had the best chance in my lifetime to fulfil its potential as a country, to basically escape the chains of the past 200 years. I still believe that if we rally around them now and support them in the right way, the Haitian people can reclaim their destiny."

1455 Former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush will help with the disaster relief effort, White House officials tell news agencies. President Barack Obama is expected to make a statement shortly. Former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush will help with the disaster relief effort, White House officials tell news agencies. President Barack Obama is expected to make a statement shortly.

1440 Ruth Norbury, in Bristol, UK, writes in an email: "My husband is from Haiti and has a large family that live in Carrefour, which is on the edge of the city. It must be a miracle because although the houses around them are broken, all 11 members of the family are still alive and uninjured and the house is ok too. All I can say to people is don't give up hope just yet because among the darkness sometimes there is a small glimmer of light." "My husband is from Haiti and has a large family that live in Carrefour, which is on the edge of the city. It must be a miracle because although the houses around them are broken, all 11 members of the family are still alive and uninjured and the house is ok too. All I can say to people is don't give up hope just yet because among the darkness sometimes there is a small glimmer of light."

1438 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and European Commission Humanitarian Aid (Echo) have taken Survivors plead for aid International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and European Commission Humanitarian Aid (Echo) have taken photos during an aerial assessment of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

1420 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown describes the earthquake as a "tragedy beyond imagination". British Prime Minister Gordon Brown describes the earthquake as a "tragedy beyond imagination".

1413 The US 82nd Airborne Division will have 100 members in Haiti on Thursday, a spokesman tells the BBC. Another 800 will be there by Friday and the rest of the 3,500-member division is on standby in case they are needed. The US 82nd Airborne Division will have 100 members in Haiti on Thursday, a spokesman tells the BBC. Another 800 will be there by Friday and the rest of the 3,500-member division is on standby in case they are needed.

1411 Elizabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN, tells the BBC World Service: "Firemen have also been trapped in the earthquake so their logistical means are very poor and they cannot cope with the situation. That's why it's very urgent to bring heavy machinery to remove the debris, also civil and military assets like helicopters are needed, given the bad conditions of the roads." "Firemen have also been trapped in the earthquake so their logistical means are very poor and they cannot cope with the situation. That's why it's very urgent to bring heavy machinery to remove the debris, also civil and military assets like helicopters are needed, given the bad conditions of the roads."

1400 Brooke Durbin, a teacher in Port-de-Paix in northern Haiti, e-mails: "The worst part about the whole thing is not being able to know what is happening just 200 miles away. What we hear is all "hear-say." We have limited internet, so we can't even check many news sites. I teach 4th grade, and many (if not most) of my students have some family that they can't get hold of." Brooke Durbin, a teacher in Port-de-Paix in northern Haiti, e-mails: "The worst part about the whole thing is not being able to know what is happening just 200 miles away. What we hear is all "hear-say." We have limited internet, so we can't even check many news sites. I teach 4th grade, and many (if not most) of my students have some family that they can't get hold of."

1353 A senior White House advisor said she was left "speechless" by comments from US TV evangelist Pat Robertson that Haitians had made "a pact to the Devil". Valerie Jarrett told ABC's A senior White House advisor said she was left "speechless" by comments from US TV evangelist Pat Robertson that Haitians had made "a pact to the Devil". Valerie Jarrett told ABC's Good Morning America: "That's not the attitude that expresses the spirit of the president or the American people, so I thought it was a pretty stunning comment to make."

1346 The American Red Cross tweets: "You have donated nearly $3million to Red Cross earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Thank you. Keep it up." "You have donated nearly $3million to Red Cross earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Thank you. Keep it up." Haiti: How to help

1338

Yael Talleyrand, in Jacmel, Haiti, has sent this picture to the BBC, showing people gathered at a temporary camp at an airport in Haiti. "There are thousands of people there that need more tents, sheets, and so on, because they have only 3 tents that can only protect 50 people each," she said.

1334 The US army is sending up to 3,500 soldiers to Haiti, officials quoted by Reuters say. The first 100 are scheduled to arrive soon. The US army is sending up to 3,500 soldiers to Haiti, officials quoted by Reuters say. The first 100 are scheduled to arrive soon.

1325 Haitian actor Jimmy Jean-Louis, who starred in the Heroes TV series, tells Haitian actor Jimmy Jean-Louis, who starred in the Heroes TV series, tells CNN he has not been able to contact his parents in Petionville since the quake. "I don't think people have any idea how terrible this is," he says.

1321 Sebastien Barrau, a Haitian living in Miami, has started up a website for missing persons. He says: "I'm really disappointed - there are so few survivors. I spoke to a friend who helped get five people out of a collapsed supermarket, just five people. I've heard about people being alive one day and stuck under the rubble, but who don't make it."

1319 Troylivesay tweets: "Yesterday there was only one gas station operating in town that I saw and it was a mob scene. No violence but it was very intense."

1315 Churches, barber shops and small shops in Haitian areas of Miami have been collecting donations to send to friends and relatives. "My body is in Miami but my mind is in Haiti," Fletcher Toussaint, a young immigrant, tells the BBC. Awaiting news from home Churches, barber shops and small shops in Haitian areas of Miami have been collecting donations to send to friends and relatives. "My body is in Miami but my mind is in Haiti," Fletcher Toussaint, a young immigrant, tells the BBC.

1310 Two days after the disaster struck, people speak of still hearing voices crying from the rubble. Two days after the disaster struck, people speak of still hearing voices crying from the rubble.

1309 Google and Geoeye have put together some Google and Geoeye have put together some new satellite images of Haiti, taken after the quake and showing the extent of the destruction.

1303 The foreign minister of Indonesia - a country which has suffered natural disasters in the past - expressed condolences to Haiti. "As a country that has been itself devastated by a similar situation, we are absolutely saddened by what's happening in Haiti," said Marty Natalegawa. The foreign minister of Indonesia - a country which has suffered natural disasters in the past - expressed condolences to Haiti. "As a country that has been itself devastated by a similar situation, we are absolutely saddened by what's happening in Haiti," said Marty Natalegawa.

1257 Haitian DJ Carel Pedre tells BBC's Haitian DJ Carel Pedre tells BBC's Newshour he has seen a lot of dead bodies and collapsed buildings. "I've seen thousands of people crying for help, I've seen thousands of people homeless, helpless. I see a country devastated, I see - wow - I have witnessed a disaster and I think that's the biggest disaster I've ever seen in my life."

1254 The UN says up to 200 of its staff, including peacekeepers, are unaccounted for. Between 50 and 100 could be trapped in the UN building in Port-au-Prince. The UN says up to 200 of its staff, including peacekeepers, are unaccounted for. Between 50 and 100 could be trapped in the UN building in Port-au-Prince.

1253 Troylivesay tweets: "Currently experiencing another aftershock - they are still coming - had a couple strong ones yesterday and last night."

1250 Paul Conneally, a spokesman for the BBC World Service that conditions have been appalling. "The devastation is just as impressive from the air as it is from the ground. You mix this with factors such as the already impoverished and under-developed nature of the country, the fact that it was still just recovering from very, very serious weather-related natural disasters in the recent past - this is not a scenario that leads to a very positive prognosis." Paul Conneally, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Haiti, tells theBBC World Service that conditions have been appalling. "The devastation is just as impressive from the air as it is from the ground. You mix this with factors such as the already impoverished and under-developed nature of the country, the fact that it was still just recovering from very, very serious weather-related natural disasters in the recent past - this is not a scenario that leads to a very positive prognosis."

1245: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the death toll will reach "tens of thousands" and the aid will require a "long-term effort". US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the death toll will reach "tens of thousands" and the aid will require a "long-term effort".

1243 RAMhaiti tweets: "The streets are now Haiti's living room and bedroom with everything closed. Money, food, drinks, supplies, rotting bodies, frustration, impatience, despair will all become a problem...Jacmel has had much destruction, school kids caught in collapsing buildings...the devastation is so widespread that the folks who should be helping, are probably taking care of their own issues."

1235 The BBC's Matthew Price at a hospital in Port-au-Prince says: "The smell is nauseating. Bodies lie outside on the lawn, among them lie the injured and inside the screams and whimpers of those in pain echo down the corridors." Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. "The smell is nauseating. Bodies lie outside on the lawn, among them lie the injured and inside the screams and whimpers of those in pain echo down the corridors."

1210 David Darg, an aid worker with David Darg, an aid worker with Operation Blessing International on his way to Haiti from Miami, tells the BBC the situation is nightmarish: "I sifted through the internet for reports of damage and couldn't believe the horror unfolding in a nation that has already endured so much. A day that started with us fixing a broken sewer turned into a day of a broken city." Haiti aid worker diary

1202 Steven Watson, in Kingston, Jamaica, emails:"I was sitting in a pick-up truck in Kingston, Jamaica and it shook for about 30 seconds. It felt like a freight train was passing close by. My thoughts and prayers are with the Haitian people at this time." "I was sitting in a pick-up truck in Kingston, Jamaica and it shook for about 30 seconds. It felt like a freight train was passing close by. My thoughts and prayers are with the Haitian people at this time."

1150 Yael Talleyrand, in Jacmel, Haiti, has sent photos of her home town to the BBC, including this one of a newly built hotel now in ruins.

1142 The BBC's David Loyn in the Dominican Republic says: "A team of British fire officers from seven regions have arrived and are now making their way in a light plane to neighbouring Haiti to help in the earthquake rescue. They are carrying sophisticated listening equipment to detect life." "A team of British fire officers from seven regions have arrived and are now making their way in a light plane to neighbouring Haiti to help in the earthquake rescue. They are carrying sophisticated listening equipment to detect life."

1135 Immanuel Kenneth, India, e-mails: "My American friend was in Haiti to see her brother who is a doctor in Haiti. I last spoke to her on Skype on January 12. I have had no contact since then. I pray that she is safe." "My American friend was in Haiti to see her brother who is a doctor in Haiti. I last spoke to her on Skype on January 12. I have had no contact since then. I pray that she is safe."

1126 Haiti's ambassador to the UN, Leo Merores, tells the BBC World Service the government is still functioning - President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive are assessing the situation in Port-au-Prince. "The process of finding the survivors and pulling out the dead has begun. But it's an extremely slow process because so many buildings have been completely destroyed," he says. Haiti's ambassador to the UN, Leo Merores, tells the BBC World Service the government is still functioning - President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive are assessing the situation in Port-au-Prince. "The process of finding the survivors and pulling out the dead has begun. But it's an extremely slow process because so many buildings have been completely destroyed," he says.

1124 The UN says 100 of its staff are still unaccounted for after the quake, the AFP news agency reports. The UN says 100 of its staff are still unaccounted for after the quake, the AFP news agency reports.

1121 Subash Neupane, Kathmandu, Nepal, e-mails: "I was shocked to learn the news about the devastating earthquake and broken communication channels. Thanks to the internet my uncle, who is working under UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, was able to send me the message that he is safe. May the relief reach the people soon." "I was shocked to learn the news about the devastating earthquake and broken communication channels. Thanks to the internet my uncle, who is working under UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, was able to send me the message that he is safe. May the relief reach the people soon."

1110 The BBC's Jack Izzard says only a trickle of aid flights have arrived in Haiti so far but that will increase as the operation picks up speed. The first flights will be carrying emergency food and medical supplies, then heavy lifting equipment will arrive to move the rubble. The BBC's Jack Izzard says only a trickle of aid flights have arrived in Haiti so far but that will increase as the operation picks up speed. The first flights will be carrying emergency food and medical supplies, then heavy lifting equipment will arrive to move the rubble. Aid flights arrive in Haiti

1052 The Red Cross says that since the quake, 1,360 Haitians - including 148 people in Haiti "saying they were alive" - have registered on its The Red Cross says that since the quake, 1,360 Haitians - including 148 people in Haiti "saying they were alive" - have registered on its website which helps track down missing family members

1047 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has arrived back in the US to deal with the country's response to the quake, after cutting short a tour of the Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has arrived back in the US to deal with the country's response to the quake, after cutting short a tour of the Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

1028 Countries around the world are scrambling to send assistance to Haiti. Among others, China has sent 10 tonnes of tents and medical equipment, the European Commission has pledged $4.37m (£2.7m: 3m euro), Israel is sending an elite army rescue unit of engineers and doctors and US Navy vessels are making their way there - AP reports. Countries around the world are scrambling to send assistance to Haiti. Among others, China has sent 10 tonnes of tents and medical equipment, the European Commission has pledged $4.37m (£2.7m: 3m euro), Israel is sending an elite army rescue unit of engineers and doctors and US Navy vessels are making their way there - AP reports.

1024 The The Miami Herald has pictures of aid leaving Florida for Haiti and of the local Haitian community holding prayer vigils for the country.

1013 The BBC's Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince says: "It is the sight that awaits you inside the hospital grounds that is most alarming. It is as if a massacre has been perpetrated here." "It is the sight that awaits you inside the hospital grounds that is most alarming. It is as if a massacre has been perpetrated here." Sleeping among the dead

1010 Laura Bickle, an American working in an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, tells the BBC World Service the enormity of the disaster is hard to comprehend. "All the parks are filled with people - they either have no home to go to or they are too scared to go home. They are pulling people out of the rubble, literally, blood running in the gutter like water." Laura Bickle, an American working in an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, tells the BBC World Service the enormity of the disaster is hard to comprehend. "All the parks are filled with people - they either have no home to go to or they are too scared to go home. They are pulling people out of the rubble, literally, blood running in the gutter like water."

1005 The The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) in the UK has launched an appeal for donations.

0948 Belinda Luescher, a spokeswoman for the Belinda Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme (WFP), tells the BBC aid agencies have a "huge task" ahead of them in Haiti. "The people of Haiti need everything, and they need it now. Just in a normal day the World Food Programme will be feeding one or two million people in Haiti and now we need to do even more, because the people have lost everything."

0942 The BBC's Nick Davis in Port-au-Prince says: "There is no mortuary big enough for the numbers who have died. The only sign of anything being done is a commercial flat-bed van onto which police officers are stacking bodies." "There is no mortuary big enough for the numbers who have died. The only sign of anything being done is a commercial flat-bed van onto which police officers are stacking bodies." A devastated city

0933 Carel Pedre tweets: "The last aftershock was short but there are thousands of people homeless and helpless on the streets 70 minutes of sleep since Monday morning!...First aftershock of the day. Haiti is sill shaking!! HELP!!... Now we need to be organised. Let's make it happen, people. Haiti needs you."

In the UK: British Red Cross, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Tearfund

In the US: Mercy Corps, American Red Cross, Unicef USA, The Global Orphan Project, International Rescue Committee

These organisations also have ways to donate:

International Red Cross, International Medical Corps, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Save The Children, ActionAid, International Relief and Development

We will keep you updated with relief efforts as the information comes in.

0912 Mike Thomas, co-ordinating the UK's rescue response in Haiti, tells the BBC his team's priority will be to identify areas where people are trapped alive in rubble. "We're hoping we can get our dogs there quickly, they'll be invaluable in helping target those areas," he says. Mike Thomas, co-ordinating the UK's rescue response in Haiti, tells the BBC his team's priority will be to identify areas where people are trapped alive in rubble. "We're hoping we can get our dogs there quickly, they'll be invaluable in helping target those areas," he says.

0907 fredodupoux tweets: "People in the streets are chanting as the night settles. People lost their houses and are sleeping on newspapers in the streets."

0850 Tamar Hahn of Tamar Hahn of Unicef tells the BBC that although the media focus has been on Port-au-Prince, other towns in Haiti have been "very, very severely affected".

0832 The The UN says damage to the capital, Port-au-Prince, is "massive and broad," with perhaps hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed - Reuters report.

0830 RAMhaiti tweets: "St Gerard Church and the school behind it are destroyed. People are alive in the rubble. I look at the sky, see the stars, and it's as if nothing was wrong. The singing, the praying and the sirens bring me back to reality." "St Gerard Church and the school behind it are destroyed. People are alive in the rubble. I look at the sky, see the stars, and it's as if nothing was wrong. The singing, the praying and the sirens bring me back to reality."

0816 The BBC's Matthew Price in Haiti says: In places there is barely anything left of this city. And so far the people are largely having to cope on their own. For some, the only hope is to dig with their bare hands. This is a race against time. This country - so often forgotten by the world - now needs its help more than ever. In places there is barely anything left of this city. And so far the people are largely having to cope on their own. For some, the only hope is to dig with their bare hands. This is a race against time. This country - so often forgotten by the world - now needs its help more than ever.
Please note that this page has not been updated since early 2015. I now recommend stack

Rationale

I’m trying to learn the Haskell programming language, and I’m tripping over the cabal-install package management system sufficiently often that it’s putting me off putting time into learning the language. Here are my requirements for a development environment I’m willing to learn in:

don’t leave Debian Wheezy 32-bit; Debian Jessie will be out soon, but its versions of GHC and the Haskell platform are still very old so upgrading early is not a way out. minimise how often I have to delete all of ~/.cabal and ~/.ghc ; when using cabal sandboxes, again, minimise the number of core libraries that need to get rebuilt in every sandbox; be simple enough to integrate cleanly with the existing ways I manage my OS installation and the contents of my home directory; be simple enough that I can understand everything as a Haskell beginner and can get things working (again) quickly and get back to trying to write Haskell.

In this document I will describe the combination of home directory and system-wide installations that fit these requirements, and the workflow for sorting out packages so that I can get on with trying to make my programs do input and output, and other fun Haskell beginner stuff.

Alternative approaches

The following two approaches don’t satisfy the requirements given above.

Do everything manually

This involves having nothing installed system-wide, including the Haskell Platform. Install GHC and Cabal in ~/local/src and then install things into their own sandboxes and add the .cabal-sandbox/bin directories to your $PATH . Someone on reddit describes a balance between installing stuff into .cabal/bin and having sandboxes in which related packages are built and then symlinking those directories. But this requires lots and lots of rebuilding over and over and lots of manual $PATH additions. System-wide Debian packages mitigate this.

This might facilitate such an approach.

Fails (2), (3) and (4).

Use a clever automatic sandboxing solution

Halcyon and the Nix package manager (which doesn’t require the full NixOS) are the projects I’ve come across that try to do this. They aim to avoid even more rebuilding than my approach avoids. The Halcyon author doesn’t want to support 32-bit Debian, and I don’t want to be a Nix early adoptor at the same time as trying to learn how to get my programs to take input and produce output.

Fails (1) and (5).

Drawbacks of my approach

We’re living very far away from the edge: we’re using GHC 7.4 and a version of the Haskell Platform from 2012. Someone on reddit expresses the view that since Haskell moves so fast, you’ll end up rebuilding everything all the time anyway so you can use your favourite packages from Hackage. The only thing we’re not getting from the Debian apt repositories that we might is haskell-mode and ghc-mod for Emacs, since we can have newer versions of those without repeated building.

We’re doing a lot of rebuilding of libraries, and we’re only avoiding rebuilding those that come with Debian, which will become less and less useful as time goes by and Hackage packages depend on newer versions.

This is okay because I’m a Haskell beginner, and I’m not a professional software engineer, so even if I stick with learning Haskell it’s going to take me years before I’m writing anything that needs fancy contemporary libraries. And maybe by then the cabal-install ecosystem will have improved. I basically need Hackage only for building fancy things like Propellor and Structured Haskell Mode so it’s okay to sandbox those things and do a load of builds.

System setup

Debian packages and dotfiles

Get all our basic libraries installed system-wide:

“` {.nil}

apt-get install ghc ghc-prof haskell-platform

“`

or if you’re using Propellor:

{.haskell} workstationAptPackages :: Property NoInfo workstationAptPackages = combineProperties "workstation apt packages" [ Apt.installed ["ghc", "ghc-prof", "haskell-platform"] , Apt.removed ["haskell-mode", "ghc-mod"] ]

Put cabal configuration file in place:

The most important thing here is require-sandbox: True . We’re not putting anything in ~/.cabal/bin . So we need to include all .cabal-sandbox/bin directories in our $PATH . I build stuff that is to be built on every machine in ~/local/src . So for each binary we have a sandbox in a directory under ~/local/src , e.g. ~/local/src/propellor . This code will prepend those directories to $PATH . It comes from my ~/.shenv which is supposed to be a POSIX-compatible script to set up environment variables that I can source in .zshrc , .bashrc , scripts run from cron, my GNOME and XFCE startup scripts and wherever.

{.bash} for bindir in $(find ~/local/src -path "*/.cabal-sandbox/bin"); do PATH="$bindir:$PATH" done export PATH

Upgrading cabal-install

Before doing anything else, we upgrade cabal-install . The version of cabal-install in Wheezy is so old that it doesn’t know about sandboxes, and we don’t want to pollute ~/.cabal/bin . So we cheat and get it from Jessie:

“` {.nil}

apt-get install -t testing cabal-install

“`

Be sure to have set up apt pinning so that this doesn’t pull anything else in from Jessie!

Upgrading cabal-install again

Since we want the smartest dependency resolution we can get, we now upgrade cabal to the very latest and greatest.

{.nil} $ cabal update $ cd ~/local/src $ cabal get cabal-install $ cd cabal-install-* $ cabal sandbox init $ cabal install

Restart the shell ( hash cabal isn’t enough because we only just created the sandbox) and type cabal --version to check that the second decimal is higher than 20. Use which cabal to check that it’s the one from ~/local/src .

Usage for Haskell projects

Installing other people’s programs

Maybe you want the ghc-mod or structured-haskell-mode executables from hackage. Follow the procedure just used for upgrading cabal-install for the second time.

Getting libraries for your project

This section is a WIP. But some tips: - Basic workflow is cabal init; cabal sandbox init; cabal build . - Use cabal repl to launch ghci. - When you need a library, first try to find a debian package (the name will begin with [lib]ghc- ). - If you can’t find it, you can use cabal install blah to install into the sandbox for testing before adding to the .cabal file as a dependency. Try to install all required packages in one go on one cabal install blah1 blah2 command as this gives cabal the best chance of getting the dependencies right. - Don’t be afraid to clear out the sandbox: rm -rf .cabal-sandbox-config .cabal-sandbox; cabal sandbox init . - Try -v3 to enhance cabal’s dependency resolution some more.

Sources & further reading
One of the more memorable stories this season was the Dogecoin and Reddit communities pooling together money to sponsor the No. 98 Phil Parsons Racing entry of Josh Wise.

Thus far the Reddit and Dogecoin community have rallied behind the car. At the All-Star race in Charlotte, Wise won the fan vote earning entry into the race beating out the likes of Danica Patrick.

On Sunday they will return to the Ford Fusion driven by Wise in the Geico 500. The plan for Dogecoin and Parsons is to continue sponsorship into the 2015 season by offering a variety of merchandise.

The car driven by Wise will be a little different this week with Chinese characters appearing on the front end of the car. Provident Metals will again serve as an associate sponsor of Wise.

(Yes we release the art of this car has Chevrolet logos)
Contrary to fears raised by marijuana opponents, teen use of cannabis is trending downward in most states that have legalized it for adult use.

According to new data from the federally-funded National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), the percentage of Colorado teens who used marijuana in the past year is down more than two points in the 2015-2016 version of the study as compared to the 2014-2015 edition.

The same is true in Washington State. In Washington, D.C., the drop was nearly three points. A smaller decline was seen in Oregon, while Alaska showed a slight rise.

Annual teen cannabis use is also down across the U.S. as a whole, but the drop was less significant than that experienced in Colorado and Washington, the first two states to legalize marijuana.

Percentage Of 12-17 Year-Olds Who Used Marijuana In The Past Year

STATE 2014-2015 2015-2016 Alaska 18.44 18.86 Colorado 18.35 16.21 District of Columbia 16.55 13.58 Oregon 17.56 17.35 Washington 15.61 13.54 Total U.S. 12.86 12.29

Similar drops were seen in most legalization states for monthly teen cannabis use as well.

Percentage Of 12-17 Year-Olds Who Used Marijuana In The Past Month

STATE 2014-2015 2015-2016 Alaska 10.64 10.43 Colorado 11.13 9.08 District of Columbia 8.85 8.07 Oregon 9.42 9.77 Washington 9.17 7.93 Total U.S. 7.2 6.75

Colorado and Washington State legalized marijuana in 2012, with Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C. ending cannabis prohibition in 2014. (Four additional states voted to legalize marijuana in 2016, but those programs weren’t running when the new survey was completed.)

While legalization opponents have long argued that ending prohibition would lead to skyrocketing use by young people, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Advocates, on the other hand, have maintained that regulating and controlling the cannabis market and instituting strict age restrictions would actually give teens less access to marijuana than they had when it was illegal and there were no checks for age at the point of sale.

In a Facebook post, cannabis consulting firm Freedman and Koski, Inc, which is run by Colorado’s former top marijuana official, said that the drop in teen use in the state “coincides with an increase in funding prevention programs from cannabis taxes.”

“Colorado is effectively regulating marijuana for adult use. Teen use appears to be dropping now that state and local authorities are overseeing the production and sale of marijuana,” said Brian Vicente, partner at Vicente Sederberg LLC, and one of the lead drafters of Colorado’s legalization measure. “There are serious penalties for selling to minors, and regulated cannabis businesses are being vigilant in checking IDs. The days of arresting thousands of adults in order to prevent teens from using marijuana are over.”

The new state numbers are part of a state breakdown of NSDUH data that was released last week.
MORE THAN A TV: Kiwi smart TV owners have been slow to connect their TVs to the internet.

The average Kiwi household has three internet-connected devices - and perhaps even more after yesterday - but many other web-capable gadgets in homes are not online, new research suggests.

A Colmar Brunton survey, commissioned by wholesale broadband provider Chorus, found laptops, desk-top computers and smartphones were the web-connected gadgets with the highest penetration, appearing in 82 per cent, 63 per cent and 60 per cent of Kiwi homes respectively.

Those gadgets had a high level of internet connectedness - at least 92 per cent.

But other smart devices are not being connected.

Almost 40 per cent of New Zealand households have a smart or web-capable TV, so viewers can browse the web, stream programmes and movies and use applications such as Skype, but half of them are not hooked up to the internet.

Similarly, 61 per cent of Blu-ray players, 57 per cent of security systems, 42 per cent of TV hard-drives and 41 per cent of hand-held gaming consoles are not used online.

When asked why their devices were not online, 37 per cent of respondents said it was not necessary for them to be, 8 per cent said they did not know how to connect them, 8 per cent said they did not have the capability to connect them and 8 per cent said they did not want to use the devices online.

Chorus spokesman Gerard Linstrom said many consumers were not aware their devices could be connected to the web or of the benefits of doing so.

People thought Blu-ray players were just for playing high-definition disks, "but increasingly, a lot of Blu-ray disks come with interactive content. There are additional features and programming available".

"There's a lot of untapped content that people have already got access to - they've already paid for it."

Web-connected home security systems could be managed and monitored remotely, for example, through a smartphone, while TV hard-drives could also be controlled remotely.

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Paul Brislen said awareness was an issue but a lack of content was a big reason people with smart TVs weren't connected - himself included.

Movie and streaming service Quickflix had only just become available for TVs through Freeview.

"But Quickflix has a fairly limited library, they'd be the first to admit that. Sky doesn't do anything other than replay its broadcasts and with TVNZ and TV3 [online] it's just replay TV. There's really a limited amount of legal digital video content beyond user-generated content."

He was surprised by how many households had connected their TVs.

"The rest of us will join in once there's a service to connect to."

Linstrom said there were usually multiple options for hooking devices up online, and the type of internet connection could make a difference.

Homes on the internet delivered over fibre could run multiple bandwidth-hungry applications without them interfering with each other.

"Mum and Dad can sit in the living room and watch a movie or a sports programme while somebody sitting in another room plays an interactive game, and somebody else listens to online music."

He recommended owners of web-capable devices consult the often-ignored instruction manual to get connected, or they could call in the professionals.

"A lot of the retailers have got their own geeks who will come in and install your PC or your TV or your home theatre so that it will actually work the way it's intended to."

Teenagers, particularly gamers, were often pretty clued up at connecting devices to the internet, Linstrom said.

"So one of the other options is ask your teenager." Fairfax NZ
Three prostitution cases have been thrown out this month by Hennepin County judges and the Minneapolis city attorney, who said Minneapolis undercover police investigators went too far.

The officers’ sexual contact with the female suspects also drew a sharp denunciation from the county’s chief public defender, Mary Moriarty.

“Do citizens want officers behaving in this manner?” Moriarty asked Wednesday.

Two of the cases were dismissed by Hennepin County judges in rulings that found the officers’ actions constituted “outrageous government conduct.” The third was dismissed by the Minneapolis city attorney in light of one of the judges’ rulings.

On Wednesday, Minneapolis police said the department has discontinued such undercover investigations pending a full review of its policies. The department declined to comment on the specific cases. None of the three officers involved in the cases is under internal investigation.

As far back as 2009, the Minnesota Court of Appeals had addressed such conduct by Minneapolis police when it reversed a prostitution charge, citing similar pre-arrest behavior. At the time, then-Chief Tim Dolan asked for an internal inquiry on how the investigation was handled.

In the first of the three recent cases, Moriarty’s office learned of the conduct as it defended a woman charged in March with four misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor charges of prostitution and illegal acts at a massage business, including exposure and unlawful touching. The city attorney’s office said at the time that the case was prompted by community complaints about possible prostitution activity at a south Minneapolis business.

When assistant public defender Briana Perry received the case, she e-mailed Moriarity the 36-minute audio recorded during the encounter between officer Steven Lecy and the woman at the massage parlor, saying she found the officer’s behavior “just disgusting.” Moriarity sent the case to City Attorney Susan Segal and asked for a dismissal, but Segal declined.

On the recording, after nearly 30 minutes of small talk about tattoos, the weather and his broken hand, Lecy, who also compliments the woman’s anatomy, interrupts the massage and asks the woman if she wants him to flip onto his back. She begins touching his genitals as part of a naked “body-to-body” massage. Lecy can be heard moaning. A few moments later, he says the words “repeat customers,” code to backup officers that it’s time for an arrest. They then enter the room.

Moriarty said Lecy arrived two hours late for this week’s dismissal motion hearing and was surly and clearly upset.

“The Police Department has undercover female officers who do detail like this,” Moriarity said. “Do you think they would allow themselves to behave in any sort of sexual manner?”

In a dismissal order issued in court Tuesday, Hennepin County Judge William Fisher said probable cause for a crime could have been established long before the sexual activity recorded on the tape. Lecy’s attorney had argued that touching was necessary to make the encounter a crime.

“What must it have been like for this woman to have this happen and find out it was a police officer?” Moriarty said.

Attorney Jeffrey Dean represented the woman charged in the other two eventually dismissed cases. One case involved officer Christopher Reiter, who was found to have engaged in “outrageous sexual conduct” that violated a woman’s due process rights while he was doing undercover work at a south Minneapolis parlor in November 2014.

Hennepin County Judge Amy Dawson wrote in her Aug. 7 dismissal order that Reiter “initiated sexual contact that isn’t required for the collection of evidence to establish elements of the offense.”

Nearly 20 minutes into his interaction with the woman, court documents say, Reiter pointed to his groin after she asked “if there were any areas she had missed.” She started to rub his genitals and they negotiated a price for further action “that would take care of him,” the documents say.

Reiter’s attorney argued that his behavior was necessary to gather evidence and to protect his safety until backup officers arrived. He was merely involving himself in ongoing criminal activity and the woman wasn’t a reluctant participant, his attorney argued, court documents show.

“Cases regarding prostitution can have actions that can be offensive or distasteful,” Reiter’s attorney wrote. “That does not make them due process violations.”

The third case involved the same woman Dean represented in his other case. She was arrested in May after officer Abubakar Muridi asked her to rub his genitals before he negotiated a price for sex, Dean said. The city attorney dismissed that case Monday.

“My hope is that the Police Department will finally stop engaging in the outrageous conduct of having sexual relations with the targets of their investigations,” Dean said. “Women in prostitution are vulnerable and traumatized. They have often been the victims of physical and sexual abuse and suffer from poverty and addiction. When police engage in this unnecessary sexual conduct, the officer worsens the trauma and deepens the damage.”

New massage license needed

Meanwhile, a city spokesman said Wednesday that Minneapolis’ new massage license ordinance may offer a civil regulatory path to reducing prostitution that wouldn’t require building cases for criminal prosecution.

The new rules, which were passed by the City Council in 2013 and went into effect in July, require home businesses to pay an annual licensing fee of $50 and larger massage businesses to pay $140. The new rules also outline a variety of “unlawful acts” that could result in a citation or revoked license. The ordinance is aimed at making it harder for prostitution rings and other illegal outfits to thrive under the guise of the massage business.
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Pupils are still taught in Shakespeare’s historic 587-year-old half-timbered former classroom today.

But if a £1million Heritage Lottery Fund bid is successful, one of the finest surviving old schoolrooms in Britain could become open to the public for the first time.

Bennet Carr, headmaster of King Edward VI Grammar School (KES), Stratford-upon-Avon, said: “It became William Shakespeare's classroom when he was educated in the 1570s.

“John Shakespeare, William’s father, was appointed Bailiff, or Mayor in 1568, and had the right for his son to attend the school free of charge. There would have been 40-60 boys in the one class.

“It is where Shakespeare would have been taught Latin, rhetoric and Greek and was most likely to have experienced theatre for the first time, as 30 troupes came out of London.

“We would like to restore the building and open it up for the first time.

“We would continue to teach until mid-morning and open the classroom in the afternoons, weekends and holidays. It’s the first time it will ever have been opened. It’s an absolute gem.”

The simple timber-framed medieval classroom is on the second floor of The Guild Hall in Church Street and has not changed since Shakespeare’s day.

The ground floor was used as a library until last year. School archivist Richard Pearson said: “The Guild Hall has the first authorised painting of the Tudor Rose dating back from 1493.”

Mr Carr said restoration work which needs to take place includes a new roof, new timbers and stone preservation work.

He said: “The ground floor of the Guild Hall was created in 1420 and the top floor added in 1427.

“It was the civic heart of Stratford-upon-Avon pre-Reformation. The last time it was restored was in the 1890s. It’s virtually unique for a Guild Hall and needs to be preserved. It’s had hundreds of boys going in-and-out.

“For local people who have never been in it to see where Shakespeare was taught, it’s really exciting. Everyone comes to Straford once – now there would be another reason to come down. It has the wow factor.”

The Guild Hall lottery bid will be submitted later this month as Stratford-upon-Avon gets ready for Shakespeare’s 450th birthday celebrations and the school will find out if it has been successful in June.

BBC historian Michael Wood has made a film retelling the history of the Guild Hall for a future fundraising appeal.

Mr Carr said: “In 2003 Michael did a six-part documentary In Search of Shakespeare tracing his life. As part of that he came to the school and has become a really good friend of the school.

"He has very kindly produced a 10-minute film briefly recording the history of the building and launching a fundraising effort. If successful we will be seeking sponsorship to match the lottery bid for anyone who would like to be involved.”

KES was founded in 1553 by Henry VIII’s only surviving son Edward VI, who died aged 15. Previously known as the Guild School it was renamed the King’s New School.

Shakespeare was born and died on the same day – April 23 – St George’s Day.

On Saturday, April 26, KES head boy Christian Van Nieuwerburgh will lead the annual birthday procession celebrating Shakespeare’s 450th birthday.

The parade through Bridge Street is followed by The Quill Pageant – where a costume character William Shakespeare hands over a symbolic quill to the head boy of KES who will use it to signal the start of the flag unfurling ceremony.

He will then carry it to Holy Trinity Church, symbolising Shakespeare’s journey from the cradle to the grave.

Christian will be followed by 600 pupils – and for the first time 39 sixth form girls, who were admitted to the school last September.

It was former KES headmaster, Rev Robert de Courcy Laffan, that first initiated the annual birthday procession and laying of flowers on Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church in 1893.

Mr Carr said: “Robert de Courcy Laffan was a great friend of the Flower family who helped to restore the school building in the 1890s. He was a great education reformer. He, head boy Ralph Garlic and a representative from Shakespeare’s Birthplace decided they would walk from the school to Holy Trinity Church and

lay flowers on the grave. The following year was the beginning of what has become the annual procession.

“There had been a small parade by counsellors in 1810, but the school initiated the procession. It was reported in the Times of London, newspapers in Stratford, Leamington and the Birmingham Post

“The procession has been going 121 years. Until the 1960s the head boy used to carry a quill to replace the old one on the Shakespeare bust at the church. That tradition was reintroduced last year.

“We are only a small faith school with 600 pupils and even though it’s their Easter holidays most students want to be there. It’s unfortunate that it’s the holidays – but only three students are unable to attend.

“And for the first time this year we have girls parading with us – as 39 girls joined the sixth form.

“It’s quite a sight. All the pupils will carry blue and yellow flowers and the youngest boy Dominic Ellis will lay a laurel wreath on the actual grave. The flowers will go on the gravestone.

“The pupils lead the way with me and the staff following. Many Old Boys come back. It’s quite a spectacle. Where else would you see teenagers walking through a town each carrying a bunch of flowers?

“It’s a delightful English tradition. This year is particularly important being the 450th anniversary. It’s going to have added emphasis.”
Has an airline refused compensation after a flight delay or cancellation? Thanks to the European Court of Justice, you can demand at least £225. Barrister Richard Colbey explains

Many passengers who have tried claiming compensation from an airline for a cancelled flight will have encountered refusals based on "exceptional circumstances". Until earlier this month, at least in airline speak, it could mean not only extraordinary events – like the foiled terrorist attack which forced Glasgow airport to close – but technical defects.

European law entitles passengers whose flights are cancelled or substantially delayed to a minimum of €250 (£225) compensation. The airline is only excused liability if it can show its failure was caused by these ill-defined exceptional circumstances.

Friederike Wallentin-Hermann had booked Alitalia tickets for herself, her husband and daughter from Vienna to Brinidisi in south-east Italy, via Rome. The first leg of her flight was cancelled at very short notice, leaving her to take a roundabout route on Austrian Airlines, which resulted in them reaching their destination nearly four hours late.

The cancellation was due to a "complex" turbine engine failure, which took 10 days to fix. Predictably, the airline claimed this was an "exceptional circumstance".

Wallentin-Hermann decided to pursue her claim for the standard compensation, plus a small amount for telephone charges, in her local commercial court. Airlines have tended, since the current compensation regulations were introduced in 2004, not to defend claims from those passengers who actually use the courts.

Most prefer not to risk setting an unfavourable and incontrovertible precedent, which could make it harder to fob off the majority who give up before resorting to litigation.

Alitalia, however, decided to put its head above the pulpit, fighting the matter not only in the Austrian courts, but, when unsuccessful, appealing to the European Court of Justice.

The resulting decision will be welcome confirmation for passengers that routine technical faults are not "exceptional". The court's reasoning recognised that airlines invariably face technical problems. Checking for, and fixing these, is an inherent part of their business. The mere fact that an airline has complied with the legal minimum maintenance requirement will not exempt it from liability when something mechanical goes wrong.

The judgment does not go so far as to rule that mechanical defects could never amount to exceptional circumstances. The court recognised that a warning by the aircraft manufacturer leading to the removal from service of an entire fleet, or mechanical defects caused by terrorists or sabotage, could be treated differently.

The judgment was given in December last year, when it probably became known to the industry, but was only formally published earlier this month. This has a personal resonance, as I suffered a Swiss International Air (SIA) cancellation on Boxing Day due, apparently, to a failed autopilot.

My compensation claim – I only sought out-of-pocket losses, not the full EU set sum – was initially met with the same response as the Wallentin-Hermanns'. A couple of stroppy emails did persuade SIA to pay up, but it was disappointing that the airline continued to argue this issue even after the European Court decision.

Airlines have no excuse now for not paying up; some will doubtless continue to try it on. Anyone encountering this who refers specifically to the "European Court case of Wallentin-Hermann v Alitalia" may impress the airline sufficiently so that it does not waste time trying to bluster its way out of paying up.
Sidechains have been the source of increased excitement in the Bitcoin community over the past year due to the belief that this new technology will allow an endless number of features to be integrated into the Bitcoin protocol. There are still a few people out there who believe sidechains are nothing more than vaporware, but the sidechains concept has an experienced team of Bitcoin Core developers behind it, not to mention a startup, Blockstream, that announced a $21 million round of funding late last year.

Blockstream recently released Sidechain Elements, which is a federated, alpha release of their originally outlined pegged sidechains proposal. The idea is that this early version allows the community to test out the concept without making any changes to Bitcoin Core. Some have pondered whether it could take up to five years for a true, two-way peg implementation to make its way to Bitcoin. Although the timeframe for a real two-way peg is unclear, there seems to be a general path for this new functionality to make its way into Bitcoin.

What Will It Take to Enable Two-Way Peg Support for Bitcoin?

Cryptographer Adam Back is, perhaps, best known as the inventor of hashcash, which is the underlying proof-of-work system utilized by the Bitcoin blockchain. He’s also the President and Co-Founder of Blockstream, which means he should have a general idea of how decentralized, two-way peg sidechains will eventually be rolled out. In a recent email to CoinJournal, Back was able to describe what needs to happen in order for two-way peg support to be possible in Bitcoin:

“Two-way peg support would generally be possible with any generic and sufficiently flexible scripting language, it is just a script that verifies a compact hash chain structure. Two-way peg appears almost — but probably not quite — possible today with Bitcoin script; however, I think we can fairly say this a historical accident due to slight limitations in bitcoin script, which had various opcodes disabled defensively for security reasons some years back. By doing some very advanced tricks across multiple transactions, it might even be just possible already (exercise for the reader).”

When it comes to the “very advanced tricks,” Back also added, “If someone can solve that exercise for the reader via advanced Bitcoin script hacking, we’d be very happy to hear from them.”

A BIP and Community Consensus

According to Back, either an upgrade to Bitcoin script or specific changes that enable two-way peg support should be enough to bring sidechains to Bitcoin. He then added that a concrete proposal is the next step that needs to be taken in order for decentralized sidechains to become a reality:

“I think the next step would be for someone to make a concrete proposal for community review (i.e. a BIP) and an example implementation, and then for there to be a design discussion with perhaps alternative methods compared side by side [and] evaluated by the community as has happened with prior BIP proposals and review process.”

It’s well-known that making changes to Bitcoin Core is an extremely tedious task surrounded by immense amounts of caution (as it should be), but it should be pointed out that the sidechains proposal is something that could potentially speed up the process of bringing new features to Bitcoin in the future. Back also pointed out that technically-inclined individuals in the Bitcoin community seem to have a positive view of the sidechains concept:

“We can say that generally technical people have been quite supportive of the idea of sidechains and the flexibility it adds for experimentation and extension, but it’s quite difficult to predict a time-frame as a specific proposal has not been made yet, and how long that would take depends on the technical community reaching consensus on alternative proposals. Bitcoin BIP community consensus is focussed on security and tends to prioritize new features by utility to the community.”

What to Do in the Meantime

For now, the low-trust, federated peg model can be used as a test ground for sidechains. Back explained how this early implementation of the sidechains concept could eventually lead to decentralized, two-way peg sidechains on the Bitcoin network:

“In the mean time there is an approach to get a similar effect using a functionary model with multi-sig as a protocol adaptor, as described in appendix A of the sidechains white paper, so people can use side-chains in a different security model in the mean time. We used this approach in the elements sidechain alpha release that we released in June, and if side-chains using the functionary model are popular it may help make the case for why a 2wp operator to improve them would be useful to integrate in Bitcoin.”

It’s impossible to predict a timeframe for two-way peg sidechains at this point. Having said that, it seems clear that it will be easier to gain consensus around a sidechains-related proposal rather than something like an increase in the blocksize limit. Although there have been issues with making changes to Bitcoin Core in the past, Blockstream’s Adam Back seems somewhat optimistic about the prospects of implementing the two-way peg model in Bitcoin:
Beijing Sets Deadlines for Bitcoin Exchanges - Customers to Withdraw Funds Quickly

Beijing has ordered all affected bitcoin exchanges to post a notice of their closure by midnight on Friday. Now, the exchanges are urging customers to withdraw their funds as regulators have also set a deadline for them to come up with plans to allow withdrawals “in a risk-free manner.”

Also read: China’s Regulatory Crackdown Forces More Bitcoin Exchange Closures

Exchanges Ordered to Announce Closing Dates

Chinese authorities have ordered Beijing-based cryptocurrency exchanges to stop trading and allowing new registrations as of Friday, according to a government notice, which was verified by Reuters. “The notice was signed by the Beijing city group in charge of overseeing internet finance risks and circulated online.” The notice read:

All trading exchanges must by midnight of Sept. 15 publish a notice to make clear when they will stop all cryptocurrency trading and announce a stop to new user registrations.

China’s top bitcoin exchanges have already complied. Btcc announced that “Btcchina will completely shut down its exchange businesses on September 30th,” the company tweeted. However, the only businesses affected are those relating to Btcchina; other Btcc businesses are unaffected as “Btcc is a separate company from Btcchina,” the company noted, adding that “Btcc Pool, Btcc USD Exchange, Btcc Dax, Btcc Mobi, & Btcc Mint are not affected by this change.”

Huobi and Okcoin made similar announcements on Friday, stating that they are closing on October 31. Huobi announced that new user registration and CNY deposit service have already stopped, stating that:

The actual closing of CNY trading will take place on October 31st. We will close all CNY to cryptocurrencies trading one asset at a time.

Okcoin similarly posted a notice on Friday, outlining its closing policies. The company emphasized that the only service closing is the RMB trading business. The rest of its businesses are not affected. “Because regulators have not announced that bitcoin and digital assets are illegal, Okcoin will actively explore, strive for, expect to continue to provide Chinese users with compliant digital asset services,” the company wrote.

Many others have also announced their closure such as Viabtc and Yobtc. Another exchange C2CX announced that it will close on September 30.

Customers Urged to Withdraw Funds Quickly

The regulators have additionally instructed the exchanges to come up with plans of how customers can withdraw their funds, Reuters reported. “Platforms should also tell the government by Wednesday Sept. 20 how they will allow users to make withdrawals in a risk-free manner and handle funds to make sure investor interests are protected,” the news outlet detailed.

Btcchina has already made announcements regarding the withdrawal of user funds. All withdrawals are processed within 24 hours, the company revealed. In addition, even after September 30 when the exchange has ceased operations, customers can still continue to withdraw funds. Furthermore, its Blockchain+ trading platform will open up bitcoin cash (BCC, BCH) withdrawals before Sunday, September 24. The company assured customers that the exchange and its Blockchain+ trading platform have enough funds to accommodate all customer withdrawals including CNY, BTC, LTC, BCC, and ETH, and tweeted that:

Btcchina encourages customers to withdraw their funds as quickly as possible. Customers can withdraw their funds whenever they want.

Huobi’s notice also gave some details about how it will deal with withdrawals. While CNY deposit service has stopped, digital asset deposits and withdrawals, as well as CNY withdrawals, will remain open. “BCC withdrawal service will be enabled before September 20th,” the exchange wrote.

What do you think of Beijing’s orders? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Btcc, Twitter

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
Two students have found a human tooth from about 560,000 years ago in a famous prehistoric cave in south-western France , a discovery praised by archaeologists as the oldest human body part ever discovered in the country and being rare from that period in Europe .

The tooth was found last week during excavations at Tautavel, one of Europe's most important prehistoric sites, where about 40 volunteers are working under the supervision of scientists.

Chevalier told The Associated Press that the adult tooth would help fill a gap between the very few oldest human fossils, notably found in Spain and Germany , and more recent ones.

Thousands of finds on the site include prehistoric tools and bones from animals, especially horses, reindeers and buffaloes.

"We believe these men have lived for a long time in the cave or have regularly come back into it," Chevalier said. "We also know that the area was quite cold at the time. It was a steppe, with no trees. There had to be some long periods with snow."

Volunteer archaeologists at work in the Arago cave (AFP)

These latest findings haven't been the subject of a scientific publication yet, but Tautavel is recognised as a reference by archaeologists all over the world.

There have been excavations at the cave for about 50 years and it is famous for the discovery of 450,000 human skull in the early 1970s, known by scientists as the "Tautavel Man".

Christian Perrenoud, a geologist and archaeologist who has been director of Tautavel's excavations for nine years, told the AP that his team used several dating processes to determine the age of the tooth.

Mr Perrenoud said he is "pretty confident" that his team will find more human fossils from this period on the site. "Our daily life is to determine what human activities looked like 560,000 years ago," he said.

Professor Chris Stringer, merit researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum of London, wrote in an email to the AP that "well-dated teeth of this age are very important as they probably belonged to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which is already known from Arago (in Tautavel) in France, Mauer in Germany and Boxgrove in England".

"If the tooth has calculus (tartar) attached to it, this may also provide direct evidence of the diet of these ancient humans," he added.
NINTENDO Australia fears it could be swamped by requests for freebies after a cute story of goodwill went viral on the internet.

11-year-old Victorian schoolgirl Helen last month wrote to the company as part of her Year 6 class project.

"The reason I'm writting (sic) to your company is because at school we are learning how to write letters to companies," Helen wrote.

"We have 25 students in our class and we have 25 companies. I chose your company because I'm a big fan of yours."

In fact Helen was such a big fan of Nintendo she couldn't resist asking for a DS gaming console after her parents "refused" to buy her one.

"I also have a request to make. My request is quite big. I would like a DS please for those many reasons," Helen wrote.

Nintendo obliged and sent a new DS to Helen's school along with a letter of reply to the young girl.

"Thank you for your letter — we were very impressed. I really hope you and your classmates enjoy playing the DS," wrote a Nintendo staff member.

Now the exchange — including Helen's letter and Nintendo's reply — has gone viral on the internet.

Just two days after being posted online, the exchange has been viewed more than 330,000 times on image-sharing site imgur.

It has also attracted thousands of votes on link-sharing websites like Reddit and Digg.

But for every reader that responded with a "daaaaw", there's another who has joked about trying it out for themselves.

"So I can just send any company a letter and they will give me a product?" asked one reader on Digg.

"I'm going to send a letter to Steve for a certain pad," said another.

However if you're thinking about writing to Nintendo under the pretence of a school project, be warned — they verify all requests.

"Nintendo always calls the school, hospital, retirement home, or whatever it may be to ensure the letter is legitimate," said Nintendo Australia's Heather Murphy.

"In this particular case, Nintendo called the school and spoke to the school principal."

After talking to the principal to make sure the gaming console would be well used, Nintendo sent a DS and a "game suitable for children to play" to the school.

Ms Murphy said it wasn't common practice to give away free consoles — or even reply — to everyone who wrote to the company. She said it received "hundreds" of letters per day.

"Nintendo does not routinely give away products in response to letters. From time to time, we may donate product to schools, hospitals or retirement villages," she said.

"We receive a high number of letters on a daily basis, and unfortunately we are not able to respond to every one.

"So therefore we hope we do not receive an influx as we simply would not be able to respond."

However Ms Murphy said Nintendo would like to thank everyone who had written to the company already.

"Especially those letters that tell Nintendo about their experiences with our products and how and why they enjoy them so much," she said.
Sierra Nelson loves cephalopods. Squids, octopuses, cuttlefish—you name it, if it’s a bilateral mollusk with a big-ass head, Nelson is positively gaga over it. Nelson is a Seattle-area poet, and you can understand how a poet might fall in love with tentacled sea creatures: They’re romantic figures, skulking in the ocean—part of the great marine biosphere, but also remote from whales and fish. Those articulate limbs and big brains set them apart, leaving them to skulk and mope fabulously. And they even produce their own ink! How could a poet not land on Team Cephalopod?

But Nelson is more science-minded than your average poet. She’s a co-founder of the Vis-á-Vis Society, which applies scientific rigor to crowd-sourced poems, often employing large crowds at parties to write, Mad Libs-style, a series of poems about love and longing. No other poets in town, likely, have dissected a poem into pie charts on a whiteboard while wearing a lab coat.

On her own, Nelson loves to tease out the poetry in science, finding resonance in the long and mysterious Latin words and phrases we’ve used to name the world. One of my favorites of her poems is “The First Photograph,” which explains the process that created a blurry heliograph by the father of photography, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce:

“Through the pinprick it all came to us,/how close we were, upside down,/several hours on the windowsill./We were surfaces arranged to receive.”

The poem concludes:

“Yet I capture you. Close to the sun./I coated my longing in bitumen.” Much has been written about the way photographs capture a moment in time, but rarely is that desperate need so beautifully overt.

So yes, there’s whimsy in Nelson’s celebration of all things squid and squidlike. But there’s also serious investigation and a questing mind, fusing science and art and seeing what happens. Every year since 2015, she’s been presenting Cephalopod Appreciation Societies—arts celebrations with music, film, visual art, poetry, and speeches. Past participants have included musician Lori Goldston, biologist Stephanie Crofts, marine cinematographer Laura James, and novelist Kevin Emerson, and presentations have included stickers, classes on incorporating marine biology into creative writing, octopus-themed animation, and sea-shanty singalongs.

This Sunday’s Society is in a different setting: not the creative hub of Hugo House, as in past years, but at Waterfront Space, a gallery on Western Avenue. Nelson encourages participants of all ages to come dressed as their favorite cephalopod, and she promises there will be a “mini-parade” to the waterfront, presumably where she will call on a giant squid to rise from the deep and cast judgment on Seattle. Will we be destroyed by the mammoth monster from the briny depths? Or will our suction-cupped friend recognize the like-minded intelligence in our eyes and guide us to a happier future? Only our molluscular overlords know for sure.

Waterfront Space, 1400 Western Ave. Free. All ages. Noon, Sun., Aug. 20. Paul Constant is co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. Read books coverage at seattlereviewofbooks.com.
[What Steve King's 'subgroups' musing says about the party of Donald Trump]

The Post's Philip Rucker interviews Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday, July 20. (The Washington Post)

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Wednesday defended his controversial comment this week that some cultures contribute more to civilization than others.

"The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal — that's not objectively true," King told The Washington Post's Philip Rucker, less than 48 hours after he asked on live TV what "subgroups" besides white people had made any contributions to civilization. "We've been fed that information for the past 25 years, and we're not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that."

Here's what he told Rucker:

"Western civilization is the most successful civilization the world has ever seen. And some of the reasons for that is it's borrowed from other cultures along the way, back to Mosaic law, the Greek age of reason, Roman law and the Roman order of government, and the Republican form of government, by the way that we're guaranteed in our constitution. The foundation of our ideological thought is rooted in the enlightenment of Europe and then this country was born at the dawn of the industrial revolution. ... The sum total that's been contributed by Western civilization, it surpasses any other culture of civilization, party because we borrowed from them along the way, and we're flexible enough to do that. And so I don't think we should apologize for our success."

Of course, as my eagle-eyed colleague Philip Bump — who caught King's comment Monday on MSNBC — pointed out, our society is shaped by numerous nonwhite societies, past and present:

Civilization first arose in cities in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq and Syria. Arabic and Middle Eastern inventors and scientists brought astronomy to the world, which in turn aided innovations in navigation. Critical innovations in mathematics and architecture and medicine originated in the same area. The Chinese contributed philosophical precepts and early monetary systems, among other things. The specific inventions that were created outside of the Western world are too many to list: the seismograph, the umbrella, gunpowder, stirrups, the compass. Oh, and, of course, the non-Western world gave us the numeric system that will be used to tally up the delegates to make Trump the nominee of King's party.

That apparently didn't resonate with King, who told Rucker he originally felt forced to defend his view of how Western civilization became great after Esquire's Charlie Pierce said in the same live TV interview he didn't see much diversity at the Republican convention.

"If you're really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican Party's attention, its platform, its public face," Pierce said on MSNBC.

"He was disparaging a group of people — a subgroup of people, old white people — and saying they're going to be out of the politics of the Republican Party,” King told Rucker. "That's got to be answered."

[What Steve King's 'sub groups' musing says about the party of Donald Trump]

Rucker asked King — who has often been in the spotlight for making controversial remarks on race — if his answer wasn't the very definition of identity politics that Republicans love to accuse President Obama of playing.

King said the opposite was true, and that he hoped his conversation could help people see beyond the skin color.

"Our focus on melanin and people's skins — can't we talk about the diversity of ideology? Can't we look at people for their minds and what they can contribute?" he said. "And I'd like to see us go more toward a respect for people's ability to contribute, and I actually want to get to a society where we disregard race."

The Post's Philip Rucker sits down with Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday, July 20. (The Washington Post)

But thanks in part to him, in a week when the Republican Party is nominating a presidential candidate whose views on race often seem to align with King's, the color of people's skin is very much in the political conversation.
The investigation into suspected collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government has claimed its first three victims: one (Paul Manafort) for completely unconnected money laundering charges, and two (George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn) for lying to investigators about things which were not themselves criminal, and which are therefore crimes which would never have happened had there never been an investigation. To date, the evidence of direct collusion between Trump and the Russians is looking a little thin, to say the least. Now, into this maelstrom steps Guardian reporter Luke Harding with his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russian Helped Donald Trump Win.

Collusion spends over 300 pages insinuating that Trump is a long-standing agent of the Russian secret services, and hinting, without ever providing any firm evidence, that Trump and his team acted on orders from the Kremlin to subvert American democracy. I’ll be honest, and admit that I picked this book up expecting it to be a series of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and to be utterly unbalanced in its analysis, and in that sense I’m not an unbiased reader. At the same time, I was interested to see if Harding had come up with anything that everybody else had not, and was willing to give him a chance. I needn’t have bothered. For alas, my worst suspicions proved to be true, and then some.

The first thing to note about Collusion is that most of it is padding. That is to say, that it consists mainly of a lot of digressions in which Harding describes people and events not directly related to the main story of collusion. Whenever a new character is introduced, you tend to get pages of background information, along with descriptions of various places they’ve been to, things they’ve done in the past, and so on. At the start of the book, for instance, Harding introduces Christopher Steele, who prepared an infamous dossier purportedly based on secret sources within the Kremlin, which made all sort of extreme accusations against Trump. We learn about Steele’s parents, his childhood, his education, his career, and so on. Harding recounts how he met Steele. We learn about how they tried one café, then another, who drank what, etc, etc. This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the book. There’s a lot of padding. This padding makes Collusion an easy read, and gives it colour, and the flavour of a spy novel. But none of it adds anything to our knowledge of Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia. It’s just filler, designed to cover up the fact that, when it comes to the matter of collusion, Harding doesn’t have a whole lot new to say and certainly doesn’t have enough to fill up an entire book.

The second thing to note is that Harding’s modes of argumentation and standards of evidence are not – how can I be polite about this? – what I’m used to as an academic. Let’s take the example of Trump’s former convention manager, Paul Manafort, to whom Harding devotes an entire chapter, obviously on the basis that the Trump-Manafort connection somehow proves a Trump-Kremlin connection. The problem Harding has is that, despite pages of fluff about Manafort, he hasn’t got any evidence that Manafort is a Kremlin agent. In fact, he quotes one source – a former Ukrainian official, Oleg Voloshin – as telling him that when Manafort worked as a political advisor to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich:

Manafort was an advocate for US interests. So much so that the joke inside the Party of Regions [in Ukraine] was that he actually worked for the USA. … He supported Ukraine’s association with NATO and with the EU. He warned Yanukovich not to lock up [former Prime Minister Iuliia] Tymoshenko. “If it weren’t for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier,” Voloshin told me.

This is pretty funny behaviour for a Kremlin agent, and Harding has to admit that, “It’s unclear to what extent, if any, Manafort was involved in supplying intelligence to Russia.” This doesn’t fit with the conclusion that Harding obviously wants readers to draw – that Manafort was a Kremlin agent, and so Trump must be too. So, he comes up with something else: some of Manafort’s associates in Ukraine “were rumoured to have links with Russian intelligence.” Note the use of the word “rumoured”. It’s not exactly convincing, but it’s good enough for Luke, who uses it to tell a story about one such associate, Konstantin Kilimnik. Harding recounts that he contacted Kilimnik by email to ask him about his relationship with Manafort. Kilimnik responds by telling him that the collusion accusations are “insane” and “gibberish”, and signs off his email with a bit of self-mockery: “Off to collect my paycheck at KGB. :))”

And here’s where it gets interesting. For Harding thinks there’s something suspicious about Kilimnik’s answer. He writes:

The thing which gave me pause was Kilimnik’s use of smiley faces. True, Russians are big emoticon fans. But I’d seen something similar before. In 2013 the Russian diplomat in charge of political influence operations in London was named Sergey Nalobin. Nalobin had close links with Russian intelligence. He was the son of a KGB general; his brother had worked for the FSB; Nalobin looked like a career foreign intelligence officer. Maybe even a deputy resident, the KGB term for station chief. On his Twitter feed Nalobin described himself thus: A brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship : )

And that’s it. That’s Harding’s evidence. Just to make sure readers get the point, he follows the last line up with a double paragraph space. Stop and think what this means, he seems to be saying. Someone who “looked like a career foreign intelligence officer” uses smiley faces. Kilimnik uses smiley faces!!! Say no more.

This is the level at which Harding’s logic works. Harding recounts a meeting of Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the White House, a meeting which was photographed by someone from the Russian news agency TASS. As Harding tells us:

The Times put the photo of Trump and Lavrov on its front page. At the bottom of the photo taken inside the White House was a credit. It said: “Russian Foreign Ministry.”

Yet another double paragraph break follows, just to make sure that readers take in the implication of what this means.

Take another example. We learn (which in fact we knew already if we’d been following this story) that Trump’s short-lived National Security Advisor, and former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn, attended a conference on the subject of intelligence at Cambridge University, where he met a Russian woman, Svetlana Lokhova. Harding admits that, “There is no suggestion she is linked to Russian intelligence.” Nevertheless, he feels it necessary to tell us that Flynn later corresponded with her by email. He writes:

In his emails, Flynn signed off in an unusual way for a US spy. He called himself “General Misha.” Misha is the Russian equivalent of Michael.

Again, Harding then introduces a section break, leaving this ominous fact hanging in the air. Think of what it means, he is saying!

This is typical of how Harding argues. He puts in some suspicious sounding fact, or asks some question, and then just leaves it hanging. The implication is that the question doesn’t need answering, that the most damaging and extreme answer is obviously true. There’s an awful lot of this technique in Collusion. Harding spends pages on a digression about Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybovlev before telling us that Rybovlev’s private jet sometimes parks next to that of Donald Trump. Seems suspicious, huh? Except that Harding tells us that, ‘The White House … said that Trump and Rybovlev had never met. This appears to be true.” But Harding isn’t satisfied, and asks, “Had he [Rybovlev] perhaps met someone else from Trump’s entourage during his travels? Like, for example, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen?” Later, Harding tells us that Rybovlev’s yacht was once at Dubrovnik at the same time as Ivanka Trump’s yacht. “Was this perhaps planned” he asks.

Harding’s method is to ask these questions, as if asking was itself proof of guilt. Trump borrowed money from Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was bailed out at one point by the Russian bank VTB. “Was there a connection?” Harding asks. But Harding doesn’t answer these questions. In fact, one of the interesting things about this book is that again and again the author has to confess that the facts don’t really fit what he’s trying to say. For instance, when discussing Trump and Deutsche Bank, and trying to make it sound as if Trump was in some way connected to the Kremlin because he was borrowing from the Germans, Harding writes, “The sources insist that the answer was negative. No trail to Moscow was ever discovered, they told us.”

This isn’t a lone example. Harding spends quite a few pages discussing Carter Page, a businessman who appeared on RT and gave a talk at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and who at one point had a marginal role in the Trump election campaign. It’s clear that he wants it all to sound really damaging. And yet, he writes that Page’s “attempts to meet Trump individually failed.” So, it turns out that there’s not much of a connection there after all. Likewise, when discussing Russian computer hackers, Harding writes: “By the second decade of the twenty-first century the cyber world looked like the high seas of long ago. The hackers who sailed on it might be likened to privateers. Sometimes they acted for the ‘state’, sometimes against it.” This rather undermines his claim that the Russian state was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

In another example, Harding discusses the sudden death of Oleg Erovinkin, who worked for the oil company Rosneft. He speculates that “Erovinkin was Steele’s source deep inside Rosneft,” and was murdered because word of Steele’s document had leaked out. The murder, he implies, is proof of the dossier’s validity. Except that Harding admits that, “there was nothing suspicious about Erovinkin’s sudden death” and “Steele was adamant that Erovinkin wasn’t his source.” Yet this doesn’t stop Harding from writing that, “in the wake of the dossier the Kremlin did appear to be wiping out some kind of American or Western espionage network. … It certainly looked that way.”

I could give other examples, but I can’t make this review too long. The point is that Harding ignores his own evidence. He argues by innuendo, and on occasion he just lets his imagine run away with itself. Steele’s dossier alleged that Trump had hired prostitutes while on a trip to Moscow. Vladimir Putin’s response was to crack a joke about Russian prostitutes being the best in the world. But to Harding it wasn’t a joke. As he writes:

Putin may have been sending a second message, darkly visible beneath the choppy, translucent waters of the first. It said: we’ve got the tape, Donald!

I wish I could say that this book was a joke. If you were going to write a parody of the collusion story, this is perhaps what it would look like. Unfortunately, Harding is deadly serious and I suspect that a lot of uncritical readers will soak it all up, not stopping to reflect on the awful methodology. So, I end on a word of warning. By all means read this book. But don’t do so in order to find out the truth about Donald Trump and Russia; do so in order to understand the methods currently being used to enflame Russian-Western relations. In that respect, Collusion is really quite revealing.

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That did not take long. Last night we found out that Tim Tibesar would not be retained as Purdue's defensive coordinator. Today it was announced that Linebackers coach at Florida State Greg Hudson would be taking over as the defensive guru under new coach Darrell hazel. FSU's on Scout.com affiliate broke the news:

Sources indicate that Florida State linebackers coach Greg Hudson has accepted the offer to become the new defensive coordinator at Purdue.

I love this news. Florida State had a defense that actually stopped people this season. In the two games I watched extensively (Miami and Northern Illinois) they strangled the life out of two pretty good offenses. Against Miami the Hurricanes jumped out to an early 10-0 lead then nothing worked for the rest of the game.

Hudson was a DC at East Carolina from 2005-09. In that time the Pirates went 5-6, 7-6, 8-5, 9-5, and 9-5 with a pair of Conference-USA championships and a stout defense. The 2008 season was especially good as the Pirates opened with wins against Virginia Tech and West Virginia. Virginia Tech went on to win the ACC and the Orange Bowl that season.

Hudson has been linebackers coach at Cincinnati (1997-2000), Minnesota (2001-2004), and Florida State 2010-12) while playing at Notre Dame for two seasons. Therefore, we've seen him before with the Golden Gophers (who were at their best under Glen Mason at that time) and the Fighting Irish.

This season was a very good one for FSU, as the Seminoles were 12-2, won the ACC, and won the Orange Bowl with a defense-first philosophy. The Noles were 6th scoring nationally at 14.7 points per game given up and held teams to 10 or fewer points six times in 14 games.

Christian Jones is one of the top-rated linebackers in the country and could go pro early as a player that Hudson coached. Telvin Smith is also pretty damn good in his own right. Hudson can help us fix a vast, gaping hole at linebacker that last saw Niko Koutouvides and Landon Johnson as dominant players a decade ago. Since they left Purdue had has a revolving door of decent, but not great linebackers and the overall defensive unit has struggled as a result.
As federal authorities continue to investigate Anthony Weiner's sexually charged online chats with an underage girl, DailyMail.com has learned that a grand jury could hear the case against the ex-congressman as soon as the end of the month.

The FBI, the New York Police Department, and US attorneys in New York and North Carolina opened investigations into Weiner's conduct in late September, after DailyMail.com reported that the former politician carried on a months-long online relationship with a 15-year-old high school girl.

Weiner has already been hit with a federal subpoena for his cell phone, CNN reported last month.

The feds are apparently looking to move quickly - a federal grand jury is expected to hear allegations against Weiner in the next few weeks, sources tell DailyMail.com.

A federal grand jury is expected to hear allegations against disgraced Anthony Weiner in the next few weeks, sources tell DailyMail.com

The DailyMail.com first reported on Weiner's conversations with the 15-year-old girl (pictured), who he traded photos and sexy messages with for several months starting in January

In the messages, which were obtained by the Dailymail.com, Weiner repeatedly complimented the girl's body, told her that she made him 'hard'

The timing of the potential hearing - shortly before the US presidential election - could cause a political headache for Hillary Clinton, whose top aide Huma Abedin is still officially married to Weiner, 52.

Abedin announced in August that she was separating from Weiner, after he was caught sending a suggestive photo of himself to another woman with his four-year-old son in the background.

Abedin and Weiner continue to share an apartment, and Clinton's political opponents have sought to tie the presidential candidate to the scandal-plagued former congressman.

After DailyMail.com reported on Weiner's conversations with the 15-year-old girl, Donald Trump called on Clinton to return any campaign donations from Weiner.

Legal experts say there are several possible avenues prosecutors might pursue if they are looking to build a case against Weiner under either New York State or federal laws.

Celebrity lawyer Joe Tacopina told DailyMail.com that Weiner could potentially face a misdemeanour of endangering the welfare of a child, which could carry up to a year in jail.

Hillary Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin (pictured on October 15 with her son), is still officially married to Weiner, 52

Abedin announced in August that she was separating from Weiner, though they continue to share an apartment

'All you really have to do is look at the messages there to substantiate 90 per cent of her story,' said Tacopina.

Other legal experts said he could have violated federal laws against sending obscene materials to minors.

Weiner's conversations with the girl also drew criticism from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who said during a press conference: 'If the reports are true, it's possibly criminal and it's sick.'

The DailyMail.com first reported on Weiner's conversations with the 15-year-old girl, who he traded photos and sexy messages with for several months starting in January.

In the messages, which were obtained by the Dailymail.com, Weiner repeatedly complimented the girl's body, told her that she made him 'hard', and invited her to chat with him on the video-messaging application Skype.

One message said: 'I would bust that tight p***y so hard and so often that you would leak and limp for a week.'

Weiner and the girl used several anonymous messaging apps, like the one pictured above, where every line of text - and the sender's name - disappear after the message is opened. In one message he told he would 'bust that tight p***y so hard'

The message continues, and Weiner says he would bust that tight p***y so hard and so often that you would leak and limp for a week'. Weiner began talking to the girl in January, after she messaged him on Twitter

The girl told DailyMail.com in an interview that she and Weiner also spoke over Skype, where the ex-congressman asked her to get undressed and masturbate in front of him

Weiner began talking to the girl in January, after she messaged him on Twitter.

In the messages, the girl told Weiner she was in high school and discussed her school activities and newly acquired learner's permit.

The girl told DailyMail.com in an interview that she and Weiner also spoke over Skype, where the ex-congressman asked her to get undressed and masturbate in front of him and engage in teacher-student 'roleplaying' scenarios.

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Weiner said that he was sorry for having poor judgment with his online conversations and said he might have been the victim of a 'hoax' in this scenario.

This is far from the first time Weiner has been entangled in a sexting scandal.

He resigned from congress in 2011 after he was caught sending photos of his crotch to a female college student, and admitted to sexting with several other women during his marriage.

In 2013, he ran for New York City mayor, but his campaign tanked after it came out that he had been exchanging sexual messages with yet another college student.

This past summer, Abedin announced that she was separating from Weiner after the New York Post reported that he had sent shirtless photos to another woman, including one that showed his four-year-old son in the background.
“There is no right answer. Cream or jam is fine.” So says 34-year-old Tingting He, in answer to the question of which to spread on the scone first in a British cream tea. It’s a relief to learn that I haven’t been doing the wrong thing all my life. We’re in the Essex tea room of an upmarket British jam maker and on the table before us is a plate of fluffy scones, a bowl of clotted cream and miniature jars of strawberry jam. Tingting may be Shanghainese but she’s giving me a lesson in the British tradition of afternoon tea. As brand ambassador for Tiptree Farm she delivers the same lecture in China’s top hotels. Her home country may claim to be a communist state, but it has a healthy appetite for the branding and rituals of the British ruling class. Tingting brings Chinese buyers for a tour of the Tiptree fruit farm.

Tingting He and Carrie Gracie

“It’s refreshing for them. They’re paying for the countryside with the birds singing. There are lots of rumours about Chinese food sources, so the quality gives them peace of mind. And also they know the Royal Family has issued us with a royal warrant. That gives them another level of security.” It’s easy to see why Chinese visitors might enjoy the tour. Tiptree exported its first jar of jam in the late 19th Century and still has some of the rambling walled gardens and ancient orchards of that era. Inside the jam factory, the scent of simmering strawberries gives way to a hot wave of orange marmalade. And then the heady spices of the Christmas pudding room. Tingting says she loves the tradition of setting light to the brandy. She thinks she can sell Christmas puddings in China.

People like something festive, a good gift over Christmas or Chinese Spring Festival. It’s special, unique. They’re very curious and open-minded.”

British food is not fabled in China. But on a state visit to the UK in 2015 the Chinese president was filmed eating fish and chips. And walking between pallets piled high with jams and chutneys, Tingting is excited about China’s new breed of gastronomic adventurers. “The more they read and travel and encompass different food cultures, the more they try new things. Blueberry jam is something they are willing to try. Cheese and redcurrant jelly. At the start they found it strange but now they think it’s good. They are inventing their own way of getting Western food into their culture, which is very exciting for us. ”

When Tingting says “us” she means Tiptree. After many years studying in the UK, and with a British fiance, the Essex farm is as big a part of who she is as Shanghai. But the hard fact for exporters is that China is a long way away. Sea freight can take two months. Tingting hopes the rail freight service on the new Silk Road will shrink the time to market. When the train gets refrigerated containers next year, it should become possible to deliver British scones and Devon clotted cream. She dismisses my suggestion to bake the scones in China. “You can’t do that because British water and flour make for the special taste.” Once a symbol of British empire and engineering, now it’s China’s great age of the railways. The overland freight service from the UK began this year, carrying British hopes for post-Brexit markets from one end of the new Silk Road to the other. Tingting is impatient for faster progress.
(CNN) The story about a small-town police officer in Illinois becomes more convoluted by the day.

Investigators interviewed a woman who said the officer asked for help finding a gang member to kill the administrator, Lake County Major Task Force member Christopher Covelli said.

When authorities talked to the gang member, he denied having a conversation with Gliniewicz about a hit, Covelli said. No other evidence was found about a hit.

At a press conference, Fox Lake Village Administrator Anne Marrin was asked how it felt to know a police officer apparently wanted her dead.

"Unsettling," she said of the inquiry. "It's quite unbelievable and almost surreal."

Marrin said she was asking questions about the youth group that police say Gliniewicz was stealing from. She said she didn't know about Gliniewicz' plans until after his death and doesn't feel in danger now.

"Even though these threats were made months ago, I take these threats very seriously," she said.

The hit man revelation is the latest turn in a story that has shaken Fox Lake, a community northwest of Chicago.

Gliniewicz, a veteran officer with 30 years experience, was found shot to death on September 1 after he radioed that he was chasing suspects into a wooded area while on patrol. No arrests were made. The community mourned the shaved-head military veteran known as G.I. Joe.

Authorities didn't truly suspect Gliniewicz had killed himself until about two weeks ago, when bank statements and text messages revealed the extent of his stealing, said George Filenko, Lake County Major Crimes Task Force commander.

Money taken from Explorers Post

Gliniewicz stole "tens of thousands" of dollars from the Explorers Post, an organization for youths interested in law enforcement careers, Marrin said. The police department sponsored the group and Gliniewicz was the leader. Investigators said he used the money to pay his mortgage and other expenses.

Marrin said her relations with Gliniewicz were always cordial.

"We never fought," she said. "There were no harsh words."

But he was reluctant to provide information about the Explorers. She asked for but didn't receive schedules of activities, a list of members or parental consent forms, she said.

"They didn't have a budget," Marrin said. "That was part of the problem."

A day or two before Gliniewicz' death, she asked for an inventory of equipment owned by the Explorers, she said. He didn't provide it by the deadline and she asked again.

"His email said, 'I will have that information for you by noon or 1 o'clock at the latest,' " she said.

That was on September 1. Gliniewicz was found dead later that day.

The lieutenant sent word over his radio at 7:52 a.m. that he was pursuing a trio on foot. Three minutes later, he requested backup. Radio communication dropped off. Colleagues would not hear Gliniewicz's voice again.

The backups arrived about 8 a.m. and a few minutes later found Gliniewicz dead. His body was roughly 50 yards from his cruiser, police said. The officer's .40-caliber pistol was found at the scene.

A massive manhunt followed, with 400 law enforcement officers looking through the woods around the crime scene and helicopters hovered overhead.

Gliniewicz was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time he was shot, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation. One of the officials said two shots hit Gliniewicz -- one stopped by his bulletproof vest, and another entered his torso at a downward angle.

Recovered text messages

Gliniewicz had deleted 6,500 text messages, Filke said. Investigators spent weeks recovering them.

In one messages that police released, Gliniewicz talked about how much he disliked Marrin.

"We have a new village administrator that is a power monger and is trying to control everything in the village," Gliniewicz said, adding that many officers were considering retirement.

The officer allegedly had discussed causing harm to Marrin.

"Hopefully she decides to get a couple of drinks in her and she gets a dui," said a person identified as "Individual #2."

Gliniewicz replied, "She does, but not around here and no one knows where. Trust me ive thought through MANY SCENARIOS from planting things to the volo bog!" Apparently he meant the Volo Bog, a state park with a lake near Fox Lake.

After Gliniewicz' death, investigators found packets of cocaine in his desk. Authorities haven't said whether those were the "things" he considered planting in her car. The evidence bag with cocaine was not marked and it did not have a case number on it, investigators said. The toxicology report did not include a positive finding for cocaine.

The investigation is not over and more people may be arrested. The widow and a son of Gliniewizc are being investigated to determine whether they were involved in the embezzlement of funds, three law enforcement sources told CNN on Thursday.

One source says the two are the individuals 1 and 2 referred to in the text messages released by the investigative task force.

When reached Thursday, an attorney for the family refused to comment.
December 4, 2013 - TF2 Team

We've been busy these last few months, trying to settle a longstanding debate as to what "bimonthly" actually means. Some members of the team are convinced it means "once every two months." Others maintain even trying to define it would ruin the enchanting mystery of reading. Anyway, three months later we're no closer to an answer. However, we are close to releasing the second issue of Team Fortress Comics, this time as a tri-monthly publication. How close? It's here.

When we last left our gripping ongoing tale, Saxton Hale had lost Mann Co. to the scheming Gray Mann and disappeared to parts unknown. The TF2 mercs, now out of jobs, had scattered to the winds—until six months later, when Miss Pauling started reassembling the team under orders from an in-hiding Administrator. With Demo, Soldier and Pyro on board, our team heads to Teufort to rescue Spy and Scout from the hangman's noose. Find out what happens next in Part Two, titled "Unhappy Returns".
Following a monster sophomore campaign at Cartersville High School in Georgia that saw him pass for 3,655 yards and 43 touchdowns, Trevor Lawrence keeps his spot as the No. 1 player in the nation and headlines Thursday’s unveiling of the first full Top247 for the 2018 class.

With the release, we have a starting point for the names to know among the nation's top soon-to-be juniors.

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP247!

The list will change; it will evolve, prospects will drop and new names will emerge but at this early stage in the recruiting process, it's time to recognize the players that have already caught the collective eye of the college recruiting world.

THE FIVE-STARS

There are four initial five-stars in the Top247 for 2018:

1. Trevor Lawrence, QB, Georgia – A quarterback with a shot to go wire-to-wire as the nation's top ranked prospect. He checks every box: Size, arm-strength, athleticism, productivity. His recruitment looks like a Georgia-Tennessee battle.

2. Brey Walker, OT, Oklahoma – He's what offensive tackles look like in cartoons. A freak of a body at 6-foot-6 and 290 pounds who is also one of the nation's top heavyweight wrestlers. He's already committed to Oklahoma.

RELATED: Walker among a few players in the hunt for Lawrence's top spot

3. Zamir White, RB, North Carolina – Whatever you want a running back to be, this kid can be it. A big, powerful back with speed, White has 20 offers but is high on Clemson and North Carolina at the moment.

4. Xavier Thomas, DE, South Carolina – The game-changing edge rusher that every defense is looking for. Thomas is ready to carry the torch for the defensive line tradition in the Carolinas for the 2018 cycle.

TEAM RANKINGS SHUFFLE

Based on the new grades handed out within the Top247 and beyond, Miami is clearly building a special class. Mark Richt has locked up three Top247 prospects in cornerbacks Josh Jobe and Gilbert Frierson and wide receiver Daquris Wiggins. The Hurricanes have two more committed from outside the Top247 in all-purpose back Jalen Patterson and cornerback Thomas Burns.

RELATED: Gallery of legacy 2018 recruits

Miami's haul of three Top247 prospects is tops. Three teams, all from the SEC, have two Top247 pledges. Alabama has the two highest rated prospects in tight end Macom Epps and offensive tackle Dare Rosenthal.

LSU's two Top247 prospects are both homegrown talents in wide receiver Devonta Jason and cornerback Kelvin Joseph.

Luke Matthews, the son of NFL Hall of Famer Bruce Matthews, makes it a fourth son to play for the Aggies. His older brother, Jake, was drafted sixth overall by the Atlanta Falcons in 2014. Luke joins wide receiver Montel Parker as the two Texas A&M commits on the list.

POISED FOR BIG YEARS

- It's a good time to be arriving at South Carolina if you're Will Muschamp. The Carolinas are loaded with talent in 2018 and Muschamp looks poised to benefit from it. So too will Clemson, North Carolina, NC State and the other regional recruiters. Between the states of North Carolina and South Carolina, there are 18 combined Top247 members.

- LSU could be poised for a run at a recruiting national title based on its in-state talent to pull from. While the class doesn’t have any no-doubt five-star types yet, Louisiana looks to be loaded with depth in that mid four-star range. Fifteen four-stars in the Top247 are from Louisiana and the Tigers already have two of them committed.

- Pennsylvania is also trending up in 2018. There are nine Pennsylvanians represented in the Top247. James Franklin and Penn State are looking to capitalize on that talent by landing an early commitment form the state's top player, Micah Parsons. Can Pittsburgh do the same by keeping local gun-slinger Phil Jurkovec at home despite Notre Dame and Ohio State overtures?

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP247!
Barcelona football star Lionel Messi last night wrote his way into the history books after notching up the Guinness World Records title for the most goals in a calendar year by netting his 86th goal of 2012.

The 25-year-old Argentine edged past Gerd Mueller's long-standing record of 85 - set in 1972 - to set a new benchmark, which includes goals for club and country.

Messi clinched the record after hitting the target twice in Barca's 2-1 win over Real Betis on Sunday.

The Three-time World Player of the Year drilled in an angled shot after 16 minutes to equal the German's record before adding a second with a shot driven low in the 25th minute to set the new mark.

video

Speaking after the match, Messi told Spanish TV station Canal Plus: "I always say the same, it's nice for what it means but the victory is more important as it maintains our lead over the other teams".

Mueller, who netted 72 for Bayern Munich and 13 for West Germany when he set the previous benchmark in 1972 and was 27 at the time, was among the first to congratulate Messi, telling Sport1.de: "My record stood for 40 years - 85 goals in 60 games - and now the best player in the world has broken it, and I'm delighted for him.

"He is an incredible player, gigantic."

Messi's attempt to break the record looked uncertain after he was stretchered off during Barcelona's Champions League draw with Benfica on Wednesday with a knee injury.

However, despite admitting he thought he had kicked his last ball "for a long time because of the pain", the injury to his left knee was eventually found not to be as bad as initially feared, allowing him to start against Betis.

Messi's path to the record has included 74 goals for Barcelona and 12 for Argentina in 66 games.

He could still add to his final tally, with the striker set to feature in two league matches and one King's Cup tie before the end of the year.

Nicknamed "The Flea" for his small frame, Messi passed Cesar Rodriguez's 57-year-old milestone of 232 goals to become Barcelona all-time leading scorer.

Messi's month-by-month goal tally

January 7

February 10

March 13

April 9

May 8

June 4

July 0

August 7

September 5

October 10

November 9

December 4

Messi's goal breakdown

Barcelona

Copa del Rey: 3

Primera Division: 56

Champions League: 13

Spanish Super Cup: 2

Club total: 74

Argentina

World Cup qualifiers: 5

Friendlies: 7

Country total: 12

Overall total: 86
One of the world’s major terrestrial carbon pools is rapidly deteriorating as large parts of Indonesia’s peatlands are deforested and converted to oil palm and paper plantations. No longer a carbon sink, Indonesia’s peatlands are now a globally significant source of emissions.

The June fires in Sumatra once again drew international attention to Indonesia’s forests. At the fires’ peak, 140,000 hectares were burnt in just one week.

Most fires were in peatland, much of it on land destined to become oil palm, or Acacia plantations for the paper industry. Fire remains the instrument of choice for low-cost land-clearing.

The fires were a reminder of the unsolved problem of peatland protection in Indonesia, and of the need for urgent action against the toxic combination of plantations, fire and poor governance that is destroying one of the world’s major carbon pools.

What exactly is peatland?

Indonesia’s peatlands are (or were) low-lying rainforests located close to coastal areas. Under the forest lies the peat itself, a below-ground accumulation of carbon-rich decayed vegetation. Formed in swampy conditions where plant material fails to fully decay, peat can build up to a depth of 10 meters or more over thousands of years.

The greenhouse significance of Indonesia’s peatlands lies in the fact they can store up to 20 times as much carbon as tropical rainforests on normal mineral soils, 90% of it below ground. Peatlands release carbon for decades after deforestation as the underlying peat decomposes or is burnt.

Indonesia has by far the largest area of tropical peatland in the world: 22 million hectares. Sumatra, the Kalimantan provinces on the island of Borneo, and Papua have about a third each.

Global significance of Indonesia’s peatlands

Indonesia’s peatlands hold at least 57 billion tonnes (Gigatonnes or Gt) of carbon, making them a globally significant terrestrial carbon pool. The pool is comparable to the Amazonian rainforest, which holds about 86 billion tonnes.

To limit the world to 2 degrees of warming, we can emit no more than 600 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases between now and 2050. Indonesia’s peatland carbon alone, if released as CO 2 in the atmosphere, is equivalent to one-third of the remaining carbon budget.

What then are the chances of Indonesia losing its entire peatland carbon stock?

Indonesia’s peatland in a downward spiral

Indonesia became a leading raw material supplier in the timber, paper and oil palm industries in the 1970s. Deforestation and degradation of Indonesia’s forests took place on an epic scale, and Indonesia lost more than half its peat forest cover. Just over 10 million hectares remained forested by 2010. Only Papua retained large areas of pristine peat swamp forest.

This downward spiral won’t end any time soon. Each year Sumatra loses another 5% of its lowland forests; the situation is similar in the Kalimantan provinces. In all this, Papua is the new frontier. With logging on the rise, pulp mills planned and large areas of land under concessions, it is poised to go the way of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

The extent of forest degradation is another sign of trouble ahead. Where peatland has been deforested, fragmented or drained, it is transformed from an unburnable resource into a tinder-box.

A detailed study which analysed over 10 million hectares of peatland in Sumatra and Kalimantan found that most was degraded. Less than 4% was covered by pristine peatswamp forests and just 11% or 1 million hectares were covered by relatively intact forests. The remainder is on a trajectory of fire and conversion into plantations, as the recent events in Sumatra demonstrate.

Climate change itself is working against peatlands. In what is termed a “positive feedback cycle”, climate change is expected to produce more prolonged El Niño dry periods in Indonesia, leading to more intense fires, which in turn cause further climate change. During the 2006 El Niño, there were 40,000 fire hotspots on Indonesia’s peatlands.

The peatlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan are headed for collapse. Major question marks surround Papua’s peatlands.

What does it mean for Indonesia’s greenhouse emissions?

The peatlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan are no longer a carbon sink but a carbon source. With steadily increasing emissions from decomposition of peatland combined with large contributions from fires during El Niño years, peatland emissions are now in the order of 1 Gt of CO 2 a year on average and rising.

If Indonesia’s peatlands were a country, they would be the world’s 7th or 8th largest emitter. Over the coming decades, almost all of Sumatra and Kalimantan’s peatland carbon could be released.

More alarmingly, with half of Indonesia’s peatland deforested or degraded, around 100 Gt of CO 2 or about 150 times Australia’s annual emissions could be released into the atmosphere over the coming decades.

With this situation Indonesia has little hope of achieving its pledge to cut its emissions by 26% or 41% by 2020, which relies heavily on reducing forests and peatland emissions.

What can be done about it?

Indonesia has fought hard to address the problems of deforestation and peatland loss. It has launched major campaigns to stamp out illegal logging. It has established a Commission Against Corruption, whose clashes with the Indonesian Police are watched with fascination locally, and portrayed as the struggle of the plucky gecko versus the crocodile.

Indonesia has attempted without much success to enforce the law banning plantations on deep peat, impose due process in issuing forest concessions, and prevent fires on peatland. It has implemented a moratorium against deforestation with the strong encouragement of Norway, established a national REDD agency (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), and issued regulations to protect remaining forests.

But in a country notorious for its entrenched political economy of korupsi, kollusi and nepotisme (hardly needing translation) these efforts have shown few results to date.

The solutions are well-known and have been aired extensively. Converting peatland to plantations has to stop, but this doesn’t mean that the oil palm industry has to end.

It does mean that existing concessions on peatland need to be transferred to degraded lands elsewhere. This is something Indonesia’s national development planning agency has long called for.

Laws protecting peat and banning fires need to be enforced vigorously. And critically, Papua’s peatlands needs protection to ensure they do not go the way of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

None of these things are happening. A better understanding of the global significance of Indonesia’s peatlands is needed to spur Indonesian and international policy-makers into action.
MADISON, Wis. – Protests at the Wisconsin Capitol over public workers’ collective bargaining rights cost more than $7.8 million for police, and damage to the Capitol will cost about $270,000 to repair, a state official said.

Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said during a news conference Friday that local law enforcement incurred $3.9 million in overtime costs from Feb. 14 to March 13. Another $3.5 million was spent on overtime for state agencies that helped cover security such as the Capitol Police, Wisconsin State Patrol, Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Criminal Investigation. Huebsch said that the state has not paid any claims yet, but will pay overtime and some justified food expenses incurred by local law enforcement once they’ve been audited.

DOA officials also say a Capitol damage report written by restoration expert Charlie Quagliana found that protesters caused “3-5 years of wear” on the building in the course of two weeks that will cost $161,050 to repair. About $112,000 should be spent repairing damage to stonework, while another $30,500 has already been spent on extra custodial staff for cleaning. Quagliana’s assessment cost about $13,000.

The damage was related to nearly monthlong protests that saw daily demonstrations of tens of thousands of protesters in and around the Capitol.

Several thousand protesters flooded the Capitol rotunda daily, with many setting up camp under the dome and staying the night. The Capitol walls were filled with signs affixed with blue painters’ tape, which protesters used to avoid damaging the marble. Despite a handful of arrests over the course of the demonstrations, protesters maintained a peaceful presence and made efforts to clean parts of the building nightly.

In his report, Quagliana said that the most significant damage was chipping and nicks to stones on the ground and first floors, which would have to be repaired through a process that includes trying to match the color of the stones.

Quagliana noted residue left by tape from protester signs and oil damage from cardboard pizza boxes hung as makeshift signs. While he recommended a full cleaning of surfaces in public areas to remove the tape and residue, he also noted they have not had a full cleaning since the late 1990s’ and were covered with layers of dust and grime.

Another $108,500 will be spent repairing damage to the Capitol lawn and its shrubs that were damaged by rallies of thousands held outside.

Huebsch said there was no evidence of “malicious destruction” of the Capitol by protesters, but only “carelessness.”

“I think $270,000 in damage to the Capitol is a huge amount,” Huebsch said. “That being said, it could have been much worse.”

Huebsch initially estimated during a court case regarding access to the Capitol that the damage to the building would cost $7.5 million to repair. Huebsch said he did not regret making the estimate, which he says was the best information available at the time.

“The DOA staff responded in the best way they could, and you’ve certainly seen the memos as to the ground work that they did … and just basically went back to what the restoration costs were 15 years ago when the Capitol was renovated,” Huebsch said. “So I don’t think it was a mistake because we were specifically asked that question in court.”

Huebsch said that DOA will work with the Legislature to fund the reimbursements, but that they would likely come from taxpayer dollars.

Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, who has been a critic of Capitol access issues since the protest, decried the cost of the added security to taxpayers.

“The costs of these excessive security measures are still being incurred and remain in clear violation of a court order,” Risser said. “The protests that occurred this spring were peaceful. It is unnecessary to turn the people’s house into a fortress where the people are not welcome.”

Huebsch said that although security around the Capitol is being constantly evaluated, the extra security would likely remain in place until after the collective bargaining issue has been resolved in the Legislature.

DOA is also waiting on a report from the Department of Military Affairs that would detail the Capitol protests and security concerns arising from the event.
Last year, theatre owners and exhibitors in Pakistan temporarily stopped screening Indian films after Pakistani artistes and technicians were banned by the Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association (IMPPA) from in India. The controversial move was taken in the wake of political tension between India and Pakistan, post the Uri (Jammu and Kashmir) attacks in September.

However, earlier this year, Pakistan lifted the ban on Indian films and began screening them in the country. And a few days ago, local distributors from the neighbouring nation apparently requested for Dangal (2016) to be released there. Aamir Khan and the film’s team were “absolutely okay” with that, especially since Pakistani audiences have always loved Hindi films and Indian actors.

Aamir was surprised with the demands of the Pakistan censor board to omit the scenes featuring the Indian flag and playing the national anthem. ( You Tube )

However, Hindustan Times has learnt that the release of the film couldn’t go through when a “surprising” demand came in from the other side of the border. A source says, “When the film went to the Pakistan censor board, they were fine with it except for two particular scenes towards the end — one in which the Indian flag is shown and another in which the Indian national anthem is played after Geeta Phogat (played by Fatima Sana Shaikh) wins the gold medal. The Pakistan censors wanted the scenes to be edited out before they gave Dangal the green signal,” says an insider.

Dangal is the Hindi movie industry’s biggest blockbuster with over Rs 385 crore at the Indian box office. ( You Tube )

But Aamir — who is also the producer of the film — felt that the “demand for the two cuts was surprising, because the film isn’t jingoistic in nature”. The source says, “It’s a sports-based biopic with no direct or indirect reference to Pakistan. The film only highlights India’s nationalistic sentiment, so what is the reason to chop off those scenes?”

Aamir then decided that the film would not be released in Pakistan. Dangal is the Hindi movie industry’s biggest blockbuster with over Rs 385 crore at the Indian box office. “It will result in an economic loss to the tune of Rs 10-12 crore, as Pakistan is an important international territory vis-à-vis money, but he isn’t willing to edit the scenes in question. He is aware that not releasing the film could lead to piracy, but he is sure about what he won’t do,” adds the source.

We tried to reach Aamir, but he was not available for comment till the time of going to press. But his spokesperson confirmed the news without divulging further details.

Watch the promo of Dangal-

First Published: Apr 06, 2017 18:09 IST
I was teased by my present for a whole 24 hours as I came home to a FedEx slip on Wednesday night. By Thursday, I was bubbling with excitement, and the presents did NOT disappoint!

I had done a little internet stalking of my giver as he had messaged me to tell me it was on its way to me last week. A geek who loved tattoos, Star Wars, Harry Potter and reading? This was either going to go really, really well or really, really badly as those four things are pretty much at the top of my own interests.

Wrapped individually, with old timey string closures and lots of detail, my box unfolded on itself. A Star Wars lunch box surrounded by green, red and white tissue paper. A card atop more tissue wrapped things inside telling me not to open until I'd unwrapped everything.

And then.

There it was.

Coffee beans roasted with Maker's Mark.

And a handcrafted, orange metal up-vote ornament.

My gifter wrote a card admitting to some cyber-stalking of his own. (It's the internet after all - that's what we do.)

Given that I frequently tweet my love of bourbon and regularly tweet about my boyfriend, coffee, Matt could NOT have picked better gifts for me. And the vehicle of delivery? A metal Star Wars lunchbox like I had when I was a kid?

He wins all my up votes today! I instagrammed my present immediately with lots of capslock and squee'ing. A girlfriend's comment to the picture was "It's you in present form!" and she could not have been more right!

Thanks Matt!
This year's 41st issue of Shueisha's Young Jump magazine is announcing on Thursday that an anime adaptation of manga creator Lynn Okamoto (Elfen Lied, Nononono)'s Gokukoku no Brynhildr science fiction manga is in the works.

The original manga revolves around high school boy Ryōta Murakami, who cannot forget his female childhood friend whom he let die in an accident. Feeling that he must fulfill their promise of proving the existence of aliens, he has continuously looked up at the sky as a member of the astronomy club. One day, a girl named Neko Kuroha who looks exactly like his childhood friend appears as a transfer student. It turns out that she is a magic-user that has run away from a research lab.

Okamoto began the manga in Young Jump in 2011. Shueisha will release the sixth compiled volume of the manga on September 19.

Update: Updated title's reading.
In this July 6, 2012 photo, excavation continues at the Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi coal mining facility in southern Mongolia. Fully 90 percent of Mongolia's exports - coal, copper, cashmere and livestock - go to China, which in turn sends machinery, appliances and other consumer goods that account for a third of Mongolian imports. The rising trade with China now amounts to three-fourths of Mongolia's economy, one of the highest ratios in the world, according to an Associated Press analysis of IMF trade data. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

* China, India to propel coal past oil by end of decade

* Muted impact from carbon policies aimed at curbing coal use

* China to drive two-thirds of coal growth this decade (Adds comments from Alstom on Asia power market, coal supply and prices; provides graphic link)

By Florence Tan

DAEGU, South Korea, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Coal will surpass oil as the key fuel for the global economy by 2020 despite government efforts to reduce carbon emissions, energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie said on Monday.

Rising demand in China and India will push coal past oil as the two Asian powerhouses will need to rely on the comparatively cheaper fuel to power their economies. Coal demand in the United States, Europe and the rest of Asia will hold steady.

Global coal consumption is expected to rise by 25 percent by the end of the decade to 4,500 million tonnes of oil equivalent, overtaking oil at 4,400 million tonnes, according to Woodmac in a presentation on Monday at the World Energy Congress.

"China's demand for coal will almost single-handedly propel the growth of coal as the dominant global fuel," said William Durbin, president of global markets at Woodmac. "Unlike alternatives, it is plentiful and affordable."

China - already the top consumer - will drive two-thirds of the growth in global coal use this decade. Half of China's power generation capacity to be built between 2012 and 2020 will be coal-fired, said Woodmac.

China has no alternative to coal, with its domestic gas output limited and liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports more costly than coal, Durbin said.

"Renewables cannot provide base load power. This leaves coal as the primary energy source," he said.

ASIA TO FOCUS ON LOW-COST COAL

Power infrastructure provider Alstom estimated that across Asia close to half of the 600 gigawatt of new power generators to be built over the next five years will be coal-fired, Giles Dickson, a vice president at the company said.

"Coal prices are low," he said, adding that coal is about one-third of the price of LNG in Asia and about half of the gas price in Europe.

Abundant supply is also supporting demand for coal. The traded volumes of coal will increase by a further 20 percent by 2020, Dickson said, including supply of lower grade coal from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa.

"As the lower grade coal comes into the market, further downward pressure on prices will further drive demand," he said.

Excess supply and faltering demand growth have depressed global coal prices this year. European coal futures have tumbled more than 20 percent, while Australian coal prices have plummeted from the record $130 per tonne hit in 2011 to around $80 per tonne as China's demand grew slower than expected.

"If you take China and India out of the equation, what is more surprising is that under current regulations, coal demand in the rest of the world will remain at current levels," Durbin said.

High fuel import costs and nuclear issues will support coal use throughout Northeast Asia, while in North America coal is still competitive in many locations despite abundant low-cost shale gas.

"The struggling economy and low coal prices has rendered the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) ineffective," Durbin said. "The carbon price will need to reach 40 euros per tonne to encourage fuel switching, which is unlikely before 2020."

In Southeast Asia, coal will be the biggest winner in the region's energy mix. Coal will generate nearly half of Southeast Asia's electricity by 2035, up from less than a third now, the International Energy Agency said in early October.
THE GOVERNMENT reckons laws on “suicide websites” are too lax and need rewriting before they do serious damage.

Times are hard, and a recent spate of suicides has prompted the government to take a closer look at information available online about easy, painless ways to kick the bucket.

Under a 1961 Suicide Act it is illegal to promote suicide in the UK, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of web sites and forums popping up offering lethal advice.

UK Justice Minister, Maria Eagle, reckons there isn’t a "magic solution " to protecting suicidal maniacs online.

But with nothing better to do with its time and dwindling financial reserves, the Government has decided to amend the law and make it more obvious it applies online too.

In other words, ‘If we can’t make people financially secure and happy enough to not want to do themselves in, we can at least make it bloody difficult for them to do so!’

The news comes just months after boffins at the British Medical Journal conducted a survey which concluded the Internet was more likely to encourage people to top themselves than talk them out of it. µ

L’Inq

BBC

See Also

Internet encourages suicide
REG REAGAN runs the rule over every NSW and Queensland player ahead of Game II and he hasn’t held back!

NSW Sub-type: comment CAPTION: NSW Sub-type: comment CAPTION: NSW

JARRYD HAYNE

Says the turning point in his career was being shot at six years ago at Kings Cross. He says, ``It taught me the importance of speed and evasion’’.

DANIEL TUPOU

Going into this Origin II camp, Laurie Daley urged the young man to talk more and he actually did... Then he was encouraged to talk less!

JOSH DUGAN

Son of Queanbeyan grog monster, `Dave Dugan’. Dave recently went to give blood and when they drew it out, it formed a head. A man after my own heart.

MICHAEL JENNINGS

Is having his best season in years for the Roosters. Which isn’t saying much because his previous four years were pathetic.

Boo Bailey artwork Source: The Daily Telegraph

WILLIAM HOPOATE

Recently returned from a Mormon mission where he broke the Mormon record for most Bibles sold. William said the secret to his selling success was kindness, as well as taking his father John, just in case they were considering not buying.

JOSH REYNOLDS

A typical rough, tough Western Suburbs boy. Was homesick all week in Coffs Harbour and had trouble sleeping. Eventually Laurie Daley had to stand outside his hotel room window and fire a handgun, just to make him feel at home.

TRENT HODKINSON

Has a huge phoenix tattoo emblazoned across his chest to remind him of all the injuries he’s overcome, and also a cellmate he became particularly fond of during a stint in Long Bay prison.

NSW Origin stars Josh Dugan, Jarryd Hayne and Will Hopoate. Picture Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia

PAUL GALLEN

When the great Bob Fulton labelled Paul Gallen a possible future Immortal, Gallen said it was his proudest moment. No-one has had the guts to tell Paul that Bozo was joking.

ROBBIE FARAH

Was at the centre of all the post-game celebrations at full-time as coach Laurie Daley turned Robbie upside down and used his nose as a yard glass for teammates to drink out of.

AARON WOODS

Last week, he put his Leichhardt house up for sale. The real estate guide described the house as, ``Just like its footballing owner, large, ugly and rather empty upstairs’’.

Unsung heroes of the NSW Blues Origin team Beau Scott and Ryan Hoffman. Picture Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia

BEAU SCOTT

One of the true heroes of Origin I. He walked into the sheds at full-time and collapsed, not through exhaustion but when he was reminded he had to go back and play for the Knights.

RYAN HOFFMAN

Stood up after Origin I and gave a stirring victory speech, it’s just a shame his teammates didn’t respect him enough to listen to it.

GREG BIRD

Has been brought into the NSW side because of a distinct lack of nastiness and suspect facial hair being the only thing missing from our Origin I performance.

JAMES TAMOU

His Origin I performance was superb. Coach Laurie Daley described his performance as ``almost as strong as his body odour.’’

Michael Jennings and team mates enjoying themselves during the NSW Blues Origin team captains run training. Picture Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia

ANTHONY WATMOUGH

Laurie Daley paid tribute to Anthony Watmough’s new found maturity. Daley said, ``Last camp he actually managed to string a sentence together and spelt dog three times without making a mistake’’.

TRENT MERRIN

Or otherwise known as the fat, slow bloke who dates Sally Fitzgibbons. Sally, like most celebrities, does her bit for charity causes, but dating Trent Merrin is taking things too far.

LUKE LEWIS

Says he misses the threat of violence and all around general hostility of Penrith. Lewis said when it comes to violence, Cronulla really lacks consistency and needs to aim up, more than the occasional Australia Day.

QUEENSLAND Sub-type: comment CAPTION: QUEENSLAND Sub-type: comment CAPTION: QUEENSLAND

BILLY SLATER

Poor diddums was apparently in doubt for the game after someone forced him to make the first tackle in his career and his shoulder’s a little sore. Pull out the violins everyone. Billy’s in the real world now. If only his heart was as big as his nose.

DARIUS BOYD

When Darius plays for Queensland his motto is, ``Never say die’’. When he plays for Newcastle, he obviously confuses that with, ``Never say try’’.

GREG INGLIS

Aggravated a knee injury he first hurt while trying to tow ``that boat’’ from Melbourne to Sydney. Is confident he’ll play after realising the crack he heard wasn’t his ankle joint, but his credit card snapping.

JUSTIN HODGES

Popular Queensland player who lists his likes as yelling obscenities at the less fortunate and not offering his seat to the elderly on public transport.

BRENT TATE

Was distraught following Origin I after getting spear tackled by Josh Reynolds. He said, ``I saw my whole life flash before my eyes’’. He added later that it wasn’t the tackle which distressed him, but the fact he’d come to realise what a boring, meaningless life he’s led.

Maroons players Cameron Smith and Johnathan Thurston. Pic by Luke Marsden. Source: News Corp Australia

JOHNATHAN THURSTON

Won a Logie award for his near perfect depiction of a speed hump during Origin I.

DALY CHERRY-EVANS

Nicknamed ``Cherry Ripe’’ because like the chocolate bar exciting, reinvigorating and smooth on the palate. After watching his Origin I performance, he should be renamed ``Flake’’, bland, rather boring and falls apart with very little pressure.

MATT SCOTT

Rough, tough North Queensland boy, likes nothing more than a good feed and a fight. He can’t fight but by the look of him he certainly knows how to feed.

CAMERON SMITH

``Pops’’ had a shocker in game I and spent the majority of the match limping around after losing his walking stick while changing his adult nappy at half-time.

NATE MYLES

Has earned the tag of ``Most hated Queenslander’’ and that’s just by his Maroons teammates. Likes to lead with his head, whether it be in games, at training or in the showers.

MATT GILLETT

Impressed many with his performance in Origin I ... unfortunately they were mainly family members or friends. Voted for himself as Queensland’s best on-ground.

Will he won’t he? Daly Cherry-Evans has been sporting a leg brace. Pic Peter Wallis Source: News Corp Australia

AIDAN GUERRA

Stood up after Origin I in the Maroons shed and declared what an honour it was to play alongside his teammates. It’s a shame that they didn’t feel the same way about him.

SAM THAIDAY

One of the game’s fairest players, unless he spots an opponent who is vulnerable, smaller than he is and has his back turned, and then he’ll take a ruthless cheap shot. Lists his likes as parking in handicapped spots and stealing from the blind.

JACOB LILLYMAN

A huge cheer went up when Lillyman’s name was read out for this game ... nearly all the cheering was from Blues supporters.

BEN TE’O

Laurie Daley was so impressed by the way Nine news reporter Danny Weidler stood up to Ben Te’o at Rabbitohs’ training last week. Daley has made Weidler 18th man for NSW and is seriously considering giving him a bench spot.

DAVE TAYLOR

Nicknamed the ``coal train’’, because he’s big, ugly, unreliable and breaks down when the going gets tough.

CHRIS MCQUEEN

Was close to the Blues’ best player in Origin I. Hopefully Mal gives him more time tonight so he can entertain us even further with his hilarious fumbling and bumbling. A real court jester.
The Nuraphones determine your personal hearing profile by listening to "otoacoustic emissions" -- sounds emitted by the inner ear when stimulated -- with a tiny microphone. These emissions reveal a lot of info about our hearing, enough that Nura believes can be deciphered into a sort of hearing "fingerprint." Nura takes this fingerprint and uses it to adjust the audio signal from the headphones. The end result is a bit like a personal EQ setting, without all the guesswork, designed to make music sound like the artist intended (rather than amplify arbitrary frequencies).

It's a tantalizing prospect: Corrective headphones that know the quirks and failings of your beleaguered ears. When we wrote about them last year, I'll admit I was skeptical. Pretty much every headphone pitch I have ever had (and that is many) has espoused the virtues of its revolutionary audio, be it custom drivers, magical sound engines, dynamic doo-dahs or cutting-edge EQ algorithms and so on. But none of that helps if you're not able to hear all of those sounds and frequencies equally.

Setting up the Nuraphones is a bit more involved than most other headphones (in that there's even a setup process at all), but it's simple. Using the companion app (iOS/Android), you are first guided to make sure you have the headphones placed on your head correctly. Nuraphones have an unusual configuration that we'll get into later, but this makes it important to have them on just right during setup.

Once you have them on properly, the app plays some audio that sounds a bit like a futuristic fax machine. This doesn't last long, but it soon moves onto the next stage of configuration, which takes a little longer. All in all, it takes about a minute. Once complete, you can save your profile and forget about it if you wish.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to know was how it sounded without the custom profile. Fortunately, this is easy to do in the app, as there's a switch to toggle between generic and custom audio. I'll be honest, the difference was incredible. In the generic setting, the audio sounded actually pretty bad. But once I put on the custom profile, the music sprang to life.

The first thing you notice is that the music is louder. This alone -- a simple bump in volume -- is often enough to "trick" the brain into thinking something sounds better. (There's an old DJ trick of casually lowering the volume on the previous DJ's last record so that your first one invokes the same feeling.) I could tell straight away though that there was more going on here. The music didn't just sound louder, it sounded more "complete." All the different frequencies in the music felt balanced and natural, and not "juiced."

After listening to a number of different tracks in different styles, I was actually somewhat excited. There's an intangible, magical feeling you get when listening to well-recorded audio on a high-end system. This isn't quite the feeling I had here, but it was similar. A sense that music feels alive -- clearer, almost.

The Nuraphones have a few other features that help the music along, too. While they look like over-ear headphones, each cup has a protruding "stalk" that goes inside your ear. Both the outer section and in-ear part provide passive noise canceling, so the effect is doubled. In a room with people talking right in front of me (and no music playing), I couldn't hear a thing.

The second trick that Nura added is tactile bass. Inside the on-ear part are transponders that respond to low frequencies (bass) with vibrations. It's not just an on/off vibrate, it's responsive to the frequency. Similar to how SubPac or Basslet work. The idea is that you "feel" the bass while the in-ear part focuses on the midrange and upward. It works very well (trust me), and I'd love to see this option in more headphones. If you're wondering, you can disable the "immersion" feature (as Nura calls it) or, conversely, go wild, and jack it right up to face-melting levels.

By now, you can't help but have noticed that these are no regular headphones. The design alone will tell you that. When I first saw the two in-ear drivers poking out of the cups, I didn't know what to make of them. Each stalk is spring-loaded, so it doesn't poke you in the side of the head (or push into your ear too hard). The spring is cleverly engineered so it retracts/extends slowly. The upshot is that sometimes you adjust the headphones and then feel the tip of the stalk slowly worm its way into your ear canal. You might also have noticed these stalks are... mildly "anatomical" looking. It's a little weird, but not unpleasant.

I did find myself having to readjust the Nuraphones a fair amount. Not constantly, but maybe two or three times an hour I'd find myself reaching for either side just to get it in a slightly sweeter spot. The earbud stalks aren't uncomfortable, but it's more about making sure you have them inserted properly, so it becomes a bit of an unconscious twitch to be sure you have them set right.

The Nuraphones' weird earcups aside, the product experience as a whole is thoughtfully designed. The rubber sections that rest on the side of your head can detect when you're wearing them. This is, in fact, how you turn the Nuraphones on -- simply put them on your head. There are two touch-sensitive buttons "hidden" in the circular caps outside the strap (where you adjust the fit). These can be configured in the app to do whatever you want.

There's likely a compromise here, as you'll have to choose between skipping tracks, audio profile toggling, answering calls ... whatever the two things you need the most. I often want to pause or adjust the volume on the go, but obviously want to be able to answer calls too, without reaching for my phone.There's no button to activate Bluetooth mode, either. Anytime the headphones aren't connected, they default back to pairing mode.

This minimalist approach feels smart when it works. But if you need to toggle Bluetooth (as I sometimes did) or want to reboot the headphones (as I sometimes did), it's a bit of a guessing game -- setting them down for a bit and putting them back on. Likewise, occasionally I'd lift one earcup off to talk with a friend, and the headphones would turn off. They'd reconnect again in a few seconds, but it's a minor break in the experience.

For those who prefer a wired connection, you have plenty of options here. The Nuraphones come with a USB A cable for charging, but there are USB C, micro-USB, Lightning and 3.5mm audio cables available too (for an additional cost).

Despite the minor quirks, the whole experience feels refined. Smart, even. And it'll likely only get better. A feature in beta is that the headphones can detect who's wearing them (if they have a profile set in the app). I tested this with my wife, and it works well -- telling me "Welcome back, James" every time I put them on. You also don't need the app once you've gone through the setup -- the settings are stored on the headset, so you can forget about it completely if you prefer.

If you're wondering, you can have up to three different profiles set in the app. It's also a good way to see how different your hearing is to someone else's. I tried my wife's profile, and it actually sounded pretty similar. Both mine and hers sounded pleasing, but mine did sound better (to me). I noticed higher frequencies were a little harsher in my partner's setting, and mids a little subdued.

On a more practical note, in wireless mode the Nuraphones last about 20 hours, which is decent. You can also use them with your PC without the 3.5mm cable. When you plug them in via USB, your computer should detect them as an audio output device, so you can easily charge them while listening at work. It's worth noting here that there's no LED, so without the app, it can be hard to know if they are fully charged.

For a debut product, the Nuraphones are impressive. The audio voodoo really does add a depth and a sense of clarity to music that almost makes you worry that you must otherwise be slogging through the world hearing the world only half as brightly as you could. The tactile bass adds another dimension (and means you need less volume), though your personal preference may vary with this one, and the slick design touches make this feel like a polished product.

But they also introduce a few minor compromises or design quirks that might take some getting used to. If you can live with relinquishing control over connectivity and power to the headphones, you've got little to worry about. At $399/£349, the Nuraphones aren't the cheapest on the market, but they deliver an experience (and musical excitement) that's unique.
The following is an interview that will appear in the book How to Prove God Does Not Exist by Trevor Treharne, to be released in September by Universal Publishers.

What is the fundamental conflict between science and religion? Is it one that will never be resolved?

The two have opposing views on what constitutes reality. Science finds no need to include any substance beside matter in order to describe our observations of the world. Religion holds that there is a world beyond matter. Religion claims it has a way of obtaining knowledge that is separate from the scientific method of observation and experiment. The religious believe that we have an inner faculty of some sort that enables us to learn about the world, the universe, and reality without such observation. It is hard to see the two ever resolving this conflict.

One of your more recent books, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, is certainly a timely one based on how common that argument is currently proving. What is your summary on what is wrong with the fine-tuning arguments?

As I have said before, the universe is not fine-tuned for us--we are fine-tuned to the universe. I claim that the statements made about fine-tuning are not accurate. When theists talk about something being fine-tuned to one part in ten or a hundred orders of magnitude, they are simply incorrect. If you look more closely at the physics and cosmology, you will see that there is plenty of room to vary their various parameters and still maintain some kind of life. Our form of life is certainly sensitive to the parameters and if the parameters of the universe were different, our form of life wouldn't exist; I agree with that. But our form of life is not the only form of life one can imagine.

Two rather traditional arguments still persevere amongst theists today, firstly that "something" could not come from "nothing"...

When tackling this question in the past, I was often forced into a philosophical discussion on defining what one means by nothing. Once you define it, give it some property, then it becomes "something." So, I don't really know how you define "nothing," when you start talking philosophically. The way I handle that question now, which is consistent with all existing knowledge of cosmology and physics, is that the universe is eternal. It didn't come from nothing, or something for that matter, because it always existed and it always will. Our universe began with the big bang. I don't dispute that, but it could have come from an earlier universe and there are proposals available in literature--written by reputable scientists, published in reputable journals, and fully worked out mathematically--that provide scenarios for how our universe could have come from an earlier universe. They don't prove it really happened that way. However, they serve to refute any claim that our universe had to be supernaturally created ex nihilo.

And secondly, how can "order" come from "disorder"...

That's an easy one since you don't have to rely on complex biological arguments. You can go back to simple physics and look at something like water. Water appears in three phases: gas, liquid, and solid. If you are out in space or in a polar region, then the natural state of water is solid--ice. But that occurs only after water vapor, which is a gas, is condensed into liquid water, which is then frozen into ice. That original vapor has little structure and is about as simple as it could be. Then when it becomes a liquid, it develops some structure but can still flow and change shape. Finally, when it becomes solid ice it has considerable structure--crystal layers and so forth. So, there is this tendency in nature, in physics, for physical substances to go from simplicity to complexity. That is actually the natural trend of physical processes.

Much is made of Christian apologist William Lane Craig today, yet your debate in Hawaii seemed to set him straight on several of his arguments, in particular his first cause argument. What do you make of his challenge?

I've debated William Lane Craig a couple of times. I've written about his views, he has reviewed one of my books, and I have also spoken to him personally a number of times. So, we have had a fair amount of interaction. He is basically a very evangelically minded Christian theologian and philosopher. He uses a lot of cosmological arguments, but they don't hold water. They are already ruled out by existing science.

"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings" - what reaction has that view garnered since you suggested it? What made you think of it?

I sent it into Richard Dawkins when he was trying to come up with bus slogans. He was delighted with it and said it was the best one he had received. Other people have picked up on it since, so it has worked out pretty well. It is one of those sound bites which people have made use of.

What do you define as what is new about the New Atheism?

When my book The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason came out in 2009, I took a lot of flak from old-time atheists who resented that all the work they had done promoting atheism, secularism, and humanism was not fully recognized. But there was a difference. When, starting in 2006, a whole series of bestsellers appeared by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and myself, these all got a lot of attention. In The New Atheism, I was focusing on those works and asking what it was about these bestsellers that were different from the old atheism, which I did acknowledge.

The difference was that we are far more uncompromising towards religion. The term "accommodationists" is used for the people who were saying that they wanted to promote atheism, humanism, and science--but at the same time, we should respect the opinions of believers and, in particular, we shouldn't get into fights with them since we need their support for, say, the teaching of evolution in public schools. Moderate Christians tell us that they believe in evolution. But surveys show they really don't, since they claim evolution is God-guided, which isn't Darwinian evolution. In Darwinian evolution, humanity is an accident and that is unacceptable to Christians. They sure as heck don't want that taught in school.

Scientists are very reluctant to criticize religion. They are afraid of a backlash that might affect scientific funding, which for a research scientist is critical. The new atheists understand that it makes sense to have as many friends as possible, but ultimately it came down to the fact that religious belief is based on magical thinking and ideas that cannot be supported empirically. This serves to retard the progress of science. There is a lot of antiscience built into the religious enterprise and we felt we had to take a strong stance and argue that when someone says something contrary to our best existing knowledge, whether religious or not, then we should not hesitate to respond to it. Not that we have to call them fools or idiots, but we have to present an intellectual arguments that explain the flaws in their reasoning. We needed to come out and say something and not pussyfoot around it.
U.S. Marines from Delta Company, Infantry Training Battalion, School of Infantry-East navigate their way through the obstacle course aboard, Camp Geiger, N.C., Oct. 04, 2013. Delta Company is the first company at center with female students. (Photo: Warrant Officer Paul Mancuso, U.S. Marines) Story Highlights Thirteen women taking the latest infantry course

Services must open combat roles to women who qualify

One test: Carrying an 85-lb. pack for 10 kilometers or more

CAMP GEIGER, N.C. — Mist clings to the ground and the sun won't make an appearance for another three hours. The 263 Marines of Delta Company, Infantry Training Battalion, shoulder their bulky packs and set off.

The air is still cool, but 85-pound packs are heavy. Soon the Marines are sweating through their camouflage uniforms and noncommissioned officers are moving between the two files of Marines, shouting encouragement and encouraging stragglers to keep up.

The Marine Corps has been training infantrymen here since 1953. This year is different. Among Delta Company's 263 Marines are 13 women who have volunteered to participate in a closely watched experiment into the feasibility of integrating females into the infantry. The infantry is among a handful of military jobs that remain male-only preserves.

The women, who are shouldering the same packs and wearing the same combat uniforms as the men, are barely distinguishable from the men as they trudge in the darkness.

"We treat everyone the same," said Staff Sgt. Billy Shinault, a Marine instructor who chatted while working a bolt of chewing tobacco after the hike. "We would be doing them a disservice to lower the standards."

Shortly before he left office earlier this year, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the military to lift the ban on women serving in ground combat specialties, such as the infantry and special operations. He left it up to the services to figure out how to put the order into effect. The services have until January 2016 to do so. Exceptions would require approval of the defense secretary.

Women have been serving in plenty of jobs that have exposed them to combat over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. But ground combat jobs have remained off-limits. These jobs require physical strength, feats of endurance and spending a long time in primitive field conditions.

The infantry is the leading edge of the ground combat specialties. Its mission is as basic as it is elemental. Infantrymen carry what they need on their backs and kill the enemy at close quarters.

"Every single one of them is an alpha male," said Sgt. Kenneth Hayden, a tactics instructor here.

Fighting the old-fashioned way

For all the talk of technology and a "push-button wars," the combat of the past decade has proven that there remains a need for foot soldiers going to war with little more than rifles and bayonets. A Marine earned a Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor, in Afghanistan after he killed a Taliban with the stock of his own weapon.

At the end of the 10-kilometer hike the men and women line up to run through an obstacle course that requires scrambling over a wall, vaulting logs and climbing a rope.

A woman Marine in infantry training at Camp Geiger, N.C. (Photo: Warrant Officer Paul Mancuso, U.S. Marines)

Shinault explains to the Marines that the march is only a means to an end. After the hike is complete the Marines have to have enough energy to take the fight to the enemy.

The Marine Corps hope to have about 300 women go through enlisted infantry training by the end of a year, providing enough data to assist in making decisions about the way ahead.

Officers say it is too early to draw any conclusions. But a similar experiment conducted at infantry officer training at Quantico, Va., suggests that women struggle with the physical part of the training. The 13-week officer course at Quantico is significantly more demanding. About 25% of men do not complete the course and end up in other jobs.

So far, 10 women have started the officers course under a similar experiment, but none have completed it, according to the Marine Corps.

Here at the enlisted training Shinault acknowledged the women have more trouble with the physical requirements, but said the women match the men evenly in marksmanship, a key part of infantry training.

The two-month enlisted course here at the School of Infantry-East is not as demanding as the officer course and it is more likely at least some women will complete it. The attrition rate for men here has been about 1%.

Even if they do pass this initial group will not get to join the infantry, at least not immediately, since it remains closed to women.

On the 10-kilometer hike two men and two women dropped out. The hikes here at the infantry school get longer, culminating with a 20-kilometer walk. Officers have promised that standards, honed after more than a decade at war, will not be changed to accommodate women.

"There certainly is no pressure to lower those standards," said Col. Jeffrey Conner, commander of the School of Infantry-East.

Army standards

The Army is also undertaking studies as it works to open ground combat positions to women. Recently they validated the physical requirement of all their specialties in an effort to create tests that will screen applicants for those occupations.

Among the hardest physical task was in the artillery field, where a three-person crew has to load 90 rounds of 155mm howitzer shells, which weigh about 95 pounds each, into an ammunition truck within 45 minutes.

"Our guidance is not to lower the standards," said David Brinkley, an official at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, which is overseeing the analysis of job requirements.

In order to get into the course here at Camp Geiger women had to pass the same physical test that men take, which includes a requirement to complete three pull-ups. The Marines asked for volunteers from a recent class of 114 females graduating from boot camp at Parris Island. Of that class, 49 met the physical standards to join.

Of the 49, only 19 volunteered initially. Four dropped before training started and another two did not pass initial physical screening. One of them has elected to continue in a later class. Another was recently injured, leaving 12 in the class currently.

Officials would not allow journalists to speak to any of the students in order to avoid interfering with the training.

The Marines have taken pains to ensure that women don't feel alienated by the culture of the infantry, which has been an all-male enclave for years. The Marines, an infantry-oriented service with a gung-ho culture, have the fewest number of women of any service — less than 7% of the total force.

Instructors have been told not to change the standards, but minor adjustments have been made at the training.

Women in the Infantry Training Battalion are housed in separate barracks, but share the same conditions as the men when they go to the field. Male instructors are instructed to announce themselves before entering the female barracks and same for women instructors entering male barracks.

The training battalion has added several women instructors who teach and also serve as mentors.

Staff Sgt. Juanita Towns, an instructor here, said the women have the same concerns as the men: finishing the course.

"We're all going to be Marines at the end of the day," Towns said.

The instructors were also asked to tone down some of their profanity. "Some of the terminology they used in the past may not be as effective with women," Conner said.

Follow @jimmichaels on Twitter.

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With 2015 heading towards being the hottest year on record, India and China will negotiate for a treaty to put a check on the rising temperature.

The two countries will formally move a proposal at the Bonn climate talks starting from Monday, proposing that rich nations should have pre-2020 emission reduction targets. India will also propose that rich nations give US$ 100 billion of public finance every year to fight climate change.

An 89-page draft was agreed on in Geneva earlier this year for the Paris climate summit and at Bonn, negotiators of 196 countries will try to bridge differences on several contentious issues, including finance, mitigation targets, adaptation and technology transfer.

An Indian climate negotiator said the task at Bonn would not be easy as most of the countries were not willing to budge from their stand. He added that as the Prime Minister had made it clear, India would be insisting on pre-2020 emission targets as part of the deal.

“Having post-2020 emission reduction targets has no meaning unless rich countries have emission reduction targets for 2020. Many countries have opted out of the Kyoto Protocol making it a non-effective instrument,” the official said.

The proposal is backed by China and a few other developing countries but may be resisted by the United States which has not given any emission reduction target for 2020.

The negotiations come at the time when several tropical countries, including India and Africa, are battling an intense heat wave.

The Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation that monitors global weather conditions had predicted that 2015 could be the warmest year on record. The prediction is based on the hot weather conditions in various regions of the world in the first five months of 2015.

Climate scientists believe that the weather condition this year should be a warning to countries that they need to act now to fight climate change.

First Published: May 31, 2015 23:58 IST
Chancellor Carol Christ announced a new commission on Thursday to assess ways to better handle campus free speech situations like the canceled “Free Speech Week.”

In a campuswide email, Christ said the intent of the new task force is to address the controversy that free speech issues have caused on campus, as well as to examine the “complex set of issues and propose solutions.” The commission will be comprised of students, staff, faculty and administrators.

The commission is still in the very early stages of development, according to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof, and more information will be released in the coming weeks. Mogulof added that the chancellor is still finalizing the commission’s objectives and exact membership makeup.

“The team must be willing to balance the law and the needs of our students,” ASUC Senator Juniperangelica Cordova-Goff said in a text message. “Free speech is important, but controversial speakers have proven their intention to cause unnecessary chaos. We cannot let this continue, as (Free Speech Week) directly blocked the education of so many students who felt unsafe to attend class.”

Cal Berkeley Democrats President Caiden Nason said in a text message that he feels the formation of a task force will help the campus to receive input but that the results of such efforts will always remain the same. Nason added that the campus has begun to attract outsiders, some of whom have engaged in violence in past protests.

According to Mike Wright, editor-in-chief of conservative student publication the Berkeley Patriot and one of the Free Speech Week organizers, he has no knowledge of attempts made by the campus to reach the publication regarding the commission.

Although Cordova-Goff is currently unaware of how involved the ASUC will be, she said she believes that student representation must play an integral role in the commission.

“If we desire a safe campus, we must act as a community, challenging systems and laws that allow for state-sanctioned violence and parallel speech,” Cordova-Goff said in a text message.

Contact Mark Henry Salupen at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @salupen_markdc.
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His whole-hearted approach made Jonjo Shelvey a popular figure during his time at Liverpool.

And his reputation among fans was further enhanced when he gave Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson a verbal volley in front of the Main Stand at Anfield in September 2012.

Shelvey was leaving the pitch after being sent off by referee Mark Halsey for a two-footed lunge on Jonny Evans and he believed Ferguson had contributed to his dismissal by his reaction to the incident. At the time he accused Ferguson of ‘grassing’ him up.

Now Shelvey has revealed further details about the clash which endeared him, not just to the Anfield faithful, but apparently to the United boss himself.

He now accepts he was wrong to confront Ferguson – but says the Scot was impressed with his passion.

Shelvey said: “I was a bit immature then and a bit silly. I pulled him aside afterwards and apologised to him and he was spot on with me.

“He said, ‘no I like it. It shows you’ve got a bit of balls about you’.

“I got a few high fives around town for the next few months, but it was silly from me on the professional stage. You don’t do something like that.

“I was young and I was starting for Liverpool against Manchester United, games don’t come much bigger.

“I was immature, the occasion got the better of me. It was part of growing up and you learn from those sort of things.”

There was no happy ending to the 39th minute dismissal despite Steven Gerrard giving the Reds the lead. Second half goals from Rafael and a Robin van Persie penalty won it for United.

Shelvey played 69 times in three years at Anfield, departing in the summer of 2013 to Swansea, where his form has earned him another England call-up.
Cyclist maimed in random shooting gets $15K in donations Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Alonso Solis gets donation check at the Mexican Consulate. June 29, 2017 (KXAN Photo/Alyssa Goard) [ + - ] Video

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- The cyclist attacked on East Riverside Drive by a random passenger shooting out of a car received a large donation Thursday from Austin community members. These community members -- most of whom had never met 42-year-old Alonso Solis before -- came together to offer him care and financial support as he faces medical costs that seemed insurmountable.

On June 7, Solis was biking back from the store late at night when he was hit in the back, neck, head and face with pellets from a shotgun blast. Police arrested 19-year-old Merrick Isaacks for shooting Solis. A police affidavit showed that Isaacks was looking to "blow off steam" and held an acquaintance who was driving a car at gunpoint.

Isaacks then fired out of his car window around Austin. He is still being held in the Travis County Jail on two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. His bond totals $250,000.

After that incident, Solis was unconscious for nearly two days, before waking up in the hospital.

When KXAN visited with Solis at his home weeks ago, he could barely sleep or eat because of his pain. He has to take several months off from his job laying carpet because he can no longer lift his arm due to his injuries. He does not speak English or have many friends in Central Texas; his wife and four children live in Mexico. Solis had no insurance and no idea how he would pay for all of the medications.

That is, until people from all around Austin stepped forward to help him.

Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Alonso Solis of Austin was hit in the face while cycling by a shotgun blast from a random shooter. KXAN Photo/ Frank Martinez.

Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Alonso Solis of Austin was hit in the face while cycling by a shotgun blast from a random shooter. KXAN Photo/ Frank Martinez.

After KXAN's initial story, our station was overwhelmed with requests from people who'd watched our report and wanted to help. Rich and Anne Barger of Leander were two of those people. The two immediately set up a GoFundMe page for Solis.

"As we were just reading that story my wife and I said, 'Hey we have to do something, no one has set up a GoFundMe,'" Rich Barger explained.

Barger got in touch with others who'd seen the KXAN story, including Sasha Knight of Austin. "Once I saw Alonso's story that evening and of course being so heartbroken about it, I reached out to KXAN immediately afterward," Knight said. "That's when I started thinking OK this is something we need to start."

Knight's friend, an immigration attorney, began communicating with Solis about his limitations and medical needs. Knight and the Bargers decided to set their fundraising goal to $25,000. As of Thursday morning, the page has raised nearly $15,000 with almost 400 people donating.

To keep the fundraising transparent, the people behind this GoFundMe have been working with the Mexican Consulate in Austin to coordinate these donations. The Consulate helped Solis to set up a bank account where his donations will be sent to, Knight explained that the first donation of $13,450 was transferred to him Wednesday.

Solis was notified of this donation at a formal presentation at the Mexican Consulate on Thursday.

"I'd like to thank the people here for helping out very much, these people, even without knowing me, they've come forward to help out and again I want to thank you for what you have done," Alonso said with the help of a translator.

"We get together to recognize the compassion, the charity, the good character of people who helped one of our nationals, Alonso Solis," said Consul General Carlos González Gutiérrez. "People who, in the face of tragedy, have shown solidarity to another human being regardless of ethnic or national origin."

"Alonso didn't have his family here to support him and be with him," Knight said. "This can show Alonso how many people care about him and hope for a speedy recovery and some sense of healing."

"Hopefully this outpouring of love overshadows what was this really negative thing," Rich Barger said. "What happens if we all start to do these things a little more often? Maybe that's altruistic, but that's kind of the heart behind everything we're doing here."

Barger explained that to meet Solis' medical needs, they are looking to raise a total of $25,000. You can find the GoFundMe page here.

The Consulate tells KXAN that Solis will need to have another surgery next Tuesday to remove more of the pellets in his head.

Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Alonso Solis meets the family who organized the fundraiser for his medical expenses. KXAN Photo/ Alyssa Goard.
Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) in a new interview criticized former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE for writing her memoir so soon after the 2016 election.

“What’s the f---ing point? Keep the fight up?” McCain asked in an interview with Esquire.

“History will judge that campaign, and it’s always a period of time before they do. You’ve got to move on. This is Hillary’s problem right now: She doesn’t have anything to do.”

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Clinton published her memoir, “What Happened,” in September, less than a year after her surprise loss to President Trump.

The former secretary of State has since taken to the speaking circuit to promote the book and reflect on the 2016 presidential race.

McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to then-Sen. Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaChicago's next mayor will be a black woman Obama portraits brought more than 1 million visitors to National Portrait Gallery in first year With low birth rate, America needs future migrants MORE (D-Ill.), also told Esquire that the most difficult thing to do after losing an election “is to just shut up.”

“One of the almost irresistible impulses you have when you lose is to somehow justify why you lost and how you were mistreated: ‘I did the right thing! I did!’” McCain said.

“The hardest thing to do is to just shut up.”
Prior research suggests that liberals are more complex than conservatives. However, it may be that liberals are not more complex in general , but rather only more complex on certain topic domains (while conservatives are more complex in other domains). Four studies (comprised of over 2,500 participants) evaluated this idea. Study 1 involves the domain specificity of a self‐report questionnaire related to complexity (dogmatism). By making only small adjustments to a popularly used dogmatism scale, results show that liberals can be significantly more dogmatic if a liberal domain is made salient. Studies 2–4 involve the domain specificity of integrative complexity. A large number of open‐ended responses from college students (Studies 2 and 3) and candidates in the 2004 Presidential election (Study 4) across an array of topic domains reveals little or no main effect of political ideology on integrative complexity, but rather topic domain by ideology interactions. Liberals are higher in complexity on some topics, but conservatives are higher on others. Overall, this large dataset calls into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals in a domain‐general way.

It has practically achieved the state of an axiom in our field that liberals are more complex thinkers than conservatives. This is not without reason. Meta‐analyses—covering a vast array of evidence related to dogmatism, uncertainty avoidance, openness to experience, need for closure, and integrative complexity—suggest that liberals are indeed more complex than conservatives (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Van Hiel, Onraet, & De Pauw, 2010; see also Joseph, Graham, & Haidt, 2009). Nonetheless, we believe that the judgment that conservatives are broadly simple‐minded may be premature. In the present article, we provide an alternative framework for understanding existing differences in complexity between conservatives and liberals and some initial evidence for that framework. Our approach focuses on considering more fully the topic domain that the complexity measurement is relevant to.

The Domain Specificity of Complex Thinking Complex thinking is domain‐specific.1 Someone can think highly complexly about the Iraq War, and yet still think very simply about broccoli. A lot of evidence using many different operations of complex thinking underscores this point (Conway, Schaller, Tweed, & Hallett, 2001; Houck, Conway, & Gornick, 2014; Judd & Lusk, 1984; Liht, Conway, Savage, White, O'Neill, 2011; Pancer et al., 1995; Sidanius, 1984; Suedfeld, 2000; Tetlock, Peterson, & Lerner, 1996). For example, the complexity of thinking can be affected by the importance of the content domain (Conway et al., 2008; Suedfeld, 2000) by the experience people have with the domain (Conway et al., 2008; Dasen, 1975; Suedfeld, 2000), by the heritability of the domain (Conway, Dodds, Hands Towgood, McClure, & Olson, 2011), or by the value conflict implied by the domain (e.g., Suedfeld, Bluck, Loewen, & Elkins, 1994; Tetlock, 1986). This fact of domain specificity has implications for our understanding of group differences in complexity. For example, while there is a tendency to think about cultural differences in complexity in monolithic terms, evidence (see Conway et al., 2001, for a summary) suggests that the culture‐complexity link is in fact domain‐specific. In methodological terms, the relationship between cultural groups and complexity is probably better described as a culture by topic‐domain interaction than it is by a main effect of culture (Conway et al., 2001). Ideology X Domain Interactions on Complex Thinking A primary assumption of the present article is that this same culture × domain interaction applies to political culture (defined operationally by political ideology). This idea is not new. Over 25 years ago, Tetlock (1986) pointed out that, because conservatives and liberals differ in which values are in conflict, his Value Pluralism Model predicts ideology × domain interactions. Of course, his model also predicts that integrative complexity most typically breaks left of center; thus, it expects both a main effect (liberals more complex) and interactions with issue domain. Yet it is worth noting that, while the main effect prediction has been widely discussed, the expected interaction has not.2 This is not from an initial lack of encouragement of its importance. In 1986, Tetlock (p. 825) encouraged researchers to study this topic: “Systematic study of such Ideology X Issue interactions should be a major goal of future laboratory and archival studies on this topic.” Tetlock's admonition has been largely ignored. Indeed, in the intervening 25‐plus years, very little research has been done to further this “major goal.” The research that has been done relevant to issue domain and complexity (e.g., Lavallee & Suedfeld, 1997; Suedfeld, 2000; Suedfeld et al., 1994; Suedfeld, Steel, & Schmidt, 1994) has generally not directly tested ideology X issue interactions, and, to date, no research program has systematically explored these interactions. Further, almost none of the research cited in meta‐analyses on conservative simplicity (Jost et al., 2003; Van Hiel et al., 2010) has directly accounted for such interactions.

Why This Matters: The Present Research If we assume that (1) ideology × domain interactions are prevalent in reality, and (2) very few formal and systematic tests have been made of such interactions, then it is possible that existing research to date might misrepresent the actual main effect between liberals and conservatives on complexity—it may be that the small number of tested domains are on average ones for which liberals score higher on complexity and that the counterbalancing domains have yet to be tested. As such, before fully deciding on the question of whether or not liberals and conservatives differ in complexity in a domain‐general way, it is worth first more fully exploring ideology × topic domain interactions on a wide range of topics (see also Duarte et al., in press). To that end, the present research attempts to show how two of the major complexity‐relevant areas most typically used as evidence of conservative simplicity (Jost et al., 2003; Van Hiel et al., 2010) might be accounted for by ideology × domain interactions. Study 1 focuses on one self‐report measure relevant to complexity; studies 2–4 focus on complexity scoring of open‐ended statements.

Study 1: Dogmatism is Domain‐Specific As Jost et al. (2003) point out, dogmatism has historically been conceptualized as closed‐mindedness that is indicative of rigid, black‐and‐white thinking; for example, Rokeach described dogmatism in terms of “closed belief systems” (1960, p. 67). Such closed belief systems are a hallmark of cognitive simplicity (see, e.g., Conway et al., 2008; Tetlock, 1986), and thus it is not surprising that other researchers have noted the kinship between dogmatism and cognitive simplicity (e.g., Suedfeld, Tetlock, & Streufert, 1992). For our purposes, this clear conceptual overlap suggests that it is reasonable for us to view dogmatism as a proxy for closed‐minded, simplistic thinking. Indeed, this overlap is the impetus for dogmatism being used as one of the major arguments in the case for conservative simplicity (Jost et al., 2003). Specifically, a large body of research, mostly using versions of the Rokeach (1960) scale we use here, reveals a positive relationship between dogmatism and political conservatism (see Jost et al., 2003). The use of dogmatism as an argument in the case for conservative simplicity is partially dependent upon its conceptualization as being free of specific topic content (henceforth, domain general; see Jost et al., 2003, for a discussion). And many of its items do, on the surface, appear to be domain general. On the other hand, some research suggests that students who rate the ideological content of the Rokeach items rate them as leaning towards conservative content (see Simons, 1968), and other academics have noted (e.g., Van Hiel et al., 2010) that not all the items on the scale are free of specific content. One of the items explicitly mentions religion, another item states an explicit idea about humans being helpless and frail, and a third item states that focusing on one's happiness is contemptuous. These items explicitly identify a domain of interest and in some cases state an opinion on that domain. Thus, it is possible that the standard dogmatism scale is not really a pure measurement of domain‐general dogmatism, but rather a measurement of dogmatism that captures domains on which conservatives are more dogmatic. In the present study, we directly test the degree that the specific content of the dogmatism questionnaire matters by altering the items to reflect one of two content domains (environmental issues versus religion).

Study 1 Method Participants Four‐hundred and seventy‐five undergraduates at the University of Montana participated for course credit in large‐group sessions. Questionnaire Packets Participants completed a questionnaire packet which contained a dogmatism scale,3 a political ideology scale, and some demographic information. Dogmatism Eighteen items from Rokeach's (1960) standard dogmatism scale were used in the present study. Participants were randomly assigned one of three versions of the dogmatism scale. Some participants received the standard version of the scale as typically used in previous research on ideology (obtained from Ray, 1970). Other participants received one of two domain‐specific versions of the scale. In one condition, participants received a scale that was designed to measure their dogmatism about religion, and in another condition, participants received a scale designed to measure their dogmatism about environmental issues. These domain‐specific dogmatism scales were nearly identical to the standard scale and to each other, but they differed only in intentionally injecting content domains into the items (please see the online supplemental information for the entire scales). An example will help illustrate. A standard item on the dogmatism scale is “A group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long.” For the religious dogmatism scale, this item was adapted (italics and bold added for emphasis here) to say “A religious group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long.” The parallel environmental dogmatism questionnaire item read “An environmental group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long.” In this way, the two alternate domain‐specific dogmatism questionnaires kept almost all of the language from the original items but interjected a content domain (either religion or environmental issues) into the majority of those items. Inter‐item reliability for the scale was satisfactory in all three conditions (standard‐scale alpha = .74; environmental‐scale alpha = .74; religious‐scale alpha = .88). Four items on each domain‐specific scale were kept in their original (domain‐general) wording. These originally worded items appeared last in the list of 18 items. Political Ideology Participants also completed several items relevant to their political ideology. We focus on two of those here: standard bipolar items anchored by liberal/conservative and Democratic/Republican that have been used in prior research (e.g., Conway et al., 2012) and are similar to the vast majority of standard ideology measures (see e.g., Jost et al., 2003; Federico, Deason, & Fisher, 2012). These two items were highly correlated (r = .77) and thus averaged into a single measure of political conservatism (standardized alpha = .86).

Study 1 Results Correlations within Condition We first looked at correlations within each condition. Replicating prior research, the standard dogmatism scale was positively correlated with political conservatism (r[111] = .27, p < .01). Does this finding represent a domain‐general or domain‐specific phenomenon? Our next two findings suggest it is domain‐specific. First, the religion dogmatism scale—a scale specifically designed on a domain on which conservatives are more likely to be dogmatic—showed virtually the same effect as the supposedly domain‐general scale (r[184] = .33, p < .001). More importantly, are conservatives unilaterally more dogmatic across all domains? The answer is no: They were significantly less dogmatic on environmental domains, as illustrated by the negative correlation between conservatism and environmental dogmatism (r[180] = –.26, p < .001).4 Absolute Values for Conservatives and Liberals Evaluating only correlations between scales, it is conceptually possible that the negative correlation between conservatism and the liberal‐focused scale could be driven more by a rejection of those items by conservatives than by an acceptance by liberals. To look at the plausibility of this alternative, we divided participants up categorically into conservatives (those who scored above 5 on the conservatism scale) and liberals (those who scored below 5 on the scale). This analysis thus drops those directly at the midpoint of the scale. We then ran parallel 2 (Type of Scale) × 2 (Ideology) ANOVAs for dogmatism (for this analysis, we dropped the standard questionnaire). This analysis showed a significant Type of Scale × Ideology interaction (F > 29.9, p < .001). More pertinent to our purpose are the absolute values for each scale, broken down by ideology. These are presented in Table 1. As can be seen there, the highest score for simplicity was for liberals (the highest cell was liberals on environmental dogmatism). These additional analyses with absolute values make any interpretation of Study 1 results based on a lack of liberal simplicity implausible.5 Table 1. Studies 1 through 4: Liberals and Conservatives by Topic Domain and Complexity Measurement Liberal Complex Domains Conservative Complex Domains Liberals Conservatives Liberals Conservatives Study 1 (Student) Dogmatism 2.55 3.21 3.61 3.07 Study 2 (Student) Complexity 1.90 1.75 1.54 1.76 Study 3 (Student) Complexity 2.02 1.67 1.54 1.79 Study 4 (Bush/Kerry) Complexity 1.81 1.34 1.39 1.93

Study 1 Discussion These results suggest that the relationship between ideology and dogmatism is domain‐specific. Conservatives are indeed more dogmatic on the religious domain; but liberals are more dogmatic on the environmental domain. It might be easy to dismiss these effects as reflecting the content preferences of liberals and conservatives (and thus as not reflecting anything about dogmatism per se). There are two reasons why we think such a dismissal would be premature. First, the dismissal is a double‐edged sword. If the question is “do prior results suggest that conservatives are more dogmatic?” then simply dismissing our results as only having to do with content raises the possibility that all dogmatism scales are picking up on content primarily (and not dogmatism per se). Second, more importantly, a quick dismissal of these findings does not capture the subjective nature of the items themselves. For example, consider that for dogmatism, liberals scored higher on the following questions: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are for the truth that the planet is warming and those who are against that obvious truth. When it comes to stopping global warming, it is better to be a dead hero than a live coward. A person who thinks primarily of his/her own happiness, and in so doing disregards the health of the environment (for example, trees and other animals), is beneath contempt. The subjective tone of those statements is not merely “I am an environmentalist” but rather “all people who disagree with me are fools.” In these and other items from the scale, liberals are consenting to (1) categorizing the world into only two kinds of people, those that are right and those that are wrong, (2) a scorn of those unwilling to die for a cause, (3) a belief that persons who disagree with them are “beneath contempt,” (4) a belief that the only method for understanding the truth is to rely on experts, (5) an expression that true living involves believing in their cause, and (6) an appeal to the temporal urgency of the cause. Those are not just statements about having an environmental position: They are explicitly and overwhelmingly dogmatic statements. And liberals are more likely to agree with such sentiments—for an environmental domain.

Studies 2–4: Integrative Complexity is Domain‐Specific The dogmatism measurement used in Study 1 has been widely used to make a case for conservative simplicity, but it is not without its problems (see Van Hiel et al., 2010). It is dependent on participants’ own self‐perceptions and willingness to express them; it also contains explicit ideological content. Although, as we have discussed, that “ideological content” argument cuts both ways and does not undermine our present purpose, it would nonetheless be advisable to also use a more open‐ended measure that ameliorated some of these problems. With that in mind, we turn next to one such open‐ended measurement of the complexity of thinking: Integrative complexity (e.g., Suedfeld & Streufert, 1966; Suedfeld & Tetlock, 1976; see also Harvey, Hunt, & Schroder, 1961; Schroder, Driver, & Streufert, 1965). Integrative Complexity Integrative complexity, which formed an important part of Jost et al.'s (2003) case for conservative simplicity, is used to assess the complexity of spoken or written communications according to their basic structure (see, e.g., Suedfeld & Bluck, 1988; Suedfeld, Bluck, & Ballard, 1994; Suedfeld & Leighton, 2002; Suedfeld & Rank, 1976). Passages are coded and assigned a score between 1 and 7 based on the level of differentiation (i.e., the extent to which differing dimensions are used to describe a given topic) and, if more than one dimension is present, integration (i.e., the joining of these multiple dimensions; see Baker‐Brown et al., 1992, for integrative complexity scoring details). In assigning complexity scores, the particular position argued for by the speaker/writer is irrelevant; the score is based on the structure of the passage. As such, the construct is able to capture the underlying mechanisms of the complexity of thought on a broad level that is conceptually independent of the content domain of the passage. It is in part for this domain‐general breadth that integrative complexity is the most widely used scoring system for measuring the complexity of open‐ended statements (e.g., Conway, Conway, Gornick, & Houck, 2014; Conway & Gornick, 2011; Conway et al., 2012; Conway, Suedfeld, & Clements, 2003; Conway, Suedfeld, & Tetlock, 2001; Houck et al., 2014; Suedfeld & Bluck, 1988; Suedfeld et al., 1994; Suedfeld & Leighton, 2002; Suedfeld & Tetlock, 1976; Tetlock, 1984, 1986). Domain Specificity Although it is intended to be a “content free” measurement, this does not mean that participants’ complexity is uninfluenced by the domain of interest. Indeed, although content domain is not often a subject of inquiry in integrative complexity research, topic domain has been shown to influence integrative complexity in some lines of research (Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011; Conway et al., 2012; Pancer et al., 1995; Suedfeld, 2000; Suedfeld, Bluck et al., 1994; Suedfeld & Wallbaum, 1992; Tetlock, 1986; Tetlock, Peterson, & Lerner, 1996). In all this work, the specific content domain that people wrote or talked about mattered for the ultimate complexity they produced. Thus, it is worth considering more fully the possibility of ideology × topic domain interactions on integrative complexity. Our Focus on Dialectical Forms of Integrative Complexity Recently, a new scoring system for parsing integrative complexity scores into different types of complexity has been scientifically validated (Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011). In particular, some integrative complexity scores are driven by dialectical complexity, which is complexity achieved by giving legitimacy to two opposing viewpoints. On the other hand, some integrative complexity scores are driven by elaborative complexity, which is complexity achieved by defending or expanding upon one particular viewpoint (see Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011). All materials in studies 2–4 in the present article were scored for integrative complexity and the two subtypes outlined in Conway et al. (2008). However, we here opt to present results in those studies on dialectical forms of complexity. Our reasons for doing so are three‐fold. First, almost all of the prior work on integrative complexity cited in meta‐analyses by Jost et al. (2003) and Van Hiel et al. (2010) comes from Tetlock. When scoring integrative complexity, Tetlock has only coded dialectical forms of complexity in his work (see Conway et al., 2008, for a review). As a result, the best direct comparison with prior work showing conservative simplicity is dialectical complexity. Second, this focus makes conceptual sense, because dialectical forms of complexity most clearly map on to the “rigidity of the right” idea. It is in their inability or unwillingness to think about things from different points of view that conservatives are supposed to be lacking: And dialectical complexity best captures that aspect (see Conway et al., 2008). Third, our results are inferentially stronger and more consistent using dialectical forms of complexity, and thus we acknowledge that part of our decision to present this set of results is ad hoc. However, we also performed all analyses using the larger integrative complexity construct, and the overall pattern of results in most cases is similar (see footnote 12 for details). It is indeed noteworthy that the key moderating effects reported here are strongest for the form of complexity (dialectical complexity) on which conservatives are supposed to be weakest. Using dialectical complexity below in Studies 2–4, we show that, contrary to the conservative simplicity hypothesis, no main effect emerges of ideology on complexity. Instead, these results are better characterized by an ideology × topic domain interaction.

Study 2 Method Participants Over a three‐year span, 1,529 undergraduate participants at the University of Montana completed questionnaire packets, usually in large sessions exceeding 100 persons.6 Complexity Question Stems Participants completed one of 13 possible question stems that mostly dealt with political and social issues (example topic stems include “death penalty,” “abortion,” and “organized religion”). These questions were later coded by trained scorers for integrative complexity. Most of these items were chosen because they had been previously assessed for their heritability in one of two prior, well‐known heritability research programs (Eaves, Eysenck, & Martin, 1989; Martin, Eaves, Heath, Jardine, Feingold, & Eysenck, 1986; see Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011 for descriptions of topic selection). Complexity Coding Study 2 was scored by coders who had taken an intensive training course and achieved a .85 reliability score with an expert integrative complexity coder and who had subsequently received training in scoring the subconstructs. Responses were coded by 4–5 coders in “blocks” of around 500 responses each. For each block, every coder of that block scored all participants (and thus all topics) for that block. Thus, summary scores provided below are the average of 4–5 coders for each participant. To check for reliability, we computed standardized alphas for each block separately (because all coders scored all responses in each block, an alpha is an appropriate metric of reliability). Reliability on each of the different blocks was satisfactory, with standardized alphas for dialectical complexity ranging from .86 to .89 (M = .88). Ideology Measurement All participants completed the same two continuous measurements of political ideology used in Study 1. These were averaged to produce a single continuous “political conservatism” score. For both Studies 2 and 3, we converted this score into a categorical measurement in a manner identical to our method in Study 1 for testing absolute values. We did this because the current conceptual case being made is that conservatives are simple‐minded. Because the slope of the line in a correlation might not fully capture differences between persons on each side of the liberal/conservative divide, there is value in considering what people who classify themselves as being on the “conservative” side of the ledger are like, as compared to those on the “liberal” side, in more categorical terms. In addition, using a regression‐based approach for Studies 2 and 3 would be fairly cumbersome, due to the large number of topic domains (with topic domain serving as one of the primary IVs). Thus, for ease of testing interactions, an ANOVA‐based approach that uses categories for political ideology is more practically useful. Persons who scored above the midpoint were categorized as conservative, while those below the midpoint were categorized as liberal. This removed participants right at the midpoint, leaving 1,323 for our main analyses in Study 2 (liberal = 852; conservative = 471). Results and Discussion Analyses were first performed within a 2 (Ideology: Leans Right versus Leans Left) × 13 (Topic Domain) Factorial ANOVA. By far the strongest effect was for Topic Domain F(12, 1297) = 9.30, p < .001. No main effect of ideology emerged, with Conservatives (M = 1.72) and Liberals (M = 1.72) having virtually identical overall complexity means. However, an Ideology × Topic Domain interaction emerged, with Conservatives higher on some topics and Liberals higher on others, interaction F(12, 1297) = 2.03, p < .02. To understand the degree that this interaction was driven by conservative or liberal complexity (or both equally), we created some ad hoc categories representing the upper tertile of topics on which conservatives and liberals, respectively, were highest in complexity (defined by the difference between conservatives and liberals on complexity for that topic).7 Topics for which Conservatives were higher were: Death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished, Socialism, Refugees, and George W. Bush. Topics for which Liberals were higher on complexity were: People should find out if they are sexually suited before marriage, Bible truth, Alcohol, and Censorship. (These analyses remove the middle tertile of topics for which liberals and conservatives were roughly equal in complexity). A 2 (Ideology) × 2(Ad Hoc Domain Type: Conservatives Higher or Liberals Higher) ANOVA revealed, predictably, an interaction between Ideology and Domain Type, F(1, 734) = 12.31, p < .001. As can be seen in Table 1, this interaction is clearly a true crossover interaction, with conservatives scoring higher than liberals on some topics, while the reverse is true for others. Indeed, within‐domain type correlations showed roughly similar effect sizes for topics on which conservatives were higher in complexity (conservatism‐complexity r[346] = .12, p < .03) and topics on which conservatives were lower in complexity (conservatism‐complexity r[511] = ‐.08, p < .06; Fisher's Z‐test comparing correlations = 2.87, p < .01). In other words, the interaction between domain type and ideology is roughly equally attributable to the fact that conservatives were sometimes higher than liberals on complexity as it is to the fact that liberals were sometimes higher than conservatives.

Study 3 Method Participants Over a two‐year span, 728 undergraduate participants at the University of Montana completed an open‐ended question pertaining to an array of attitudes in exchange for course credit, usually in large sessions exceeding 100 persons.8 Complexity Question Stems The 30 question stems were taken directly from a research program that was not motivated by ideology, but rather because they had been previously assessed for their heritability in a project (Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang, 2001) that was independent of the heritability program used in Study 2. Complexity Coding As in Study 2, Study 3 was scored by 4–5 trained coders in “blocks” of around 400 responses each. For each block, every coder of that block scored all participants (and thus all topics) for that block. Thus, summary scores provided below are the average of 4–5 coders for each participant. To check for reliability, we computed standardized alphas for each block separately. Reliability on each of the different blocks was satisfactory, with standardized alphas for dialectical complexity ranging from .81 to .82 (M = .81). Political Ideology We measured ideology in a manner identical to Study 2 and further computed a single categorical score identical to that study. This method (which removes participants scoring directly at the midpoint of the scale) left 633 for our main analyses (liberal = 395; conservative = 238). Results and Discussion Initial analyses were performed within a 2 (Ideology: Leans Right versus Leans Left) × 30 (Topic Domain) Factorial ANOVA. Once again, by far the strongest effect was for Topic Domain F(29, 573) = 2.91, p < .001. No main effect of ideology emerged, with Conservatives (M = 1.74) and Liberals (M = 1.76) having virtually identical complexity means. Unlike in Study 2, no clear Ideology × Topic Domain interaction emerged in Study 3. However, the descriptive data suggested that sometimes conservatives were higher than liberals on some topics and vice versa, but that small cell sizes (in some cases n = 7) and the large number of cells made it difficult to find an effect in the 2 × 30 ANOVA. We subsequently followed an ad hoc procedure identical to that in Study 2: Specifically, we created some ad hoc categories representing the upper tertile of topics on which conservatives and liberals, respectively, were highest in complexity. Topics for which Conservatives were higher were: Wearing clothes that draw attention, Exercising, Death penalty, Open‐door immigration, Smoking, Reading books, Castration, Loud music, Roller coaster rides, and Easy access to birth control. Topics for which Liberals were higher on complexity were: Being assertive, Organized religion, Crosswords, Public speaking, Abortion on demand, Big parties, Playing organized sports, Making racial discrimination illegal, Education, Being the center of attention. (This analyses removes the middle tertile of topics for which liberals and conservatives were roughly equal in complexity.) A 2 (Ideology) × 2 (Ad Hoc Domain Type) ANOVA revealed an interaction between Ideology and Domain Type, F(1, 374) = 21.39, p < .001. As can be seen in Table 1, this interaction is clearly a true crossover interaction, with conservatives scoring higher than liberals on some topics, while the reverse is true for others. Indeed, within‐domain correlations showed roughly similar effect sizes for topics on which conservatives were higher in complexity (conservatism‐complexity r[230] = .15, p < .03) and topics on which conservatives were lower in complexity (conservatism‐complexity r[207] = −.20, p < .01; Fisher's Z = 3.67, p < .01). In other words, the interaction between domain type and ideology is roughly equally attributable to the fact that conservatives were sometimes higher than liberals on complexity as it is to the fact that liberals were sometimes higher than conservatives.9,10

Additional Results from Studies 1–3 To this point, we have talked loosely about ideology × domain interactions without clearly specifying the psychological explanatory variables that might account for such interactions. This is partially purposeful—our primary goal in this article is to discuss the potential for such interactions at a large level and not to engage in a debate about the specific psychological mechanisms underlying those interactions. However, on a subset of our data for Studies 1–3, we collected a few variables relevant to mechanisms that we believed might help explain those interactions. (We did not collect any of these additional variables for Study 4.) Thus, while not our primary purpose, we briefly summarize the outcome of those analyses here. Although we measured other variables (for a summary, see footnote 11), we specifically focus on a set of variables related to a given domain's attitude strength. Conceptually and empirically, attitude strength/involvement is negatively related to dialectical forms of complexity (see Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011). Thus, it is possible that liberals and conservatives differ on what topics they hold strong attitudes on, and this fact might help us better understand the domain‐specific effects of conservatism on complexity. We tested the implications of this in Studies 1–3. Study 1 For Study 1, all participants who completed the domain‐specific dogmatism scales also completed several measurements relevant to attitude strength/involvement with the topic domain: (1) topic importance, (2) involvement with the topic, (3) experience with the topic, (4) confidence in their opinion on the topic, and (5) attitude extremity (represented by how far they were from the midpoint in absolute terms on an agreement item). We converted each measurement to a z‐score and averaged them into an overall attitude strength score. Conceptually, if conservatives and liberals differed in what topics they were dogmatic about due to differences in attitude strength, then liberals should hold stronger attitudes on the topics they were more dogmatic on (and vice versa for conservatives). This conceptual logic directly predicts an ideology × topic type interaction on attitude strength, such that liberals would hold weaker attitudes on topics for which they scored lower in dogmatism (in this case, religion), while conservatives would hold weaker attitudes on topics for which they scored lower in dogmatism (in this case, environmental issues). We tested this by computing an ideology (liberal versus conservative) × topic type (environment versus religion) interaction on attitude strength. Results were consistent with our conceptual logic: Conservatives held stronger attitudes for the domain on which they were more dogmatic (conservatives = .27, liberals = .10), while liberals held stronger attitudes for the domain on which they were more dogmatic (conservatives = −.34, liberals = −.04), interaction F(1,304) = 8.69, p < .01. Studies 2 and 3: Attitude Strength/Involvement We performed a similar set of analyses on Studies 2 and 3. In particular: On a subset of our data that comprised part of the sample for Studies 2 and 3 (n = 423), immediately after completing the open‐ended statements that were scored for complexity, participants also completed measurements of attitude strength identical to those used in Study 1. As in Study 1, we converted each measurement to a z‐score and averaged them into an overall attitude strength score. Conceptually, if conservatives and liberals differed in what topics they were more complex about due to differences in attitude strength, then liberals should hold stronger attitudes on the topics they were less complex on (and vice versa for conservatives). Thus, we computed ideology (liberal versus conservative) × ad hoc topic type (liberal higher in complexity versus conservative higher in complexity) interactions. Results were largely descriptively consistent with attitude strength being an explanatory variable, but the inferential statistics were not overwhelming. In particular, for Study 2, conservatives held stronger attitudes for topics on which liberals were higher in complexity (conservatives = .16, liberals = −.04), while liberals held stronger attitudes for topics on which conservatives were higher in complexity (conservatives = −.07, liberals = .00). However, this interaction was not statistically significant (p = .184). A similar pattern emerged for Study 3, where conservatives held stronger attitudes for topics on which liberals were higher in complexity (conservatives = .21, liberals = −.04), while this difference was essentially not in evidence for topics on which conservatives were higher in complexity (conservatives = .05, liberals = .04). However, this interaction was also not statistically significant (p = .262).11

Study 4: 2004 Bush‐Kerry Debates George W. Bush has often been discussed as a prototypical representative of simple‐minded conservatives (e.g., Simonton, 2006). But if, as we have argued, complexity is largely driven by topic domain, then it is important to consider what domain politicians are talking about. In Study 4, we compare Bush versus his opponent in the 2004 election campaign, John Kerry, across 15 different topics that were discussed during the presidential debates. Method Paragraph selection Across three presidential debates, the two candidates were specifically directed to discuss 15 different topics, ranging from domestic issues (e.g., the economy) to moral discussions (e.g., abortion) to foreign policy (e.g., the Iraq war). From each debate, we randomly selected five paragraphs per topic per candidate. If the candidate did not provide five paragraphs in a given debate for a given topic, we used all the available paragraphs for that topic. Paragraph preparation and scoring As is standard in archival integrative complexity research (e.g., Conway & Conway, 2011; Suedfeld & Rank, 1976; Tetlock, 1984; Thoemmes & Conway, 2007), we removed all information from the selected paragraphs that might directly identify who the speaker is and replaced that with generic information, and then we presented the paragraphs in random order to four trained scorers. All scorers coded all paragraphs. Interrater reliability for the current project was satisfactory (dialectical complexity alpha = .75). The four coders’ scores were averaged into a single complexity score. Results and Discussion Analyses were first performed within a 2 (Candidate: Bush Versus Kerry) × 15 (Topic Domain) Factorial ANOVA. By far the strongest effect was for Topic Domain F(14, 65) = 2.40, p < .01. No main effect of ideology emerged, with Conservative Bush (M = 1.45) and Liberal Kerry (M = 1.48) having virtually identical overall complexity means. However, an Ideology × Topic Domain interaction emerged, with Bush higher on some topics and Kerry higher on others, interaction F(14, 65) = 1.88, p < .05. To understand the relative strength of Bush's and Kerry's complexity in contributing to this interaction, we created some ad hoc categories by grouping topic types together on which Bush's and Kerry's complexity differed. Specifically, we created difference scores for each topic representing the degree that either Bush or Kerry was higher on complexity for that topic, and then used the upper tertile of these difference scores for each candidate to create two categories: The five topics for which Bush was higher in complexity and the five topics for which Kerry was higher. (This strategy is analogous to the strategy for creating ad hoc categories in Studies 2 and 3). Using these criteria, the topics on which Bush was higher than Kerry were: Religion, Terrorism/Homeland Security, Stem Cells, Healthcare, and Affirmative action. The topics on which Kerry was higher than Bush were: Iraq, non‐Iraq foreign policy issues, economic issues, Abortion, and Education. A 2 (Candidate) × 2 (Ad Hoc Domain Type: Bush Higher or Kerry Higher) ANOVA revealed an interaction between Ideology and Domain Type, F(1, 58) = 15.44, p < .001. As can be seen in Table 1, this interaction is clearly a true crossover interaction, with Bush scoring higher than Kerry on some topics, while the reverse is true for others. Indeed, comparisons within‐domain type showed roughly similar effects for topics on which Bush was higher in complexity (effect of candidate t[28] = 2.93, p < .01) and topics on which Kerry was higher in complexity (effect of candidate t[30] = −2.63, p < .02).12 In other words, the interaction between domain type and ideology is roughly equally attributable to the fact that Bush was sometimes higher than Kerry on complexity as it is to the fact that Kerry was sometimes higher than Bush.13

General Discussion Are conservatives simple‐minded? The present results suggest the answer to this question is “yes…but only on some topics.” On other topics, conservatives are more complex than liberals. Using a large array of topic domains and methods, we found that the ideology‐complexity relationship is perhaps best described as an interaction between ideology and topic domain. Is this interaction hiding a larger main effect of conservative simplicity? Although we found no evidence here of the much‐assumed main effect difference between liberals and conservatives, our article is not an attempt to definitively answer that question with a “no.” Rather, the results presented here suggest that more caution should be given to definitively answering that question with a “yes.” It may be that liberals are, as many have claimed (Jost et al., 2003; Tetlock et al., 1996; Van Hiel et al., 2010) and as some of even our own prior work suggests (Conway et al., 2012; Thoemmes & Conway, 2007), pulled towards complexity more than conservatives: But we think such a judgment is premature. What Mechanism Might Explain Domain Differences in Complexity? Our primary purpose in this article is not to explain domain differences but to demonstrate domain × ideology interactions. It is nonetheless important moving forward to address what psychological aspects of topic domains might help us better understand when conservatives are more or less complex than liberals. We tested several possibilities on a subsample of our data, and the most promising explanatory variable to emerge was attitude strength. Conservatives and liberals differ on the topics for which they hold strong attitudes; and it may be that this variability in attitude strength helps us understand variability on complexity. Our data reveal evidence that is modestly consistent with this hypothesis: Across all three studies for which data was available, both conservatives and liberals held stronger attitudes for the topics on which they were more simple‐minded (operationalized in Study 1 as topics for which they were more dogmatic and in Studies 2 and 3 as topics for which they were less complex). Although this pattern was weaker for Studies 2 and 3,14 these results provide some preliminary evidence that the ideology × domain interactions on complexity‐relevant variables may be partially a function of domain differences in attitude strength. This suggests two possible ways forward for future researchers. First and most obviously, it would be useful to run studies with greater power for testing the explanatory ability of attitude strength measurements. This could be done by collecting a larger group of participants, but it also might be useful to select topics a priori that were especially prone to show attitude strength differences between liberals and conservatives and run more focused tests with those domains or otherwise directly manipulate attitude strength (rather than merely measuring it as we did in the present studies). Second, the measurements reported here are only one set of possible (and potentially imprecise) methods for measuring the attitude strength construct. Given the potential explanatory value of attitude strength in our understanding of complexity‐related domain variability, future work would do well to include more sophisticated methods of measuring attitude strength that do not rely solely on direct self‐report (e.g., Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). Sample Limitations This research is not without its limitations. First, our work is entirely constrained to U.S. samples and thus should be interpreted with appropriate caution. We do not know if the results presented in Studies 1–3 would generalize beyond U.S. borders, and the results from Study 4 are from a single U.S. election. What might this mean for our interpretation of the results? First, it is important to note that much of the case for conservative simplicity has been compiled on U.S. samples. For example, in Jost et al.'s (2003) meta‐analysis, 81% of the reported N for integrative complexity and 44% of the reported N for dogmatism occurred on U.S. participants. Since part of our aim is to offer a potential alternative explanation for existing evidence in these areas, our data at least suggest that for the part of the current case which has been built on U.S. samples (a fairly large percentage), we should perhaps reconsider our collective interpretation of the evidence. However, it is of course still worth considering the potential effect of the cultural context on our results. Consider, for example, that one of the most salient differences distinguishing the United States from other potential Western samples is that the United States as a whole is more conservative than many other Western nations. What effect might this have? According to one of the most influential models of the origins of complex thinking, Tetlock's Value Pluralism Model (e.g., Tetlock, 1986; Tetlock et al., 1996), if this had any effect, it would be likely to bias the sample by making U.S. liberals more complex than liberals in other places (in particular on dialectical forms of complexity; see Conway et al., 2008).15 If the United States leans right as a nation, that means that those we call “liberals” are actually more “centrist”—and it is centrists that the Value Pluralism Model (and a related model of belief defense; for discussions, see Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011) predicts would be most complex. As a population, this would make the United States a skewed test that would more likely make liberals complex, because liberals in the United States would actually be less likely to be true liberals—but would in fact be moderates who are more likely on average to be complex (see, e.g., Tetlock et al., 1994). Thus, in a sense, our finding no main effect (and instead finding domain × ideology interactions) in a U.S. sample is more—rather than less—compelling evidence against the conservative simplicity hypothesis. Consistent with this notion, it is worth noting that additional research on integrative complexity and related measurements—research not cited in Jost et al. (2003)—suggests that if anything, the conservative simplicity effect may be less likely to be found in non‐U.S. contexts. For example, Van Hiel and Mervielde (2003) correlated political conservatism amongst Belgian college students with three measurements of complexity, and none of the measurements was statistically significant. Further, in Soviet Russia, leftist communist leaders were less integratively complex than capitalistic reformers who had a more conservative ideology (Tetlock & Boettger, 1989). Quite a bit of research on Canadian political parties is also inconsistent with the conservative simplicity hypothesis. For example, comparing Canadian college students affiliated with two conservative and two liberal political parties, Suedfeld et al. (1994) found no significant differences among them, and the highest overall group on complexity was the conservative Progressive Conservative party. Similar results for Canadian politicians were found by Suedfeld's (2000) scoring of the major political parties’ candidates for Prime Minister during the 1997 Federal election. Finally, Lavallee and Suedfeld (1997) found that more liberal environmental groups scored lower in integrative complexity (though not significantly so) than more conservative forest advocacy groups in a conflict in British Columbia over Clayquot Sound. In summary, we do not view it is likely that our results will end up being relevant to only the United States—they may indeed be more powerful in other regions.16 However, it is further worth noting that to the degree that our sample does in fact differ from other samples and would yield different results, this itself poses a problem for the rigidity of the right explanation. Even should our results prove to be specific only to the United States, this suggests at a minimum that cultural context is a potential moderator of the conservatism‐complexity relationship. Given how alarmingly few cultural contexts have actually been tested, this leaves open the possibility that, averaged across all cultures, we may find a far weaker (or even nonexistent) main effect for the conservatism‐complexity relationship. Thus, while we cannot of course definitively say that our work would generalize, our work at least makes it clear that we should pause in our larger conclusions about the relationship between conservatism and domain‐general simplicity. Research Content Limitations Our discussion has covered two of the major constructs in the argument for conservative simplicity: dogmatism and integrative complexity. But the case for conservative simplicity includes much more than just research on those constructs, and it includes quite a bit of evidence our domain‐specificity theory does not account for even within those two lines of work. It does not seem very likely that ideology × domain interactions account for all of the additional evidence discussed by Jost et al. (2003). As such, caution is warranted in interpreting these results in the larger picture. Indeed, consider three lines of evidence discussed in Jost et al. (2003) and Van Hiel et al. (2010): Need for closure/structure, openness, and preference for complexity (e.g., preferences for complex visual images and complex poetry). In each case, quite a bit of evidence exists tying political conservatism to a motive for simplicity; conservatives are higher in self‐reported need for closure/structure (and, in a more nuanced recent account, liberals who are higher in need for closure show more conservative policy positions; see Federico et al., 2012), lower in self‐reported openness, and lower in self‐reported preferences for complex images or poems. Each of those areas could potentially capture a more domain‐general motive—for example, need for closure is conceptualized as a need for nonspecific closure that cuts across domains—and yet our research cannot directly speak to that work. How, then, do we reconcile our work to this prior work? We discuss three different points of intersection below (see the online supplementary information for additional discussion in this regard). The multidimensionality of complexity and why it matters Even if we assume that this prior work on need for closure/structure, openness, and preferences for complex materials represent phenomena on which conservatives are indeed simpler, that would not invalidate the importance of our present findings. As many researchers have pointed out, complexity itself is multifaceted (see, e.g., Conway et al., 2014; Houck et al., 2014; Tetlock, Emlen Metz, Scott, & Suedfeld, 2014). Thus, even if the present results turn out to be limited only to dogmatism and integrative complexity—two aspects of the case being made for conservative simplicity—that would nonetheless suggest for complexity relevant to those types, the general case being made against conservatives in those areas needs revision. This would present to us a more nuanced and accurate picture of the relationship between ideology and complexity and suggest at the least that the current picture must be qualified by the type of complexity measurement under the microscope. The potential pitfalls of self‐report measurement Further, for the purposes of determining the average complexity of a group of persons, the kinds of self‐report measurements comprising the bulk of prior meta‐analyses have some additional potential pitfalls in interpretation. A self‐report measurement is at best an indirect marker of a potential complexity‐relevant motive. To take one example, Person A may be higher than Person B on the need for closure scale because they are actually more motivated for closure; but they also may be higher because they are more willing to report higher need for closure (even though both persons may actually have the same level of motive), or have a different set of social desirability templates, or a host of other factors that do not have to do with the actual motive.17 Further, self‐report measurements vary in their degree of clear overlap with complexity. Consider that the need for structure scale was intentionally designed to avoid explicitly mentioning cognitive structure (see, e.g., Neuberg & Newsom, 1993). Both the need for structure scale and the highly correlated and conceptually similar need for closure scale contain items that appear like conscientiousness as much as cognitive structure, and the need for structure scale is in fact correlated with both self‐reported conscientiousness and conscientious behaviors (Neuberg & Newsom, 1993). While need for structure/closure has been sometimes correlated with more face‐valid measurements of complexity (e.g., Neuberg & Newsom, 1993; Webster & Kruglanski, 1994) and is related to attitudinal “seizing” that seems clearly conceptually related to complex thinking (e.g., Webster & Kruglanski, 1994), it is nonetheless worth considering that the scales do not directly measure a desire to think in a complex fashion. In contrast, the scoring of open‐ended statements is a much more direct marker of the average complexity of particular groups (see Houck et al., 2014). While it, too, has its drawbacks, this at the very least means that when Person A scores higher than Person B, we can feel more confident that the output of Person A is indeed more complex than Person B on that domain. Thus, this provides a more direct marker of the outcome of interest—complexity—than do more indirect measurements of a self‐reported motive that is expected to be correlated to the outcome. The importance of the potential divergence between self‐report and open‐ended measures is underscored by the fact that the two types of measurements are often not very highly correlated (see Van Hiel et al., 2010, for a summary). Empirical scope of the present research Our work shows a different pattern of results than quite a bit of prior work. Why is that the case? There are three conceptual reasons why the literature writ large might differ with the results presented here. The first is the primary argument made in this article: That prior work has not fully accounted for domain × ideology interactions. But it may also be that our results are simply anomalous. After all, for any real effect in psychology, sometimes you will not find that effect, or find a reversal of the effect, just by chance. Relatedly, it is also possible that our results represent an overselection of topics on which conservatives score more complexly. Even if one grants the power of ideology × domain interactions, it of course does not follow that there is no meaningful main effect (see, e.g., Tetlock et al., 1996). Conservatives may be more complex than liberals on a certain handful of topics, but this may run counter to the general tendencies outlined by Jost et al. (2003) to pull them, at some larger psychological level, towards simplicity. Indeed, it is possible that we ourselves are exhibiting a bias in topic selection: Although the topics selected here (with a few exceptions) were not largely selected for reasons directly related to ideology at all (see Conway et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2011), it is nonetheless certainly possible that we selected a group of topics on which conservatives are particularly likely to score high in complexity, thus offsetting the larger tendency for liberals to score higher. We acknowledge the possibility, as well as the possibility that our results are simply anomalous. But, in considering the scope of our research set against the existing body of work, it is also worth noting that most prior research on ideology and complexity is very narrow in its scope of possible topics, whereas our research covered 43 separate (though sometimes overlapping) topic stems for the student population and 15 separate topic categories for the Bush/Kerry comparison. For comparison, in the integrative complexity research cited in Jost et al. (2003), only one topic distinction is made within‐study at all, and it only occurred for one study and included only two broad topic types. Thus, although a lot of research indicates that liberals are higher than conservatives in complexity, it is unclear whether or not that research covers a wide range of topics. About integrative complexity specifically, it is further worth noting that prior research on ideology and integrative complexity has been mostly limited to scoring politicians (Jost et al., 2003; Van Hiel et al., 2010), and thus may not apply to the vast majority of the population.18 Further, our research covers over 2,000 participants, which is more participants than all the integrative complexity research combined cited in Jost et al.'s (2003) meta‐analysis (combined participant N for all integrative complexity studies = 307). So while it would be premature to suggest overturning all prior evidence on the basis of our work presented here, it would similarly be premature to dismiss our evidence as having no bearing on the larger question. We do not know yet whether our topic selection method might show bias in favor of conservatives, and our evidence contains the largest set of domains studied to date.19

Concluding Thoughts Even the best research is potentially subject to qualification through scientific scrutiny. Our purpose here is not to claim definitively that conservatives are equally as complex as liberals. We are certainly open to the possibility that conservatives are simpler on average, and agree with Tetlock (1986) and Jost et al. (2003) that there are reasons it may be so. Our purpose is much more modest: It is to point out that, just as there are reasons why it may be so, there are also reasons it may not be so. We have presented one alternative possibility here and offered some empirical evidence in support of that model. As such, we believe that the present research might fit in with a growing body of work suggesting that negative attributes once attributed to conservatives might be domain specific (see, e.g., Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014; Crawford, 2012; Suedfeld, Bochner, & Wnek, 1972). We hope this to be the beginning of the discussion with respect to complexity and have no illusions of it being the last word.

Acknowledgments Portions of this article were presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Chicago, IL. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lucian Gideon Conway III, University of Montana, Psychology Department, Skaggs Building 239, Missoula, MT, 59812. E‐mail: luke.conway@umontana.edu

Footnotes 1 In the present article, we use the term “domain specific” to indicate the particular content that comprises the thought‐about subject in the same way that past researchers discuss “domains” or “issues” (e.g., Suedfeld, 2000 1986

In the present article, we use the term “domain specific” to indicate the particular content that comprises the thought‐about subject in the same way that past researchers discuss “domains” or “issues” (e.g., Suedfeld, 2 Because so many factors relevant to topic content affect complexity, there are many reasons—including value pluralism and attitude strength—to expect interactions between ideology and content domain on complexity. As such, it is reasonable to expect interactions at a larger level without necessarily being able to identify specifically why such an interaction exists in a particular context. Although we provide some preliminary evidence concerning one possible explanatory mechanism in this context, the primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate the expected interaction at a larger level and not to provide a coherent theoretical explanation for the interaction.

Because so many factors relevant to topic content affect complexity, there are many reasons—including value pluralism and attitude strength—to expect interactions between ideology and content domain on complexity. As such, it is reasonable to expect interactions at a larger level without necessarily being able to identify specifically such an interaction exists in a particular context. Although we provide some preliminary evidence concerning one possible explanatory mechanism in this context, the primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate the expected interaction at a larger level and not to provide a coherent theoretical explanation for the interaction. 3 Participants also completed measurements of authoritarianism and modern racism. These measurements are not directly relevant to the present study and are not discussed further.

Participants also completed measurements of authoritarianism and modern racism. These measurements are not directly relevant to the present study and are not discussed further. 4 We also compared correlations within each condition by the type of item (domain‐general versus domain‐specific). Removing the four domain‐general items from these domain‐specific scales increased the size of the difference between the religion and environmental dogmatism scales: The main conservatism measure was significantly negatively correlated for the environmental scale ( r = –.36, p < .001) and significantly positively correlated for the religion scale ( r = .34, p < .001; Fisher's Z ‐test for comparing correlations = 6.86, p < .001). When looking at the four domain‐general items on the otherwise domain‐specific scales, conservatives were nonsignificantly positively correlated for the environmental scale ( r = .10) and significantly positively correlated for the religion scale ( r = .23, p < .01; Fisher's Z ‐test for comparing correlations = 1.32, p > .05). These results indicate that there is some “leakage” from the domain‐specific environmental items that reduce the typical size of the conservatism‐political ideology correlation but still reveal that the nature of the item itself does matter, even within a domain‐specific context.

We also compared correlations within each condition by the type of item (domain‐general versus domain‐specific). Removing the four domain‐general items from these domain‐specific scales increased the size of the difference between the religion and environmental dogmatism scales: The main conservatism measure was significantly negatively correlated for the environmental scale ( = –.36, < .001) and significantly positively correlated for the religion scale ( = .34, < .001; Fisher's ‐test for comparing correlations = 6.86, < .001). When looking at the four domain‐general items on the otherwise domain‐specific scales, conservatives were nonsignificantly positively correlated for the environmental scale ( = .10) and significantly positively correlated for the religion scale ( = .23, < .01; Fisher's ‐test for comparing correlations = 1.32, > .05). These results indicate that there is some “leakage” from the domain‐specific environmental items that reduce the typical size of the conservatism‐political ideology correlation but still reveal that the nature of the item itself does matter, even within a domain‐specific context. 5 Some prior research suggests that the relationship between ideology and outcome variables may be curvilinear and as such represents more about ideological extremism than about ideological content (e.g., Tetlock et al., 1994). As a result, we tested for the possibility that our results represent a curvilinear, rather than a linear, relationship. In particular, we ran linear regression on all key results while entering both a linear and two separate nonlinear terms for political conservatism as simultaneous predictors: (1) A mean‐centered quadratic term for conservatism and (2) an extremism score for conservatism (computed as the absolute difference from the midpoint of the conservatism scale). All analyses were performed within‐condition in a way parallel to that described above. Results overwhelmingly support a linear, rather than a nonlinear, interpretation of our results. For dogmatism, when linear and quadratic/extremism scores are entered simultaneously, all linear conservatism terms remained significant ( p 's < .01), while no significant nonlinear effects emerged in any condition on either nonlinear measurement ( p 's > .380). Thus, (1) all linear effects remained significant—and were of similar size and direction as in zero‐order analyses—when accounting for nonlinear effects, and (2) nonlinear effects overall accounted for very little of the variance. Thus, our results are much better construed as linear effects than as nonlinear.

Some prior research suggests that the relationship between ideology and outcome variables may be curvilinear and as such represents more about ideological extremism than about ideological content (e.g., Tetlock et al., 1994). As a result, we tested for the possibility that our results represent a curvilinear, rather than a linear, relationship. In particular, we ran linear regression on all key results while entering both a linear and two separate nonlinear terms for political conservatism as simultaneous predictors: (1) A mean‐centered quadratic term for conservatism and (2) an extremism score for conservatism (computed as the absolute difference from the midpoint of the conservatism scale). All analyses were performed within‐condition in a way parallel to that described above. Results overwhelmingly support a linear, rather than a nonlinear, interpretation of our results. For dogmatism, when linear and quadratic/extremism scores are entered simultaneously, all linear conservatism terms remained significant ( 's < .01), while no significant nonlinear effects emerged in any condition on either nonlinear measurement ( 's > .380). Thus, (1) all linear effects remained significant—and were of similar size and direction as in zero‐order analyses—when accounting for nonlinear effects, and (2) nonlinear effects overall accounted for very little of the variance. Thus, our results are much better construed as linear effects than as nonlinear. 6 Portions of the data from Studies 2 and 3 were used also to test hypotheses about psychological extremism (Conway et al., 2008 2011

Portions of the data from Studies 2 and 3 were used also to test hypotheses about psychological extremism (Conway et al., 7 This ad hoc strategy is primarily an organizing device to simplify data analyses and presentation. First, one of the most important considerations in the domain ideology × interaction is whether or not conservatives show an equal effect on their highest‐complexity topics as liberals do on their highest‐complexity topics. The ad hoc strategy we employ is useful for quickly illustrating that the nature of the interaction across topics is equal on both sides in a manner that allows for easy comparison across studies. Second, this strategy helps simplify additional analyses (e.g., it provides a straightforward way to test the effect of potential explanatory mechanisms in the “Additional Analyses of Studies 1–3” section). Although we recognize that this method has the potential of exaggerating the strength of the interaction effect, it is important to note that two of the three domain × ideology interaction terms are significant (Studies 2 and 4) without any ad hoc organizing—and the one that is not significant (Study 3) has such small cell numbers and so many topic domains that it would be hard to find an interaction term. Thus, we think this ad hoc method is constructive way of summarizing these studies that accurately captures the nature of the data.

This ad hoc strategy is primarily an organizing device to simplify data analyses and presentation. First, one of the most important considerations in the domain ideology × interaction is whether or not conservatives show an equal effect on their highest‐complexity topics as liberals do on their highest‐complexity topics. The ad hoc strategy we employ is useful for quickly illustrating that the nature of the interaction across topics is equal on both sides in a manner that allows for easy comparison across studies. Second, this strategy helps simplify additional analyses (e.g., it provides a straightforward way to test the effect of potential explanatory mechanisms in the “Additional Analyses of Studies 1–3” section). Although we recognize that this method has the potential of exaggerating the strength of the interaction effect, it is important to note that two of the three domain × ideology interaction terms are significant (Studies 2 and 4) without any ad hoc organizing—and the one that is not significant (Study 3) has such small cell numbers and so many topic domains that it would be hard to find an interaction term. Thus, we think this ad hoc method is constructive way of summarizing these studies that accurately captures the nature of the data. 8 Studies 2 and 3 have 423 overlapping participants (those participants completed an item used both in Study 2 and in Study 3). As in prior research using this dataset (Conway et al., 2008 2011 2008 2011 r = .02, p > .70.

Studies 2 and 3 have 423 overlapping participants (those participants completed an item used both in Study 2 and in Study 3). As in prior research using this dataset (Conway et al., = .02, > .70. 9 Although there are solid conceptual and practical reasons for treating liberalism/conservatism as a dichotomous variable, we ran several sets of additional analyses using conservatism as a continuous variable. First, we used regression/correlation analyses to test the key interactions from Studies 2 and 3 while keeping political conservatism as a continuous measurement. In particular, we (1) correlated political conservatism with complexity within each topic domain, (2) created an ad hoc dummy variable (−1 = liberals higher, +1 = conservatives higher) representing the top and bottom tertile for the conservatism‐complexity relationship, then (3) ran a regression entering standardized political conservatism, topic domain, and their interaction term on complexity. Results were consistent with those presented in the text for the categorical measurement of political conservatism: For both Study 2 and Study 3, there was no main effect of political conservatism ( betas = .01 and −.03), but a significant interaction between conservatism and topic domain ( betas > .12, p 's <= .001).

Although there are solid conceptual and practical reasons for treating liberalism/conservatism as a dichotomous variable, we ran several sets of additional analyses using conservatism as a continuous variable. First, we used regression/correlation analyses to test the key interactions from Studies 2 and 3 while keeping political conservatism as a continuous measurement. In particular, we (1) correlated political conservatism with complexity within each topic domain, (2) created an ad hoc dummy variable (−1 = liberals higher, +1 = conservatives higher) representing the top and bottom tertile for the conservatism‐complexity relationship, then (3) ran a regression entering standardized political conservatism, topic domain, and their interaction term on complexity. Results were consistent with those presented in the text for the categorical measurement of political conservatism: For both Study 2 and Study 3, there was no main effect of political conservatism ( = .01 and −.03), but a significant interaction between conservatism and topic domain ( > .12, 's <= .001). 10 For Studies 2 and 3, we further tested for curvilinear effects of conservatism in a manner identical to Study 1 by creating two nonlinear political conservatism terms. A summary of these results is that (1) the difference in the conservatism‐complexity relationship between conservative‐higher and liberal‐higher topics remains when accounting for nonlinear terms, (2) nonlinear effects overall accounted for a proportionally smaller amount of the variance than linear effects. In short, the effects reported here are better described as linear effects than curvilinear effects. A detailed report of these additional results is available upon request.

For Studies 2 and 3, we further tested for curvilinear effects of conservatism in a manner identical to Study 1 by creating two nonlinear political conservatism terms. A summary of these results is that (1) the difference in the conservatism‐complexity relationship between conservative‐higher and liberal‐higher topics remains when accounting for nonlinear terms, (2) nonlinear effects overall accounted for a proportionally smaller amount of the variance than linear effects. In short, the effects reported here are better described as linear effects than curvilinear effects. A detailed report of these additional results is available upon request. 11 For Studies 2 and 3, we also performed similar exploratory analyses using several measurements relevant to attitude discrepancy from consensus opinion (both real and perceived), the degree to which participants perceived consensus to exist on the issue in question, and the amount of effort they put into writing the topic. No significant interaction effects—and no clear pattern—emerged across the two studies on any of these variables. Finally, for Study 2 only, we had a measurement of the value pluralism participants felt relevant to the topic they wrote about (constructed in a manner drawn from Tetlock, 1986 2009 2009 p = .01), conservatism did not interact with topic type to predict value pluralism (interaction p > .89), and thus value pluralism cannot offer a clear explanation as to why topic type moderated the effect of conservatism on complexity.

For Studies 2 and 3, we also performed similar exploratory analyses using several measurements relevant to attitude discrepancy from consensus opinion (both real and perceived), the degree to which participants perceived consensus to exist on the issue in question, and the amount of effort they put into writing the topic. No significant interaction effects—and no clear pattern—emerged across the two studies on any of these variables. Finally, for Study 2 only, we had a measurement of the value pluralism participants felt relevant to the topic they wrote about (constructed in a manner drawn from Tetlock, = .01), conservatism did not interact with topic type to predict value pluralism (interaction > .89), and thus value pluralism cannot offer a clear explanation as to why topic type moderated the effect of conservatism on complexity. 12 For Studies 2–4, we tested whether the absolute value of the effect sizes for these ad hoc topic‐type comparisons differed for topics on which conservatives versus liberals were higher. In Studies 2 and 4, the effect was slightly stronger for topics on which conservatives were higher; for Study 3, the effect was slightly stronger for topics on which liberals were higher. However, across all three studies, Z‐ tests comparing the absolute value of these effect sizes revealed little evidence that they differed (Study 2 Z = 0.58; Study 3 Z = 0.54; Study 4 Z = 0.24; all p 's > .56). In other words, the absolute values of the ideology‐complexity effects are essentially equivalent between conservative‐higher and liberal‐higher topics in Studies 2, 3, and 4. This is consistent with the interpretation offered in the text.

For Studies 2–4, we tested whether the absolute value of the effect sizes for these ad hoc topic‐type comparisons differed for topics on which conservatives versus liberals were higher. In Studies 2 and 4, the effect was slightly stronger for topics on which conservatives were higher; for Study 3, the effect was slightly stronger for topics on which liberals were higher. However, across all three studies, tests comparing the absolute value of these effect sizes revealed little evidence that they differed (Study 2 = 0.58; Study 3 = 0.54; Study 4 = 0.24; all 's > .56). In other words, the absolute values of the ideology‐complexity effects are essentially equivalent between conservative‐higher and liberal‐higher topics in Studies 2, 3, and 4. This is consistent with the interpretation offered in the text. 13 We also performed analyses for Studies 2–4 for integrative complexity. As occurred for the dialectical complexity results reported in the text, no significant main effects for ideology on complexity occurred on integrative complexity in Studies 2–4. Also the same as for dialectical complexity, for Studies 2 and 3 for integrative complexity there was a significant main effect of topic domain. The main difference between integrative complexity and dialectical complexity results occurred in Studies 2 and 4 (recall that Study 3 did not have an initial ideology × domain interaction): Namely, the initial domain × ideology interactions (using all topic domains in those studies) were not significant for integrative complexity. However, following a similar ad hoc strategy for Studies 2, 3, and 4 using integrative complexity (as opposed to dialectical complexity) yielded significant interactions in each case (interaction p 's < .01), and the overall pattern is very similar. Also, Study 4 showed no main effect difference for topic domain for integrative complexity. Given our focus on dialectical forms of complexity throughout this article, these inferential differences are largely irrelevant. We report them here for completeness. Our larger point remains the same: For the dialectical forms of complexity most directly related to the rigidity of the right idea, the pattern presented here is better captured by domain ideology interactions than by a main effect of ideology.

We also performed analyses for Studies 2–4 for integrative complexity. As occurred for the dialectical complexity results reported in the text, no significant main effects for ideology on complexity occurred on integrative complexity in Studies 2–4. Also the same as for dialectical complexity, for Studies 2 and 3 for integrative complexity there was a significant main effect of topic domain. The main difference between integrative complexity and dialectical complexity results occurred in Studies 2 and 4 (recall that Study 3 did not have an initial ideology × domain interaction): Namely, the initial domain × ideology interactions (using all topic domains in those studies) were not significant for integrative complexity. However, following a similar ad hoc strategy for Studies 2, 3, and 4 using integrative complexity (as opposed to dialectical complexity) yielded significant interactions in each case (interaction 's < .01), and the overall pattern is very similar. Also, Study 4 showed no main effect difference for topic domain for integrative complexity. Given our focus on dialectical forms of complexity throughout this article, these inferential differences are largely irrelevant. We report them here for completeness. Our larger point remains the same: For the dialectical forms of complexity most directly related to the idea, the pattern presented here is better captured by domain ideology interactions than by a main effect of ideology. 14 For Studies 2 and 3, it is worth noting that we only had relevant data on a subset of our larger sample. Although attitude strength measurements did not show significant effects in those studies, they were in the correct direction and showed a similar pattern across both studies. We do not want to overinterpret these data; it is possible that this pattern does not represent a real finding. However, we view it as likely that a larger sample would find the expected significant effect for attitude strength.

For Studies 2 and 3, it is worth noting that we only had relevant data on a subset of our larger sample. Although attitude strength measurements did not show significant effects in those studies, they were in the correct direction and showed a similar pattern across both studies. We do not want to overinterpret these data; it is possible that this pattern does not represent a real finding. However, we view it as likely that a larger sample would find the expected significant effect for attitude strength. 15 The relationship of extremism/value pluralism to complexity itself is more complex than this implies. Some work shows that more extreme views lead to more complexity (e.g., Conway et al., 2008 1984 2008

The relationship of extremism/value pluralism to complexity itself is more complex than this implies. Some work shows that more extreme views lead to more complexity (e.g., Conway et al., 16 There is a potential tension here. These results highlight that other studied nations may show less of a tendency for conservative simplicity, which is best construed as a main effect of context on the effect in question. It is possible that ideology topic domain interactions —the topic of this article—could conceivably be less in those nations, even as they are simultaneously showing less support for conservative simplicity. While we acknowledge this potential, the tension between the main effect and interactions in other nations is beyond the scope of this article. Our point here is that it is likely unreasonable to imagine that different contexts outside of the United States would produce a wildly different landscape in terms of the ideology‐complexity relationship, and based on what we know, if they produce anything different, that difference would likely not be favorable to the conservative simplicity hypothesis.

There is a potential tension here. These results highlight that other studied nations may show less of a tendency for conservative simplicity, which is best construed as a main effect of context on the effect in question. It is possible that ideology topic domain —the topic of this article—could conceivably be in those nations, even as they are simultaneously showing less support for conservative simplicity. While we acknowledge this potential, the tension between the main effect and interactions in other nations is beyond the scope of this article. Our point here is that it is likely unreasonable to imagine that different contexts outside of the United States would produce a wildly different landscape in terms of the ideology‐complexity relationship, and based on what we know, if they produce anything different, that difference would likely not be favorable to the conservative simplicity hypothesis. 17 Importantly, many of these self‐report scales that are purportedly domain‐general may also contain very specific domain‐related content. (For discussion of this possibility relevant to openness, see Sibley & Duckitt, 2008 2012

Importantly, many of these self‐report scales that are purportedly domain‐general may also contain very specific domain‐related content. (For discussion of this possibility relevant to openness, see Sibley & Duckitt, 18 A recent study (Brundidge, Reid, Choi, & Muddiman, 2014 r = .20). They also scored for four different topic types and found no clear interaction pattern for ideology and domain. These data are clearly relevant to the larger issue of differences between conservatives and liberals, but it is less clear how relevant they are to integrative complexity specifically. Several considerations include: (1) Computer‐based measurements are at best an indirect approximation of linguistic complexity (see Tetlock et al., 2014 2014 r = .14; Conway et al., 2014 2014

A recent study (Brundidge, Reid, Choi, & Muddiman, = .20). They also scored for four different topic types and found no clear interaction pattern for ideology and domain. These data are clearly relevant to the larger issue of differences between conservatives and liberals, but it is less clear how relevant they are to integrative complexity specifically. Several considerations include: (1) Computer‐based measurements are at best an indirect approximation of linguistic complexity (see Tetlock et al., = .14; Conway et al., 19 It is also important to note that we are not arguing that Jost et al.'s ( 2003

Supporting Information Additional supporting information may be found in the online version of this article at the publisher's website: Filename Description pops12304-sup-0001-suppinfo01.docx19.3 KB Study 1 Questionnaires pops12304-sup-0002-suppinfo02.docx18.7 KB Additional Discussion: The Potential for Domain‐Specificity for Prior Scales. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.
At Paris Games Week Today, the developers of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds announced it's leaving Early Access this December. "Late December," to be more precise. That release looks like it will closely follow the launch of the Xbox One version of PUBG on December 12, which will include the much-anticipated vaulting system that's coming to the PC test servers soon.

An Xbox press release by PUBG Corp. CEO Chang Han Kim says the following:

"In addition to announcing Xbox’s XGP launch date on December 12, we also shared the exciting news that we’re on track to launch 1.0 for the PC version in late December. This has been an amazing year for us and launching both 1.0 on PC and on Xbox through Xbox Game Preview are huge milestones for the team. I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come in such a short time, but I’m even more excited to say that we’re just getting started."

The press release also states that the two versions of the game won't be identical, though that divide may not last long: "Both versions are being developed at the same time, but they both have their own separate roadmaps. Various Xbox One features and functionality will change and come online over time just like they have on PC, with our goal being to have both versions align to each other as soon as possible."

The new desert map will be included in the 1.0 PC release scheduled for December, and will come to Xbox later. You can watch the full VOD of the announcements here, though watch out for some early audio problems (skip to 12:30 to save your ears, headphone users).
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In 40 days, Britain goes to the polls to elect a new Westminster government.

Before that, the council elections next week will give us a sure indication of how Scotland intends to vote on June 8.

Every poll and pointer so far suggests three things will come to pass:

1. The SNP will still be, far and away, the biggest party. They will not reach the high-water mark of 2015 with 56 of Scotland’s 59 MPs but they will still be totally dominant.

2. Labour will take an absolute battering all over the country. Even though they hope to have three MPs, it is entirely possible, if not probable, that they will fail to return a single Scottish Labour member to the Commons.

3. The Tories will continue their resurgence and gain seats from the SNP.

(Image: Daily Record/DWP)

And while there are still almost six full weeks of campaigning to go and much to play for, the reason these things are likely to happen comes down to just one, mammoth, all-consuming national political obsession: the constitution.

The SNP want independence at all or any cost. The Scottish Tories want to remain in Britain at all or any cost.

And while Scottish Labour are unwaveringly behind the Union, mixed messages from London Labour have sown the seeds of

doubt about the party’s commitment to Scotland’s place in the UK.

These doubts have spread like a virus amongst committed Labour unionists who are turning away from the bosom of a party they’ve supported all their life.

Now they’re lending their support to the Tories, believing they offer the best chance of halting the SNP march to independence.

While those former diehard Labour voters are fully entitled to protect their cherished place in Great Britain, voting to strengthen the Conservatives’ grip on power is a decision they may come to regret.

Make no mistake, this is a Tory Government driven by right-wing ideology. Whatever it plans, it will not end well for the majority of working class Scots.

(Image: PA)

The Cabinet of Theresa May – the shameless Boris Johnson, Damien Green, Philip Hammond, David Davis, the Scot Liam Fox, et al – are no friends of Scotland.

This newspaper was no fan of David Cameron and George Osborne. But this current bunch demonstrate a nastiness of an entirely different magnitude. The repugnant rape clause is a stark warning about how vindictive this Government can be.

If they are emboldened by an increased majority at Westminster, be under no illusion, things will get worse. And it could get very, very much worse for Scotland.

By way of explanation, we need to wind the clock back to early 2016.

In January last year the Scottish Government were locked in bitter negotiations with the Treasury over a financial settlement required to fund the new powers coming to Holyrood because of The Vow.

These fiscal framework negotiations revolved around the Barnett Formula.

The Treasury team were desperate to cut billions from the Scottish budget. They have been itching to take money away from Holyrood for years and they saw this as a perfect opportunity.

If they got their way, the outcome would have been disastrous for Scotland.

(Image: Getty)

They did not get their way for one very good reason … David Cameron had signed The Vow on the front page of this newspaper.

To stiff Scotland out of billions of pounds would have left his questionable integrity shattered.

So he ordered the Treasury to roll over and agree to maintain Scotland’s funding for five years until a review in 2021. The Treasury was furious.

When Scotland’s settlement comes up for renegotiation in a few short years time, there will be no David Cameron there to protect us, even if last time it was for purely personal reasons.

Next time, the discussions will be led by Tory ideologues and a Treasury department hell-bent on revenge for not getting their way last time round.

The outcome could be catastrophic for the NHS, education, and everything else the Scottish Government pay for north of the Border.

That’s bad enough but here’s the real kick in the unmentionables for those Labour unionist diehards tempted to swing behind the Tories.

The Yes campaign lost in 2014 because they could not offer an economic argument that trumped Better Together’s pooling and sharing promise of staying in Britain.

If the Tories do win a bigger majority this time round and they do rip up Barnett and cut billions from our budgets, the economic arguments for staying in the Union are null and void.

And that may be more than enough to swing a second referendum the way of Yes.

There is also little evidence that the Tories have ever been anything but disastrous for the Union.

(Image: PA)

It was the Tories who propped up Alex Salmond at Holyrood from 2007 to 2011, giving the nationalists the springboard they needed to hold the first independence referendum.

It was the Tories who handed a major boost to Nicola Sturgeon’s 2015 general election campaign by cynically pitting England against Scotland by talking up a fantasy coalition between Labour and the SNP.

And it was the Tories who caused the unholy Brexit mess that has put the prospect of a second indyref back on the table in such short order.

Elections are about choices but it’s not always as simple as a cross in the box. We know a lot of thought goes into the decision.

When people voted for the Tories in the Scottish election last year, it was to clip the wings of the SNP Government at Holyrood.

Through the wisdom of crowds, the voters got exactly what they wanted – the SNP were denied a majority but remained the dominant force in Scottish politics.

But attempting to transfer that nuanced voting decision – and few electorates are more experienced or sophisticated than Scotland’s population – to a Westminster election scenario is wishful thinking.

(Image: PA Wire)

Sure, more than half the voters are against independence and don’t want their votes to be interpreted as some kind of endorsement for Sturgeon’s political vision, as they were after the EU referendum.

It’s understandable that people would want to “send a message” to the SNP about having their votes hijacked for another purpose.

That is the reason Ruth Davidson’s Tories use that as their sly election message.

But if people vote Tory this time, it is for real. A Tory Government – a vicious Tory Government – is what they will get.

That will not be in their own interests or the interests of many of their friends and families.

For Labour voters thinking of lending votes to Tory candidates, there are other choices.

They may not be great choices but they are all better than voting Tory in 40 days.

So be careful what you wish for. You have been warned.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What made Canada's Slims River disappear?

A team of scientists say a melting glacier in Canada's Yukon has caused a river to completely change course.

Their findings, published in Nature Geoscience, show how climate change can cause surprising geological events.

The Slims River once flowed out to the Bering Sea, but now it flows into the Kaskawulsh River instead.

This phenomenon, known as "river piracy", typically takes centuries but the study documented it over the course of one spring.

"Nobody's ever seen a river piracy occur in modern times, at least to my knowledge," lead author Dan Shugar told the BBC.

The geoscientist at the University of Washington Tacoma says he and six researchers from Canadian and American universities had planned to study the Slims River last summer.

Image copyright Dan Shugar/University of Washington Tacoma Image caption An aerial photo shows the meltwater stream along the toe of Kaskawulsh Glacier, seen on the left, that is diverting fresh water from one river to the other

But when they arrived in the Yukon it was barely flowing. They discovered that a small channel had eroded in a large glacier that fed a number of small lakes.

The glacial lakes used to feed two river systems - the Slims River and the Kaskawulsh River - but when water from one lake poured through the channel into another, it cut the Slims off from its water source.

The event is known as river piracy or stream capture, and can take thousands of years. But the researchers documented the piracy of the Slims River in just one spring.

Prof Shugar said his colleague, John Clague, at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, had predicted this event just a decade before because of the area's unique geological formation. But no one knew when or how quickly the stream capture would occur.

River gauges show an abrupt four-day drop in late May 2016, which then continued over the summer, the study found.

By the time Prof Shugar and his associates got there, the Slims was basically "a long, skinny lake".

"The Slims River was essentially cut off from how it was flowing before," he said.

The change in the river's flow affected the whole landscape. Sheep are now grazing on the exposed river bank, while other rivers in the area are running high. Fish population, wildlife and lake chemistry will continue to be affected, the study noted.

In the big picture, Prof Shugar said, the piracy of the Slims is a reminder that climate change "may bring surprises that we are not appreciating fully and that we're not necessarily prepared for".
In November, a University of Michigan student reported that a white male threatened to burn her alive unless she took off her hijab, a head covering worn by some practicing Muslim women.

The campus police grabbed hold of that report and brought it to the Ann Arbor Police Department’s attention. However, a month later it was found that there was no evidence to support that the student’s reported incident ever took place.

The incident, classified under the law as “ethnic intimidation,” is prosecuted as a felony. One of the law enforcement officials told Fox 2 that the prosecutor’s office would be reviewing the case. Because the hate crime that the woman falsely reported is a felony, if convicted, she will face a felony charge, as well.

But Tuesday, officials at the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office told The College Fix in an email that they will not be pursuing any charges against the woman.

“This office has declined to authorize charges in that matter,” said Steven Hiller Chief Assistant Prosecutor.

The prosecutor’s office refused to comment any further.

The woman reported the hate crime just days after Donald Trump’s election victory. A wave of Muslim students began reporting similar hate crimes across the United States around the same time. Several of those reports turned out to be hoaxes.
After a terrible personal performance against the Cowboys in round 8, Newcastle captain Kurt Gidley has announced that he’s heading over to England to finish out his career with Warrington.

But first, there is a long NRL season to play out, and the Knights need to figure out where Gidley fits into their team.

Gidley has his fair share of critics, but he is still a valuable player. He just needs to be used in the right way.

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At the moment Rick Stone is starting Gidley at fullback and moving him to hooker a third of the way through the game to make way for Sione Mata’utia at fullback.

This is a frustrating, overcomplicated and downright ineffective tactic.

For a number of years Gidley has been part of Newcastle’s spine, and he has a great deal of respect from his teammates and the coaching staff.

But it’s becoming clear that he needs to move from a shot caller to a support player.

Gidley often over calls his halves for the ball, only to make a poor decision when he gets it in his hands.

The halves, Jarrod Mullen and Tyrone Roberts, seem to lose confidence and refuse to back themselves when Gidley is calling the shots.

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No one can doubt Gidley’s commitment to the Knights, but in his effort to do everything himself he makes a lot of errors.

But despite all this Gidley does have a place in the Knights’ top 17 – as an impact lock/second row coming off the bench.

Gidley has the ability to break tackles, make tackles, throw offload and play the ball at the line – all attributes which would make him an excellent impact backrower.

He’s also one of the fittest blokes in the NRL, and holds the Knights’ record in the beep test. In fact, he has broken his own record a number of times.

Compare his offensive career stats to those of Luke Lewis, who has also been slapped with the same utility tag for much of his career. Like Gidley, he has been forced to play a number of positions, from fullback to forward.

Gidley: Games 236, metres per game 101, tackle busts 480, offloads 297

Lewis: Games 242, metres per game 82, tackle busts 385, offloads 173

Gidley also averages more tackles a game (18.3 v 17.4), less missed tackles (2.3 v 2.9) and has a better effective tackle percentage than Lewis (85.1 v 80.6).

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Yet despite this, Lewis is still considered an Origin and Test player, but Gidley is not.

Why?

Because of the amount of errors Gidley makes – he’s made a whooping 349 errors compared to Lewis’ 246.

This season alone he already has four times as many errors as Lewis does.

He simply tries too hard to make things happen when they aren’t on and as a result makes a ridiculous amount of errors.

If Rick Stone is serious about turning the Knights into final contenders, he needs to bite the bullet and put Gidley on the bench to inject into the game when his team is lagging.

Kurt Gidley is a work horse. As one of the fittest players in the competition he should be used like that, tackling his little red and blue heart out so other players a fresh when the game is on a knife edge.

Think back to Game 3 of the 2010 State of Origin series.

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Gidley started from the bench and came on to replace Michael Ennis after 30 minutes – and went on to play the rest of the game in various positions.

Just before half-time, Gidley set up an inside pass for Paul Gallen, who crash over for New South Wales’ first try of the game.

In the 47th minute, Kurt scored the next try for the Blues which narrowed the point deficit to just one.

He continued to make several linebreaks and defended strongly. He was later awarded the Brad Fittler Medal for NSW’s player of the series.

Gidley was used perfectly in the game and demonstrated all the skills that would make him the ultimate impact player – setting up tries, scoring tries, making breaks and defending like a man possessed.

If Stone moves Gidley to the it opens up room for Sione Mata’utia at fullback, or alternatively Dane Gagai could be given a shot at the custodian role (where he played his junior football) and Mata’utia could slot in a centre.
I strongly opposed the appointments of each of the three blind mice, Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers to their posts overseeing our nation’s finances. With Summers gone, the other two need to follow. Bernanke has now thrown his support to allowing criminal Banksters to continue to steal people’s homes using illegal foreclosure procedures and other practices so deceptive that they would make a robber baron blush.

Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry ou et improper foreclosures. The FDIC supports such rules, according to an FDIC official involved in the dispute. The new regulations would rein in debt collection, loan modification and foreclosure proceedings at bank divisions called "mortgage servicers." Servicers have committed widespread fraud in the foreclosure process. While the recent robo-signing of fraudulent documents has received the most attention, consumer advocates have complained about improper fees and servicer mistakes that lead to foreclosure for years. "Given that we’ve seen a massive failure in servicing practices and a massive failure to address servicing in an honest way, I think this is important," says Joshua Rosner, a managing director at Graham Fisher & Co., and longtime critic of the U.S. mortgage system… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

The article goes on to analyze the abuses and the conflict in far greater detail, so I recommend clicking through to read the entire piece.

Geithner has not yet weighed in on the issue.
Criticize cops involved in the G20 debacle? We can now expect to be arrested and face criminal prosecution.

Forget a civil defamation suit—two members of the Ontario Provincial Police, aided and abetted by the Crown Attorney’s office, have chosen the nuclear option, charging a Kitchener activist with criminal defamation.

(More here. Needless to say, this latest assault on the right to dissent has not received much coverage in the corporate media.)

From the Waterloo Record:

Dan Kellar, 29, was recently charged with two counts of defamatory libel by officers in the OPP anti-rackets squad as he left his Kitchener home on a bicycle. He was also charged with counsel to assault one of the officers. Police allege he published comments likely to injure the reputation of the officers by exposing them to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that were designed to insult the officers. …Kellar says the officers who arrested him are from the same unit that arrested other AW@L members and activists in connection with G20-related allegations. “The cop who arrested me is the one who’s making all the arrests for conspiracy cases,” he said. He said police agents began infiltrating activist groups before the summit. The two undercover officers joined AW@L [Anti-War at Laurier, a campus peace group], but were kicked out in the spring of 2010, before the summit, because activists didn’t feel comfortable around them, he said. …The defamatory libel charges were laid against Kellar after he put out a “community alert” on AW@L’s website, peaceculture.org. Kellar learned one of the officers had been spotted in Toronto, and, “sent out the warning…’suspected infiltrator police agent spotted in Toronto,’” he said. In the posting, he made comments police allege are defamatory.

Here’s the Criminal Code provision, rarely invoked in this country—until now, I guess:

298 (1) A defamatory libel is matter published, without lawful justification or excuse, that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published. Mode of expression (2) A defamatory libel may be expressed directly or by insinuation or irony (a) in words legibly marked on any substance; or (b) by any object signifying a defamatory libel otherwise than by words.

Note that the bar for a successful criminal conviction (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) is considerably higher than for a successful civil action (“balance of probabilities”).

Kellar’s words might exceed current legal boundaries, although they don’t seem to me to be much more heated than many of the public comments that erupted in the aftermath of the G20 police riot. And, given a recent court ruling, young Kellar may have an ironclad defence in any event—at least for now.

I must at this point remain sceptical of the OPP’s motives: “outing” an undercover officer, with a photo, is more likely at the root of this remarkable arrest. But the latter sets a disturbing precedent for those of us critical—sometimes harshly so—of police actions during the G20, and elsewhere.

For good measure, Kellar has also been charged with counselling assault on a police officer:

He also invited people to “spit in the footsteps” of the officer if they saw him. For that, he is charged with counselling to assault.

Now, hold on a sec. Not “spit on the officer,” but “spit in [his] footsteps,” the rhetorical opposite of “worship the ground he walks on,” something that too many police officers appear to expect from a compliant, forelock-tugging citizenry. Last I heard, footsteps are not part of the body, and are not protected by the Criminal Code.

If this is the rock upon which the Crown is to build a case of counselling assault, one can only wonder at the strength of the criminal libel case, and whether this is simply punishment by process.

But in a free society, we shouldn’t have to wonder.
Organ designers, chief drone experience designers, cybernetic director. Those are some of the fanciful new roles that could be created by the global design industry in the next few years.

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But what about current design roles? How will they favor over the next 15 years? Will every company by 2030 have a chief design officer, or will they all go extinct? Should a generation of creatives who grew up worshipping Apple’s Jonathan Ive put all their eggs in the industrial design basket? We talked to a dozen design leaders and thinkers from companies such as Frog, Artefact, and Ideo to find out which design jobs could die out in the next 15 years, and which could grow. There’s no empirical evidence behind these picks, so they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Still, they represent the informed opinions of people who get paid to think about the future. Design Jobs That Will Die UX Designers

User experience designers are among the most in-demand designers working today. So how could their jobs disappear? According to Teague designers Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, Matt McElvogue, “UX design” has become too broad and muddled. “The design community has played fast and loose with the title ‘UX designer,'” they write in an email. “From job posting to job posting and year to year, it jumps between disparate responsibilities, tools, and disciplines. Presently it seems to have settled on the title representing democratized design skills that produce friendly GUIs.” In the future, they predict that UX design will divide into more specialized fields. “The expanding domain of user experience and its myriad disciplines will push the title ‘UX designer’ to a breaking point, unbundling its responsibilities to the appropriate specialists,” they say. Visual Designers

Visual designers are the ones responsible for the way an app looks. UX designers, meanwhile, are the ones who concentrate on how it feels. A lot of times, designers do both, but going forward, jobs that require just visual design skills are going to die out. That’s according to Charles Fulford, Executive Creative Director of Elephant, the San Francisco-based, Apple-centric stealth arm of the digital agency Huge. “Gone are the days of UX dumping a ton of wireframes on visual designers,” he says, as well as “the days of visual designers being clueless about usability.” What are needed instead are designers who can not only come up with the look of an idea, but make it real, with actual programming and prototyping skills. Rob Girling, cofounder of the design consultancy Artefact, agrees. “In the next 10 years, all visual design jobs will start to be augmented by algorithmic visual approaches,” he says. After all, design companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to create previously impossible algorithmic designs, as well as crunch UX data on millions of users. “An AI-powered tool can automatically provide a designer with 100 variations of a layout, based on some high-level template, or style definition . . . We see early versions of these algorithmic procedurally generated tools already in use by game designers.” For example, the 17 billion planet universe in the recent blockbuster video game No Man’s Sky was largely generated algorithmically. The short version? If you’re a visual designer, it’s time to diversify.

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Design Researchers

“When ethnographic research was new in design, there were designers who specialized in research,” explains Harry West, CEO of Frog. “The role of design researcher is now evolving to become a fundamental skill and practice for all types of designers. Today, for any design challenge, it is assumed that you first learn what the customer wants; every designer must know how to set up customer research and learn from the source.” Consequently, no one needs a dedicated design researcher anymore. “The role is so fundamental that every designer should know how to do it,” says West. John Rousseau, executive director at Artefact, puts a finer point on it: New technologies like machine learning and virtual reality are killing design research. “Design research as we know it may cease to exist—at least in terms of the types of ethnographic field work we do today,” he says. “Research—-and researchers—-will likely be marginalized by new forms of automated data and insight generation, compiled via remote sensing and delivered through technologies like virtual reality.” Traditional Industrial Designers

Most designers we asked predictably thought their own fields had rosy prospects. Not Markus Wierzoch, industrial design director at Artefact. He says that classically trained industrial designers who remain too attached to the “industrial” parts of their profession–in other words, overly focused on the sculptural look of a product–will become, in his words, “designosaurs.” “More than ever before, industrial design cannot exist in a vacuum,” he writes. The issuer is that form no longer follows function and function only–software is also involved. That means industrial designers in the future will need to evolve to think about the total end-to-end user experience, a role Wierzoch calls the “post-industrial designer.” (More on that below.) Doreen Lorenzo, director of integrated design at UT Austin, also sees the role of the classically trained industrial designer dying off soon. “In the future, all designers will be hybrids,” she says. Chief Design Officers

“This is a trend as of late: to have an executive-level design figurehead,” says Sheryl Cababa, associate design director, Artefact. But that role might–and should–die, because it’s redundant. “Good design is, fundamentally, interdisciplinary, which means that in a company that is design-oriented, all executives will be design practitioners, and the chief design officer position will vanish as quickly as it came.”

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CEO Tim Brown echoes the idea that design will be embedded at the executive level, although he doesn’t necessarily think CDOs themselves are going to die out. “Business is moving from a long period where analytical skills were of extreme value in the search for efficiency, to one where creative and design skills will be essential to deal with complexity, volatility, and the requirements for constant innovation… CEOs will need to be designers in order to be successful.” Design Jobs That Will Grow Virtual Interaction Designers

Virtual and augmented reality is set to become a $150 billion industry by 2020, disrupting everything from health care to architecture. UT Austin’s Doreen Lorenzo thinks that more user interface designers will start strapping themselves into Oculus Rifts and becoming VI designers. “As more and more products become completely virtual–from chatbots to 3D projections to immersive environments–we’ll look to a new generation of virtual interaction designers to create experiences driven by conversation, gesture, and light,” she writes. Specialist Material Designers

Yvonne Lin of 4B Collective believes that in the near future, there will be a growing need for designers who can work in and across different types of materials. For example, she sees bamboo architects as being an up-and-coming design field, as the Western world embraces “the possibilities of a weight-bearing material that can grow three feet in 24 hours and can be bent, laminated, joined, and stripped,” as Asia has. She also says that designers who can sew will soon be in hot demand to create structural soft goods. What’s a structural soft good? Think of the kind of things MIT’s Neri Oxman designs, or wearables that are as much tech as textile: a blend of circuit boards and fabrics, like Google’s Project Jacquard. “Today, there is a skill and knowledge gap between the soft- and hard-good world. Very few people know how to work in both,” she says. “The intelligent mixing of fabrics (for comfort) and plastics and metals (for structure and function) would have significant benefits for health care and sports products. As people live longer and as sports participation increases the demand for these more comfortable and higher performance products will increase.” Maybe even tomorrow’s Air McFlys. Algorithmic/AI Design Specialists

Fifteen years down the road, few of the designers we spoke to were afraid that a robot or algorithm would take their jobs. Though “applied creativity is fundamentally hard to codify,” as Artefact’s Rob Girling says, artificial intelligence will create new design opportunities–so much so that Girling and other designers we spoke to think that AI and algorithms represent growing field.

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“Human-centered design has expanded from the design of objects (industrial design) to the design of experiences (adding interaction design, visual design, and the design of spaces) and the next step will be the design of system behavior: the design of the algorithms that determine the behavior of automated or intelligent systems,” argues Harry West at Frog. For example, designing the algorithm that determines how an autonomous vehicle makes the right human-centered decisions in an unavoidable collision. “The challenge for the designers is to tie the coding of algorithms with the experiences they enable.” Post-Industrial Designers

“As every object becomes connected–from your couch to your fitness bracelet, the hospital room to your wallet–we need to think about connected experiences,” says Artefact’s Markus Wierzoch. “[These] offer much broader value propositions, which means we need to change the [design] processes used to define these objects beyond their immediate form and function.” Enter the postindustrial designer. Postindustrial designers will need to think of the total end-to-end user experience to build “tangible experiences that connect the physical and digital worlds,” Wierzoch says. For example, the designer of the future, charged with designing an electrical toothbrush, will need to make sure their toothbrush can connect to an app, give users brushing stats, as well as plug into the future smart home. It’s just not enough to design something that cleans your teeth well anymore. “Someone has to be responsible to stitch complex experiences together,” Argodesign’s Mark Rolston says. Design Strategists

Design researchers may find fewer opportunities in the next 15 years, but Artefact’s John Rousseau thinks design strategists will be indispensable. “The importance of design strategy will grow,” he says. “Future design strategists will need the ability to understand and model increasingly complex systems”–for example, social media networks or supply chains–“and will design new products and services in a volatile environment characterized by continuous disruption and a high degree of uncertainty.” In other words, a future defined by political, social, business, and tech disruption that can happen overnight. In such a future, Rousseau says, design strategists will be like ballerinas, dancing their companies in and out of trouble. “It will be more of a dance, and less of a march.”

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The Most Important Design Jobs Of The Future

3 Things UX Designers Can Learn From Industrial Design

UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry Organization Designers

The org chart of the future isn’t going to be the same as the org chart of the past. That’s why Ideo partner Bryan Walker thinks dedicated organization designers will be on hand, helping make companies more “adaptive, creative, and prolific.” These designers, he says, “will help reimagine all aspects of an organization from its underlying structures, incentives, processes, and talent practices to its physical workplaces, digital collaboration tools and communications. “ Freelance Designers

Get used to working in your pajamas. According to Teague’s Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, and Matt McElvogue, the future of design is freelance. “Creative AI and global creative marketplaces will give individual designers on-demand access to skill sets previously only capable within large teams,” they write. “The result is a surge in the specialization, efficacy, and independence of the designer.” In their vision, freelancers won’t just toil away in solitude, they’ll form a “network of targeted micro-consultancies” that compete with more traditional firms. Have something to say? Drop us a note at CoDTips@fastcompany.com. Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article misstated that IDEO’s Tim Brown thought Chief Design Officers were on their way out. [Illustrations: vasabii/iStock] Related Video: From Apple To Zara, Designers Like To Steal. So What?
By Chris Stone

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Ralph Keeling and Lynn Talley of Scripps Institution of Oceanography aren’t household names. But they lent their scientific weight Saturday to an event that attracted a reported 15,000 people downtown.

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While Washington’s March for Science commanded most media attention, San Diego’s walk gave the area’s scientific community a more accessible public face as members called for stronger support from policy-makers.

At one point in the rally, the call went out to scientists to identify themselves. Many hands rose.

A typical chant: “What do we want? Science! When do we want it? After peer review!”

Signs reflected a wide range of issues, including global warming, medical research, vaccination and proposed budget cuts.

The San Diego March for Science was one of hundreds in the United States and worldwide marking Earth Day to raise awareness of the contributions of science to society, and the importance of supportive public policy, organizers said.

The event kicked off with remarks from area scientists at the Community Concourse in the Civic Center complex next to City Hall, followed by the march down Broadway to the Waterfront Park outside the County Administration Center.

Marchers carried signs saying “build science not walls,” “ice has no agenda it just melts,” “we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” “there is no planet B,” “no science? no beer,” “climate change is real,” “science rocks,” and “science makes America great,” among many others.

The march received support from both UC San Diego and Balboa Park’s Fleet Science Center.

In Los Angeles, the LAPD estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people made the trek from Pershing Square to City Hall starting at 11 a.m.

In pre-march remarks, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, criticized the Trump administration. “Policy should be guided by scientific consensus. Scientific facts not `alternative facts,”‘ he said. “Donald Trump can’t stop global warming just by emitting an unprecedented volume of hot air.”

California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon brought up immigration during remarks at City Hall. “One-half of our scientists in California today are immigrants.”

The group also heard from Martha Dina Arguello, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles. “Today the Cold War is over and the nuclear threat is not,” she said. “There is no meaningful medical response to a nuclear war” except disarmament.

— City News Service contributed to this report.

Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Dr. Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography spoke to thousands at San Diego Civic Center Plaza. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone A march coordinator speaks to thousands gathered for the March For Science. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone Thousands took part in the San Diego March for Science through the streets of downtown. Photo by Chris Stone A cutout of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson moves above the crowd in the San Diego March for Science. Photo by Chris Stone

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Toronto police are trying to identify a woman caught on security camera vandalizing a luxury sedan in the city's west end on the weekend.

Investigators say the Sunday morning incident marked the third time this year that the car's owner has had a vehicle vandalized.

A security video released by police, a woman in a baseball cap with a red bandana over her face is seen running up to a Lincoln MKS in the driveway of a home near Glenholme Ave. and Rogers Rd.

She then scratches the hood and sides of the car extensively with a sharp object.

"Obviously [the car owner] was targeted, because it's only his vehicle that's been damaged on the street," said Det.-Const. Jay Dabu.

Police have not established that the woman in the video is responsible for all three incidents at that address, but Dabu said it is "more than likely" that the car owner and the vandal know each other.

The car owner is scheduled to come to Toronto police 13 Division for the vehicle's damage to be assessed.

"I'm no body shop guy, but it's probably at least a couple of thousand [dollars' worth] if I'm not mistaken," Dabu said.

The woman in the video is described as white, between five-foot-two and five-foot-five, with a thin build and brown hair.
John Schnatter, the founder and CEO of nationwide pizza chain Papa John's, traveled to Tennessee this past weekend to attend the funeral of an employee who had been shot and killed during a store robbery.Gordon Schaffer, 22, was working the late shift at the Papa John's location in Columbia, Tennessee on October 21 when armed robbers entered the restaurant and ordered Schaffer to empty the cash register. Schaffer complied, but was shot by one of the suspects, and died before medics could transport him to a hospital.Schaffer's funeral was held on October 25 in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and was attended by family and friends with the Papa John's CEO making an unexpected appearance."We never once imagined that this would touch anyone high up in the Papa John's corporate office, let alone, John Schnatter. He was visibly distraught when speaking to my family about the tragic loss of my brother and it was apparent that he didn't come just to pay lip service," Devan Cronin, Schaffer's oldest sister, wrote on Facebook.Papa John's also covered the expenses of Schaffer's funeral and medical costs. Darious A. Fitzpatrick was arrested on Wednesday for killing Schaffer, and also faces charges related to the robberies of two Dollar General stores earlier in October, according to News 2 ABC Nashville.
Teams ranked Nos. 1 through 32, as voted on by a panel of 13 NFL.com and NFL Network experts. Total points based on 32 points for a first-place vote through one point for a 32nd-place vote. Don't agree with the experts? Create your own rankings.

Rank Team W - L 1st Votes Last Votes Points 1 1 Houston Texans 3-0 13 - 416 2 1 Atlanta Falcons 3-0 - - 396 3 2 San Francisco 49ers 2-1 - - 379 4 2 Baltimore Ravens 2-1 - - 374 5 4 New York Giants 2-1 - - 362 6 8 Arizona Cardinals 3-0 - - 361 7 New England Patriots 1-2 - - 329 8 4 Green Bay Packers 1-2 - - 309 9 7 Seattle Seahawks 2-1 - - 294 10 5 Philadelphia Eagles 2-1 - - 285 11 1 Chicago Bears 2-1 - - 283 12 3 Dallas Cowboys 2-1 - - 277 13 5 Denver Broncos 1-2 - - 262 14 5 Pittsburgh Steelers 1-2 - - 261 15 5 Cincinnati Bengals 2-1 - - 244 16 5 San Diego Chargers 2-1 - - 234 17 2 New York Jets 2-1 - - 194 18 5 Detroit Lions 1-2 - - 182 19 4 Buffalo Bills 2-1 - - 181 20 7 Minnesota Vikings 2-1 - - 175 21 4 Washington Redskins 1-2 - - 153 22 1 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 1-2 - - 150 23 5 Carolina Panthers 1-2 - - 128 24 5 Kansas City Chiefs 1-2 - - 104 25 3 Tennessee Titans 1-2 - - 94 26 4 New Orleans Saints 0-3 - - 90 27 4 Oakland Raiders 0-3 - - 88 28 4 St. Louis Rams 1-2 - - 74 29 3 Miami Dolphins 1-2 - - 62 30 2 Jacksonville Jaguars 1-2 - 1 58 31 6 Indianapolis Colts 1-2 - - 55 32 1 Cleveland Browns 0-3 - 12 14

Voters in the NFL.com Power Poll: Gil Brandt, Bucky Brooks, Charley Casserly, Heath Evans, Daniel Jeremiah, Michael Lombardi, Willie McGinest, Shaun O'Hara, Gregg Rosenthal, Darren Sharper, Kurt Warner, Brian Webber, Steve Wyche.
Sheffield United Football Club announces today (Tuesday) that HRH Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has become joint owner of the Club.

Click here to download an Arabic version of this announcement.

Prince Abdullah has secured a 50% interest in Blades Leisure Ltd, the holding company for Sheffield United FC, in return for which he will invest substantial new capital into the club with the aim of working with current owner Kevin McCabe and his family to achieve the Blades' return to the Premier League as quickly as possible.

The Prince becomes Co-Chairman with Kevin McCabe of Blades Leisure and Sheffield United.

Prince Abdullah, aged 47, is a grandson of the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz. He is a passionate football supporter and is former President of Al Hilal FC, the largest and most successful club in Saudi Arabia. He is also Chairman of Saudi Arabia's Football Privatisation Committee.

Prince Abdullah is a prominent Saudi businessman and industrialist. He is the founder and Chairman of the publicly-listed Saudi Paper Manufacturing Group, the largest paper tissue manufacturer in the Middle East. He is active in other fields in the services and investments sectors in Saudi Arabia, and internationally. He travels extensively and works with other prominent businessmen from around the world to promote trade, goodwill and understanding through sport between Saudi Arabia and other countries.

Prince Abdullah said: "I am delighted to invest in such a sensibly-organised, family and community club with a great history and heritage. Joining Sheffield United FC at a time close to its 125th year in existence is significant to me and, like Kevin, I am determined to see it achieve its goals and look forward to working with the whole Blades community. However, money will be spent judiciously, and in any case we must comply with the Salary Cost Management Protocol."

Kevin McCabe said: "We are thrilled to be building this new partnership for Sheffield United with Prince Abdullah, who shares our vision for the Blades to join the top tier of English football. The McCabe family remains wholly committed and over the past 10 years has invested more than £90 million in rebuilding our fine and proud Club, which now has a top-class stadium, academy and junior development centre."

The boards will also see new directors in Abdulraham Bin Abdullah (the Prince's son), James Phipps (the Prince's principal advisor) and Selahattin Baki (a highly regarded Turkish businessman and General Manager of Premier Paper Converting Company, which manufactures consumer tissue paper products in Izmit, Turkey).

London and Dubai-based specialist consulting firm Forticap acted as the sole arranger for the transaction.
Yesterday I received my Ephemera January Subscription Box! This is a brand new indie subscription box from the indie brand Aromaleigh. I have purchased from Aromaleigh in the past and was very pleased with the products I bought, the inspiration behind their themes, and their fast TAT. The Ephemera Subscription has limited slots so I'm very happy I was able to snag one!

Here is some addition information about the sub from Aromaleigh's website:

Ephemera is a word of Greek origin that signifies something being of a short-lived nature, making it a perfect name for this offering. Each month will include a range of mini jar sizes of brand new, exclusively curated products, featuring a specific theme. Boxes will also include a sneak peek (or peeks) from upcoming product releases. The themed subscription products are exclusive to your monthly box, meaning that they will not be available at a later date for non-subscription members to purchase.

My box shipped on January 2 and arrived on the 5th. The price of the subscription is $17.99 with shipping for domestic subscribers.

* Disclaimer: All products purchased with my own money unless otherwise stated. Thoughts and opinions are 100% my own. *

This month's theme was Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I happen to love both the books and the films so I was happy with this theme! Not included in this photo is the sample perfume vial from Ten Three Labs, a sample blush from an upcoming Aromaleigh collection, and some candy that didn't survive the wait for swatches :P

I think the packaging and labels of the products are cute. When I got it, this box was wrapped in a pretty ice blue bow. The box comes with a shadow guide explaining the products received and monthly theme.

From left to right: The White Witch, 100 Years of Winter, Pale as Icing Sugar, Enchanted Turkish Delight (swatched heavily, blended out).

From left to right: The White Witch, 100 Years of Winter, Pale as Icing Sugar, Enchanted Turkish Delight (swatched heavily, blended out).

The White Witch is a pale aqua shimmer with gold duochrome. I am always drawn to shades like these, they are just so pretty! Reminds me of Notoriously Morbid's Wayward Son. This color would pair well with the new shadow very well.

100 Years of Winter is a smooth greened brown with white sparkles. Very accurate description, the white sparkles can almost look duochromatic at times. I can see his shade being used in conjunction with a lot of different shades so I feel like I'll get a lot of use out of this one as a crease shade to deepen up looks.

Pale as Icing Sugar is a metallic purple-leaning taupe. Here I've swatched it two ways as it is described as a multi-use product from shadow or face highlight. I particularly like how it looks blended out so I'm excited to try it out as highlight shade. I can see medium-deep skin tones using this as a very easy inner corner highlight shadow.

Enchanted Turkish Delight is described as a winter berry with a teal glow. I didn't really see the teal glow in real life or in these photos but it still is a pretty blush. It's one of those shades that makes me you look naturally flushed, like you have been outside in the cold.

In my box I also recieved samples from two guest brands - Ten Three Labs and Dreamworld Hermetica. I am a huge fan of Dreamworld so I was excited to see they would be participating this month. I got a clamshell sample of their new liquid lipstick.

Witches Heart is a metallic burnt orange with pink shimmer. THIS SHADE IS SO PRETTY! Such an interesting lipstick shade. I haven't tried it on my lips yet but I'm so stoked to test it out. It was actually quite difficult to get off my arm so I get the impression that it may have a longer wear time.

Final Thoughts: I really enjoyed the concept behind this month's box. The eyeshadows were all fairly cool-toned which went with the theme well. My favorites were Pale as Icing Sugar and the lipstick sample. I may pass along The White Witch as I have several similar shades. If I'm being completely honest, I wasn't wowed by this month's box but I am looking forward to next month's sub box. I know Aromaleigh does some amazing duochromes and purples so I hope we will see some more of those in the next coming months!
Well, that reality stands true even today. Kejriwal is still the leader of a city (which lusts for free bijli, paani, and wi-fi), and the recent revolts within AAP, and all that dirty linen being washed out openly in public by AAP, shows his sheer inability to take everyone together. That is precisely why Shanti Bhushan said that he lacks organizational ability and should not be a Chief Minister. His prophecy is becoming true within the very forst month. Just ten days after Kejriwal boastfully sermonized to others that AAP workers should not have 'ahankaar' (while at the same time branding BJP and Congress as 'ahankaari' parties), it comes out that the most 'ahankaari' guy in AAP is he himself as he cannot tolerate any other founder member in AAP attaining some status within the party. When AAP's own pet 'Lokpal' pointed out the one-man-one-post rule being violated by Kejriwal, and objected to his holding dual posts, he was brushed aside by Kejriwal and his coterie. What does this show? It only shows that all that talk of Jan Lokpal by Kejriwal and his coterie was a plain bluff to milk Anna Hazare's ideals to gain power in Delhi. Can someone who brazenly insults own party Lokpal ever be trusted to work towards a national Jan Lokpal?
Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. Check them all out!

Introduction

As you know, I love my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. Since I bought it, I’ve been wanting to purchase one of the UniFi wireless APs ever since I saw the Ars Technica review of them. I ended up picking up the UniFi AC Pro on a Black Friday deal on Jet.com.

The UniFi AP itself does not have a web interface (however, you can SSH to it). To manage the APs, you need to use the UniFi controller software. The software is only needed for the initial setup, and can then be turned off afterwards (which means you can do the setup on your laptop, then disable the software after the initial setup). However, if you want to enable statistic gathering or guest portal, the controller software needs to be running at all times. The controller software is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, which means it’s perfect to run on a small Linux server (like a Raspberry Pi 3).

Controller setup

Installation

I’m going to assume you’re running this on a Raspberry Pi 3, running Raspbian. However, any Debian-based distribution should follow the same instructions.

First, we need to add the repository to apt.

echo "deb http://www.ubnt.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/100-ubnt.list

Note – You can also specify the version of UniFi to use, as this commenter did, since the stable repository is still on v4. Thanks for submitting this!

Then, add the GPG key.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv C0A52C50

Next, update your repositories and install Unifi.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unifi

Now, start Unifi.

sudo systemctl enable unifi sudo systemctl start unifi

Finally, we need to disable MongoDB, since UniFi will run its own instance.

sudo systemctl stop mongodb sudo systemctl disable mongodb

Package hold

If you read around r/Ubiquiti and the UniFi forums, you’ll learn that the controller releases (and AP firmware) can be hit-or-miss. Because we’ve added the UniFi repository, every time we do a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade , we might update the UniFi controller software, even if we don’t want it updated. To get around this, we’ll hold back the unifi package from being updated automatically.

sudo apt-mark hold unifi

To verify it is held back, use dpkg.

sudo dpkg -l | grep ^h

Here, you can see the results.

hi unifi 4.8.20-8422 all Ubiquiti UniFi server

The h as the first character means the package is held, and the i as the second character means the package is currently installed.

If you ever need to remove the hold, use the command below.

sudo apt-mark unhold unifi

To check for a new release of the unifi package in the repository, use the command below.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-cache policy unifi

If there is a newer version, update to it manually.

sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade unifi

Oracle Java 8 (optional)

OpenJDK has been known to have performance issues on the Pi, so I’m running Oracle’s Java 8 instead. You can find your current Java packages with the command below.

sudo dpkg --get-selections |grep -e "java\|jdk\|jre"

If you try to find your Java version, you’ll probably be using OpenJDK.

--> java -version java version "1.7.0_111" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.6.7) (7u111-2.6.7-2~deb8u1+rpi1) OpenJDK Zero VM (build 24.111-b01, interpreted mode)

Start by installing Oracle Java 8.

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-jdk -y

Next, update your environment to use the new Java.

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Check your Java version again to make sure you’re on Java 8.

--> java -version java version "1.8.0_65" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_65-b17) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 25.65-b01, mixed mode)

Now, copy the systemd service file so we can edit it, then update it to point at the new Java location.

sudo cp -p /lib/systemd/system/unifi.service /etc/systemd/system sudo sed -i '/^\[Service\]$/a Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-arm32-vfp-hflt' /etc/systemd/system/unifi.service

Now, restart systemd and UniFi.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl restart unifi.service

Log rotation (optional)

Because I’m running the controller on a Raspberry Pi 3, I have limited space on the SD card. To make sure the log files don’t fill the card, I’m going to rotate them using logrotate. Credit to Kevin Burdett for this idea.

First, install logrotate.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install logrotate

Then, create the configuration file to rotate your UniFi and MongoDB logs.

sudo bash -c 'cat >> /etc/logrotate.d/unifi << EOF /var/log/unifi/*.log { rotate 5 daily missingok notifempty compress delaycompress copytruncate } EOF'

The logrotate options are explained below:

Rotate any files ending in /var/log/unifi ending in .log

Save 5 log files before deleting older files

Rotate the log files daily

If the log is missing, go onto the next one without error

Do not rotate the log if it is empty

Compress the log files (into gzip format)

Delay compression until the log file is rotated (so processes won’t be trying to log to a compressed file)

Truncate the original log file in place after creating a copy, instead of moving the old log file and optionally creating a new one

Access controller

You can now access the controller by going to the IP of your device, over port 8443.

https://<device_IP_here>:8443

If everything is working, you should see the setup wizard. Since there are many different ways to do the setup, I won’t be covering that here.

Controller alternatives

There are a few alternatives to running the controller software on the Raspberry Pi on your local network:

As mentioned earlier, run the controller software on your PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) for initial setup. You can either turn it off after the setup, or leave it running to gather statistics. Download the UniFi app (iOS or Android) to setup the AP. The app provides limited setup functionality, with more advanced options requiring the controller. Purchase the Unifi Cloud Key ($80). This device sits on your network and runs the controller software locally, but is accessible from anywhere at https://unifi.ubnt.com. Instructions are here. Run the controller in a VPS or AWS instance. See instructions here for installation and adoption.

Comparison

Here, you can see my signal strength on the old access point (TP-Link Archer C7 running OpenWrt Chaos Calmer) on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, respectively.

Then, the same measurements with the new UniFi access point. Again, on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, respectively.

Hope this helps!

Logan
At the risk of sounding arrogant, the one thing I can appreciate about myself is that I have no illusions about my shortcomings. I willing admit that my expectations of others can be high and sometimes even unrealistic, but for myself, I really just want people to accept me as I am. However, when you are as stubborn and as set in your ways as I am, you tend to get kicked in the rear by karma a lot. And you also run into the constant irritation of people trying to change you all the time.

I like to think of my karma as my wake up calls from God. Sometimes these calls are subtle in nature and only require a tiny poke for me to wake up and redirect myself. But more times than not, it takes a drastic, hard, swift, life altering kick in the ass to make me say “oh, that is what HE meant.” Here is the thing though, I don’t see anything wrong with it, nor would I do anything any different. I am a firm believer in “you made your bed, now lay in it” philosophy. If I mess up, than I mess up but on the same token, it is my responsibility to clean up after myself. Sure, I can try to prevent it but unfortunately, I’m just a permanent member of the hard head makes a soft ass club and that is just the way it is.

The beauty of where I am at in my life right now is that I am ensuring that this time around, when karma comes calling, I learn to not repeat these same errors. I do believe that life is all about falling and getting back up because it tests your faith and keeps it in check. Even if it takes 50 times to learn just 1 simple lesson, then so be it. Celebrate the accomplishment of learning the lesson and praise God for your new knowledge.

I remember the days of trying to be a perfectionist. I believed that term was something to aspire to and that you really had issues to resolve if you weren’t aspiring to it as well. Nowadays, I am more relaxed and I realize there are very few things I do perfectly and it’s not even a term I want to make applicable for myself. See, my biggest karma lesson from God has been ” you will never be perfect because that is reserved for ME.”

Thanking the Lord everyday that I realize my place, my purpose and most of all my limitations.

~ Mara Prose

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have a surprise next week for all my loyal readers. Those who are the most familiar with my writing want to start reading my short stories that I keep under lock and key. After much soul searching, I said why not. So beginning next week, my blog will begin to include short stories. Some of the short stories will begin and end within that blog and others will fall under the “to be continued” format and will evolve based on reader feedback in the comments section. I am very excited about this new format and I hope you will be too. Stay tuned!

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Socialism: Whether it was an accident or sabotage, the deadly explosion at Mexico's state-owned oil firm wasn't an unusual event. The one thing Thursday's incident at the Pemex tower should be is a spur to privatize.

Despite a much-publicized war against cartels, the real Mexico story is one of moderately good economic growth with zero net illegal emigration and a public sector financed by a budget showing a $1 billion annual surplus.

But then there's Pemex, the supposed symbol of national sovereignty, which in reality is nothing but a millstone around Mexico's neck holding the country back from far greater gains.

Pemex's many costs and debts are among the reasons why that $1 billion annual surplus is not $6 billion. It's also a big reason Mexico has $59 billion in debt. Its unionized 150,000-strong workforce is one of the least efficient, yielding an average of $506,000 of revenue per employee per year, far below the $2.865 million each employee at the top five international oil companies brings in, according to a Baker Institute study.

Less revenue, less investment, less safety. Oilmen will tell you every incident is different, and some accidents do occur at private firms of course. But the overall Pemex record speaks volumes, with comparable events at its installations in 2012, 2010, 2007, 1993 and 1984.

Even as Pemex costs the government, the government costs Pemex. Its earnings are effectively taxed at 60% to finance about a third of the government, leaving it miserably under-invested in its own production. Not surprisingly, Mexican oil production fell from 3.4 billion barrels a day in 2004 to about 2.5 billion a day in 2012.

"The government vacuums the cash flow out of this company like an Electrolux because they need to support the government and social services. Is that how a private company behaves? Of course not," noted Garfield Miller, president of Aegis Energy Advisors, who explained to IBD that private and public oil companies have different goals.

"When you are a government institution, almost by definition an instrument of social policy, your mission becomes inescapably broader than simply maximizing value for a narrow set of constituents" — as occurs with private oil companies that answer to shareholders.

The situation is so bad in Mexico that it cannot take advantage of its vast new deepwater discoveries in the Gulf, just as the U.S.' highly efficient private companies expand production on the U.S. side of the Gulf and the shale revolution increases production, as well.

Things are so dire that already Mexico is importing gasoline from the U.S. and by 2019 is expected to be importing oil. That's ironic for a country which by national lore considers oil a symbol of independence and has indoctrinated its people into believing it is therefore impossible to privatize.

Yet the hard facts worldwide show that privatized companies outperform public ones — in technology, production, profitability and safety.

The Baker Institute's 2007 "Empirical Evidence of the Operational Efficiency Of National Oil Companies" study impartially demonstrated that private companies operate better than public enterprises.

The objectively calculated study of more than 80 companies concluded that relative to economically efficient producers, a national oil company is likely to under-invest, over-employ, sell oil products at subsidized prices, and shift extraction of resources from the future to the present.

"Technical inefficiencies," the paper concluded, "are largely the result of governments exercising control over the distribution of rents."

It ought to be a lesson for Mexico, and yet it's not taking hold. Mexico's new President Enrique Pena Nieto ran for office on a promise to introduce reforms at Pemex that could lead to privatization. But he has already begun backtracking.

The explosion at Pemex's 51-story headquarters on Mexico City's skyline should be his wake-up call.
When you’re ready to give the green light on your explainer video project, you want to make sure that you choose the right company. Now, we know that our team is more than equipped to handle your production needs, but to be honest, we also have some pretty talented competitors. Here’s our list of the top 10 explainer video production companies to choose from (just in case we happen to pack up and move to Mars, you’ll have some good options).

Of course we are a bit biased here, taking the top spot and all, but we are just that confident in our abilities to produce killer videos. Our creative team is super talented, and dedicated to delivering exceptional productions that clients are more than happy to showcase.

We pay close attention to detail, and every script and animation is triple checked against a rigid set of quality standards. Here’s a cool video that we produced for Paramount Studios. Got a project you want to discuss? Click here.

Firestarter Video is an excellent production house based out of Hollywood, California. They have produced several explainer video’s for top companies including Magicjack and United Healthcare (UHC). Their work is known throughout the industry, and the creative team is just awesome. Here’s a neat little number that shows off their explainer video skills.

Argentina based Yum Yum Video is number three on our list because of their high quality productions, and impressive portfolio. They have produced explainer videos for companies covering all facets of business, and the work is crisp and effective. Yum Yum also features a helpful blog for anyone looking for information on video marketing in general. This explainer video is a shining example of their fine work.

Bread n Beyond has produced explainer videos for top companies including Paypal and Glass Door. Their work is beyond impressive, and they have the clientele to back up their credibility. With over 1,900 productions under their belt, it’s safe to say that clients are in good hands with this company. Here’s a sample of what you get with Bread n’ Beyond.

New York based Big Drop Inc. produces stunning explainer videos. The company has an extensive portfolio that includes several animated and non-animated explainer videos (and a killer website for clients to browse.) This short number is a prime example of just how well they produce whiteboard explainer videos.

mywebmobile.com from BigDropInc.com on Vimeo.

Demo Duck is an awesome video production house with plenty of social proof to back them up. With big names like Netflix, Lowe’s, and Capital One on their client roster, it’s more than safe to say that they’re at the top of their game in this business. Based in Chicago, the company employs a highly gifted team that prides themselves in creating “hand crafted” explainer videos. Here’s one of their masterpieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqRAIeMAuPo

Explainify is a solid company with excellent credentials. They have worked with several large businesses including Tyson and GE, and their productions are definitely top notch. Explainify is the kind of company that you can feel confident in knowing that your project is being handled with care. This explainer video shows just how professional and talented their team is.

Switch Video has a very talented in-house team and a serious portfolio. Their client roster includes companies like LinkedIn and HP, and Switch produces video in a variety of different styles. The Canadian based production house is certainly a force to be reckoned with, and has definitely carved themselves a fair share of the explainer video production marketplace. Here’s an awesome piece that they created.

Located in Sarasota Florida, Media Whale is a talented production agency with several explainer video’s under their belt. Their work is crisp and engaging, and it’s easy to see how they have become one of the top agencies in the business. Here’s an example of their high quality work, in this informative video produced for TurboTax.

Turbotax Explainer Video from Media Whale on Vimeo.

Cartoon Media is a production agency that prides itself in creating non “cookie cutter” type explainer videos for their clients. They work with customers in all facets of business, including some well known companies like Siemens and Cargill. Headquartered in the UK, Cartoon Media works with clients around the globe. Here’s one of their engaging explainer videos.

So there you have it, our top ten list of explainer video production companies. There were plenty of other agencies that could have made the list, but in terms of sheer quality, cost and social proof, these represent the best of the best.

Keep an eye out for our next list, and if you would like your agency to be featured, drop us a line and we’ll check out your work.
JOHN Carver insists he will NOT step aside at Newcastle United – even though he fears some players aren’t listening to him.

Carver’s side slipped deeper into the relegation mire after an eighth successive defeat to Leicester City at the weekend.

The performance at the King Power Stadium, where Newcastle were beaten 3-0, was one of the worst of the Premier League era.

And the loss left the club is just two points above third-from-bottom Sunderland, who have a game in hand.

Many fans want head coach Carver to be relieved of his duties before Saturday’s home game against West Bromwich Albion given his dire record as head coach.

But the odds are stacked against Steve McClaren, the frontrunner to take the job in the summer, taking charge for the final three games of the season, despite Derby County’s campaign having ended at the weekend.

I’m not going anywhere until someone comes to me and tells me otherwise. John Carver

For his part, Carver – who accused United defender Mike Williamson of getting sent off “on purpose” in Saturday’s 3-0 loss at the King Power Stadium – has no intention of stepping down.

“I’m not going anywhere until someone comes to me and tells me otherwise,” said Carver.

“I’m not a shirker, and I’m not going to hide from anyone. I’m going to stand there and take it, because I have to.”

Carver had a brief conversation with managing director Lee Charnley after the Leicester game.

He said: “I had a quick chat with Lee Charnley, but it was nothing serious.

“He was basically just asking how I was and how I was feeling. It was a nice, calm conversation.”

Newcastle have won just two of 16 league games under Carver, who took over from Crystal Palace-bound Alan Pardew at the turn of the year.

And, astonishingly, the 50-year-old has admitted that there is a chance some of his players simply are no longer listening to what he is saying on the training field and in the dressing room.

“If I’m honest, I have to admit there’s a chance they’re just not listening to me,” said Carver.

“That might be one factor of many, and you have to consider it. You have to consider it and take it into account.

“But it might be a lot of other things – we might not be good enough, we might not have enough desire to want to defend in the box or score at the other end.

“There’s lot of factors, but I won’t deny that (the players not listening) could be one of them.”

Meanwhile, Carver refused to talk about McClaren’s situation, only offering him “commiserations” over Derby’s failure to secure a play-off place.
Stuart, a 66-year-old man with diabetes, felt lousy—constantly fatigued, nauseated, and short of breath after just the slightest exertion. His daughter, worried by his increasing frailty, took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Her concern was amply justified: Stuart was suffering from heart failure. Like 5.1 million other Americans each year who suffer from heart failure, he was admitted to the hospital to treat this serious, often life-threatening condition. The caring medical team stabilized his condition, and Stuart left the hospital after 10 days, glad to be home with words of advice and a few medications. Within a month he was back, once again fatigued, and facing a second episode.

Stuart’s story is far from rare. Hospital readmissions for chronic conditions such as diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and congestive heart failure (CHF) are both common and very costly. Studies conducted in the United States indicate that nearly 20% of Medicare patients who are hospitalized for chronic conditions are often readmitted within 30 days. Experts at Edifecs indicate that it costs Medicare—and US taxpayers—about $26 billion a year, and often a large majority of these readmissions are actually considered avoidable with accurate prioritization and personalized care protocols. Readmission-related costs have become so onerous that the Affordable Care Act includes financial rewards and penalties to deal with the readmission problem. Hospitals that reduce their readmission rates receive financial incentives; those that do not, lose reimbursement and get penalized.

Holistic tools that can reliably predict heart-failure readmissions—taking into account all aspects of each patient’s condition and risk factors—would significantly help patients and hospitals. The growth in the use of electronic patient records has recently offered the potential for such analysis, but little had been done to harness the collective intelligence contained in hospital patient records augmented with other data sources.

By introducing cloud computing technology and applying some of the latest advances in machine learning techniques, researchers are rapidly changing this situation.

One leading example of this is RaaS (Readmission Score as a Service), a platform that was developed by the University of Washington (UW) Tacoma’s Center for Data Science. RaaS compares a patient’s medical information to a database of heart-failure outcomes, using advanced machine learning techniques to arrive at a risk-of-readmission factor as well as corresponding actionable guidelines for the patient-provider team. Those patients identified with a high risk receive additional treatment: the goal is to reduce their likelihood of readmission and produce overall healthier outcomes across all stages of the patient care continuum.

The hundreds of machine learning models of RaaS are developed by using both the R machine learning language, and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. This chronic care management predictive platform relies on historical patient data from multiple sources. These sources include anonymized electronic medical records, claims, labs, medications, and psycho-social factors, all labeled with observed outcomes that the machine learning models access and share in sync to provide continuous monitoring for personalized patient alerts.

RaaS is available as an on-premises service as well as via the cloud by using Azure Machine Learning web services and the Azure-based Zementis Adapa scoring engine to make predictions for patients. When deployed using Azure Cloud Services, RaaS performs data preparation at scale.

The UW Center for Data Science team began developing initial models in collaboration with MultiCare Health System in March 2012, using just two on-premises servers. The maintenance, frequent updates, and down times of these on-premises servers posed an ongoing problem, and scalability issues limited the scope of the project by affecting the speed of data exploration and machine learning.

About a year and a half ago, the team applied for and was awarded an Azure for Research grant, taking advantage of the Microsoft Research program that offers training and awards of computing resources to qualified institutions that use the cloud to advance scientific discovery. The award enabled the Center for Data Science team to scale up the project and create a robust prediction engine that generates a readmission risk factor score for patients at every stage of their hospital care: post-admission, pre-discharge, and post-discharge.

The RaaS platform at MultiCare Health enables the care management team to view an electronic dashboard that shows heart-failure patients’ risks of readmission. UW Medicine Cardiology is now collaborating with the Center for Data Science team to study the efficacy of predictive models for augmenting care management guidelines by using machine learning.

—Daron Green, Deputy Managing Director, Microsoft Research

—Gregory Wood, MD, UW Medicine Cardiology

Learn more
Assyrian Farmer in Turkey Attacked By Kurds

Iskandar Dayan, an Assyrian farmer in south-east Turkey who was attacked by Kurds, in hospital. (AINA) -- Iskandar Dayan, an Assyrian farmer living in south-east Turkey near the Syrian border, was attacked and severly beaten by twelve Kurds on November 16. Mr. Dayan was driving his tractor alone when approached by the twelve Kurds, whom he recognized as being from a neighboring Kurdish village. The Kurds beat him, breaking his jaw, and warned him to never cultivate his land.

Mr. Dayan was brought to a hospital in Diyarbakir. The Kurds were arrested by the police, but were set free after they were interrogated.

The attack is part of a wider pattern in which Kurds intimidate, threaten and attack Assyrians in order to take over their lands. Court cases relating to this problem abound in south-east Turkey, where Kurds, empowered by their sheer numbers and the support of PKK Kurdish militia, carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign against Assyrians.

The area in south-eastern Turkey, known in Assyrian as Turabdin, was inhabited almost entirely by Assyrians one hundred years ago. The genocide on Assyrians in 1915, the war with the PKK and Kurdish encroachment has sharply reduced the Assyrian population to a few thousand.
Another movie from the daily sketches series - another animal, this time a lot smaller :D On the movie I will show you how to draw such birdie from the very beginning to the end, maybe my techniques will become useful to you in your own creations. Also I'd like to encourage you to upload your drawings to YourWorks gallery (you can do that after logging in)! Lately few new drawings showed up and it makes me very happy :D Such small bird is a great exercise so watch the movie and try it out yourself!

Of course if you have any questions, I am waiting for comments, I'd be happy to give additional explanations.

..:: DOWNLOAD VIDEO-TUTORIAL ::..

The one for download is in much better quality, bigger resolution and without speed up, so you can see clearly what I am doing in each step. Just download it, watch and try to draw the bird yourself!

At first I just try to grasp the base shape, only after I can see it, I add new layer and sketch all the details. I am not trying to be very precise while drawing, sketch is a bit messy and lines are pretty chaotic but what counts is that all the elements are on correct places (like eye, beak and so on). Then on separate layers I paint base colors with hard brush. I just divide the whole drawing into few layers, trying to simplify it. Opacity of my sketch is lowered, because it was too disturbing. And I paint background with soft brush. Low opacity for the brush makes blending colors easier.

For each layer on which I've painted some base color with a hard brush, I add new layer and turn it into a clipping mask (you can do that by right-clicking chosen layer and picking this option from the menu). I also copy the sketch and turn it into a clipping mask too, so that I can use those lines while painting the bird. Parts of the sketch will become part of the painting. I color my birdie with a brush you already know from the previous tutorial, you can download it from HERE. You can see that sometimes I use very small brush and scribble something on bird's head, and sometimes I use bigger one, with smaller opacity and cover larger areas. With small elements (like beak) I mix colors with smudge tool.

Sometimes I use smudge tool on my base layer, to get rid of hard borderline or add small feathers on the edge. You can see those on bird's head and belly. Slowly more and more feathers are being added and sketch is finally rubbed into the painting. Bird is rather colorful - to make areas of one color not look artificial, I add small details of that color elsewhere. For example - I used some orange tones from bird's belly and painted small lines on the side or head, where you don't see orange at all. I do the same on the tail, where I used blue from the background to add light.

Painting the branch also starts with creation of new clipping mask for color. Those are very convenient since they let me forget about the edges and shapes, I can paint freely without worrying that I will paint over something or will have to erase edges once again. At first I just want to show cylindrical shape of the branch so I add dark color on the upper and bottom part. I also add some light green, so that my branch is not completely black and white. Last thing in this part is adding missing detail on the tail.

I start working on his legs - first color them in a dark color, so I can see them more clearly and then adjust the shape with smudge tool. Only after that I start adding some simple detail with lighter color, to make them less flat. I am not trying too hard for those, they are not a significant element of the drawing anyway. But it is crucial to remember about the shadow on the branch. Only because of that shadow our bird actually looks like it is standing on the branch and it's not just pasted on top of it. Then I add some simple bark detail, small dots and wrinkles.

I fix (with smudge tool again) edges on the base layer for the branch, so they are not that sharp and stiff. Then I color that thin branch on the edge of the picture. I use lots of blue tones this time, since I plan to blur it out and it should blend into the background nicely. Gaussian blur filter helps me out in this task - I use in on the base layer and on the clipping mask too. I make that last branch in the upper-right corner in the same way.

And that's it, drawing is finished. Download the movie if you haven't yet!
I believe it takes a lot of strength to have faith, but there is something that takes even more strength.

I was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. At the age of 8 years old I was baptized into the church and confirmed as a member. I wasn’t the most obedient, but for the most part I did what was expected of me. But then, at the age of 15 I began to question the doctrines that I had been taught since before I could even speak. I believed, as the church taught, that if I did what I was supposed to it would all be clear to me. I though that this doubt was coming from the devil. I believed that because I was dating when I shouldn’t have been, I let him into my life and allowed him to leave me astray. This doubt continued off and on for two years. After breaking up with my boyfriend, I was sure that I would gain clarity. I was doing what the Lord wanted me to do, he would bless me with the truth. But this never came. I began to google what I had been taught all my life was “anti-mormon” but when I did so, I was plagued with guilt. I would read for five minutes, exit out and delete my browser history. I continued as if I hadn’t read anything at all. I went to seminary, sacrament meeting, mutual, etc.. At this time in my life, guilt and confusion filled me.

It wasn’t until I left for school that I really started to look into what I had been taught my whole life. I visited mormonthink.com and /r/exmormon. I read the CES Letter. I stopped going to institute and Sunday meetings. I started to realize that what I grew up believing, was a con. The guilt and confusion I’d been feeling for the past 3 years floated away. That left room for anger, sadness, and worry. Initially, I was furious. I was partially angry at myself for being fooled, but mostly at the LDS church for fooling me and millions of others. I was devastated, I wanted so much to hold on to the church and its teachings. I wanted my dream of being married in the temple, because what girl doesn’t want to be married inside of a castle? At first, it scared me to realize that everything I thought I knew about life, was now a mystery to me. But most of all I was, and still am, worried. I know have a huge weight on my shoulders that will not be lifted until I tell my family of my disaffection. There is no doubt in my mind that they will not understand. They will believe that I have left because I want to “be of the world” and that I just want to sin. They will view me as weak for not having the kind of strength that is required to look past the things that led me away. I can’t blame them though… Four years ago I would have thought the same thing.

Yes, I believe that having faith does require a lot of faith… But in my mind, greater strength lies in admitting that you may have been wrong. Greater strength comes from leaving everything you were taught and accepting that maybe you don’t know everything about life. My strength has come from figuring out what I don’t believe, despite the disappointment I will cause my family. It isn’t easy to realize that you will never get to attend your siblings weddings, to know that there will always be a gap between you and your family. Yes, these things are hard to accept, but I wouldn’t go back because for the first time in my life I can actually be myself.
Three people you may have heard of—writer John Gruber, developer Brent Simmons, and designer Dave Wiskus—have joined forces to create Q Branch, an app development company whose first product is a $5 iPhone app called Vesper. The app, released Thursday, aims to help “collect your thoughts.”

Yes, it’s Yet Another iPhone Notes App. But it’s one that’s meticulously and tastefully designed—not surprising, coming from the principals of Q Branch. I’ve spent the past few weeks beta-testing the app, and in advance of the release I also talked to Gruber, Simmons, and Wiskus (all of whom have written for Macworld in the past) about what went into building it.

A notebook in your iPhone

There’s no shortage of notebook and reminder apps on iOS. I’ve used many of them, including Apple’s own Notes, Evernote, and a vast collection of text editors. And yet none of them has stuck for any length of time. The Q Branch group has had the same experience.

Vesper's full list view.

“I’d been waiting for [a note-taking app] I liked and wanted to use,” Simmons said. “That one just hadn’t appeared. There are good ones, for sure—but none that fit how I think and none that feel the way Vesper feels.”

I certainly can’t guarantee that I’ll stick with Vesper for the long haul, but I’ve been using it quite a lot for the past few weeks. The app’s core is a simple list of notes. Each note has a title, displayed in bold, with the first couple of lines displayed below it. Tap and hold to “pick up” a note and re-order the list in any way you like.

Tapping on a note enters the note editor. You can enter in as much text as you’d like, as well as attach a single image, which you can take directly from within Vesper or insert from your Camera Roll. Notes can be mailed, sent via message, or copied to the clipboard—there’s no syncing with other devices or any cloud-based sync services. Notes are organized via tags. Tap on the gray Tag button at the bottom of the note to add a tag, and a pretty orange pop-up will appear as you type, suggesting tags you’ve already entered.

Autocompletion of tags.

From the list view, you can tap the “hamburger” icon in the top left of the screen or just swipe from the left edge in order to display a filter list, which lets you limit the notes being displayed to those that contain a particular tag. There’s also an Archive list, where you can send old notes with a swipe.

Vesper doesn’t do much, but that’s the point. “We built it for ourselves,” Gruber said. “I think anyone who is like us—anyone who appreciates attention to detail, doing a few things really well instead of many things mediocrely—will love Vesper.”

Vesper's tag-filter list sidebar.

It’s visually striking. I like the typography (the app’s one and only body font is a custom-tweaked version of Hoefler and Frere-Jones’ Ideal Sans) and the design of the tags and the filter list. It’s simple enough not to get in my way with a lot of fiddly organizational features, but provides me with more structure than something like the Notes app. Tagging notes made a lot of sense—I immediately made Work, Writing, and Recipes tags. I commingled work notes, ideas for my novel, a favorite recipe for buttermilk biscuits, and an idea for my podcast without any trouble. Once I started treating it as the iPhone equivalent of a small paper notebook tucked into a pocket, it all began to fit.

That’s not to say there isn’t more to be done with the app. Syncing notes to other iOS devices (and perhaps a service like Dropbox) would be a natural, though I fear that any feature addition will make the app more cluttered, when simplicity is one of its real strengths. Too many fiddly feature additions and I’ll run screaming from it, just as I often do from Evernote.

The story of Q

Q is, of course, the mastermind who provides James Bond with all of his clever gadgets, as the leader of the British spy service’s Q Branch. (Vesper is the name of a cocktail invented by Bond as well as a pivotal character in Casino Royale.)

"Bond’s gadgets have always been at the intersection of utility and elegance," Gruber said. "That’s as good a motto for a software company as any."

“What I hope people pick up on is that in this scenario, we aren’t Bond,” Wiskus said. “We’re the people who make all the great tools for the agents to use.”

Here’s a look at the formation of Q Branch and the creation of Vesper in the words of its three creators.

Macworld: How did this project come about? When did you decide to work together? Did the idea for Vesper appear first, or did you decide to collaborate and then figure out what you wanted to build?

Simmons: Last year at Çingleton I talked to John and Dave about the three of us building an app, because it occurred to me that we’d make a great team, and I was looking for something new and awesome to do. John already had the idea for Vesper, but I didn’t know about it in advance.

Wiskus: Last summer, Justin Williams suggested that we work on an idea John mentioned to him. Justin had to drop out to keep up with freelance work, but I had completed a few iterations of design. When Brent pulled me and John aside in Montreal, we knew we wanted to work together but didn’t have anything in mind. I said, “Well, I have this idea of John’s I was working on,’ and showed them the early designs on my phone.

Gruber: Right. It was an old idea of mine from around 2009, but I had long ago figured I wouldn’t be able to build it myself, so over the years I had offered it to developer friends when they asked me if I had any ideas for apps. The difference with what we’ve done here is that I didn’t just contribute the idea, I was part of the team. I don’t consider ideas for apps all that valuable. It’s the implementation of an idea that matters.

Simmons: We talked it over, and decided pretty quickly that we’d build Vesper. Not long after that I decided to leave my then-current job and switch full-time to working on Vesper.

What was the division of labor on this project? What did John do, what did Brent do, and what did Dave do?

Simmons: I write code while Dave and John design. While I have input on design, it takes all my time keeping up with these madmen. Which I thoroughly enjoy. In the past I’ve designed my own software, though I didn’t necessarily do all the graphics. This is a very pleasant change for me—it’s great working with designers I trust, so I can concentrate on making those designs real. (Being a design-savvy engineer helps a ton.) I’m so proud of their work. Maybe they can’t say it, but I can: I think the design is hot. I love the way it looks and especially how it feels.

Wiskus: Our org chart is a Venn diagram, but simply: John and I would talk, then I would go draw pictures and give them to Brent. Then we’d all look at them, talk things through, try things out in implementation, and start the process over again.

"The last few years...have been the longest stretch in my life where I’ve done nothing new," Gruber said. "I had the itch."

John, what made you want to build an app?

Gruber: I didn’t seek it out. It’s Brent’s idea that we three would make a good team. But once he offered, I jumped at the chance. I’ve never worked with Brent before, but I’ve been using his software for over a decade now, and I’ve long been a beta tester on his stuff. I know his taste in software, and I know it matches mine. It sounded like fun, an opportunity I could not resist.

Secondarily, I’ve always tried to do new things. The last few years, where I’ve done nothing but write Daring Fireball, have been the longest stretch in my life where I’ve done nothing new. I had the itch.

The surprising part is how much designing for iPhone harkens back to my days doing print design. My earliest design work was print, and that was my first love. Of course as the years went on, I did more and more Web design and less and less print. And like everyone who made the switch from print to Web design, I bemoaned the lack of control. No control over the size of the canvas, severely limited selection of fonts, crude rendering resolution, etc.

The control and fidelity afforded by the iPhone—world-class fonts, high resolution output, control over the size and placement of everything on screen—made me feel right at home.

Vesper and Q Branch are James Bond references. Why the homage?

Gruber: Bond’s gadgets have always been at the intersection of utility and elegance. Serve a necessary purpose, reliably, and look good doing it. That’s as good a motto for a software company as any.

What does Vesper bring to the table that other apps don’t?

Gruber: A few things. For one, the design supports any size note, naturally. I have two-word notes, and 200-word notes. Vesper supports photo attachments, which few others do, and the ones that do tend to be complex, fussy apps. But the three big things are organization, prioritization, and feel.

With tags, I feel organized. I’ve got everything in my mind in Vesper. But with tags I can focus on just one area at a time. (E.g., I have a tag for articles I want to link to on Daring Fireball.)

With drag-and-drop reordering, I can keep important stuff at the top of my list. This drove me nuts in other notes apps, which sort by date. I’d always be opening week-old notes and adding meaningless changes, like an extra line at the end, just to get them to sort back to the top of my list. Vesper notes are like cards in a stack—it’s easy to move one to the top of the stack.

The last, feel, is the most subjective. But I think we’ve achieved something special with Vesper, where it feels both efficient and pleasing to use. I think this is more than just superficial. Our goal was to make it such that, if a quick little thought entered your head that you might want to put in Vesper, the appeal of using the app would push you over the edge to do it, to put it in Vesper rather than just keep it in your head. A complete reduction of friction.

Wiskus: Most apps of this type enforce some kind of philosophy. Some have books you need to read just to understand them. We wanted something that worked the way our brains did naturally.
Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter made a recent proclamation that grabbed the attention of the L.A. Times, but flew under the radar of most people in Idaho. On the same day that the federal government shut down and Idaho's new health exchange launched, Gov. Otter declared Oct. 1 "Aaron Paul Sturtevant Day".

WHEREAS, “Aaron Paul” first became a household name for his role as “Jesse

Pinkman” on the popular AMC series “Breaking Bad;” and WHEREAS, Aaron won two Emmy Awards for “Outstanding Supporting Actor in a

Drama Series” for his role in “Breaking Bad” in 2010 and 2012; and WHEREAS, anyone who watched Aaron Paul’s performance in “Breaking Bad”

witnessed the devastating, tragic impacts of methamphetamine use on individuals, and the

scourge that meth has become to our communities and society; and WHEREAS, Aaron Paul continues to be an ambassador for the State of Idaho throughout

the nation and is an inspiration to all Idahoans; NOW, THEREFORE, I, C.L. “BUTCH” OTTER, Governor of the State of Idaho, hereby

proclaim October 1, 2013, as Aaron Paul Sturtevant Day.

Aaron Paul Sturtevant, who goes by Aaron Paul, played the meth-cooking Jessie Pinkman in AMC's "Breaking Bad." The hit show's finale was Sept. 30, but the show's much-anticipated end wasn't the final word in Idaho. The governor's proclamation came two weeks after the Emmett-born actor rented out the Egyptian Theatre in downtown Boise for a screening of one of the final episodes.

According to Otter's spokesman Jon Hanian, a proclamation of this kind isn't unusual.

"He's obviously had great success in his chosen profession, winning accolades and honors for his role in 'Breaking Bad.' He speaks fondly of Boise and of the state and of his experience of growing up here," Hanian says.

Hanian says he's not sure if the governor is a fan of the show, but he says Otter wanted to recognize this "Idaho son," despite his living in L.A. for the past several years.

And for those who missed the feverishly hyped visit from Paul at the Egyptian, Bushmill's whiskey produced this video documenting it. The whiskey company sponsored his trip to the City of Trees, as Paul refers to Boise. In the video Paul sips whiskey with some friends and talks about his Idaho roots -- and "staying grounded" in Hollywood.
Photo

It is widely known that being overweight or obese is linked to an increased risk for cardiovascular and other diseases. Now a new study has found that even in young adults of normal weight, increases in body mass index also lead to increased risk.

Researchers studied 12,664 young adults, testing them for 32 gene variants known to be associated with higher B.M.I., and assigning a “gene score” to each depending on how many of the genetic variants they carried. By studying such a large population, they were able to separate genetic tendencies toward weight gain from other variables that may contribute to being overweight, such as diet, physical activity levels and socioeconomic status.

Elevated B.M.I. and numerous blood indications of metabolic risk closely matched higher gene scores, strongly suggesting that higher B.M.I. alone causes the increase in cardiovascular risk factors independent of fatty food consumption, exercise, smoking and other variables.

The study, online in PLOS Medicine, also analyzed 1,488 people who had metabolic profiles done after six years and found that increases in B.M.I., even within the normal range, led to extensive adverse metabolic changes, while modest weight loss led to multiple favorable changes.

“Our study in young adults shows that even a modest weight loss tends to improve the metabolic profile,” said the lead author, Peter Würtz, head of molecular epidemiology at the University of Oulu in Finland. “It doesn’t have to be a large change to have a beneficial role. Even with a normal B.M.I. of 24, it’s worth it to try to get it lower.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders attacked Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton over her record on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, during Thursday’s debate.

Sanders attacked Clinton’s previous promotion of natural gas saying, “[w]hen you were Secretary of State, you also worked hard to expand fracking to countries all over the world.”

Clinton admitted Sanders was correct, but stated during the CNN debate, “I don’t think I’ve changed my view.”

Clinton specifically claimed that “for both economic and environmental and strategic reasons, it was American policy to try to help countries get out from under the constant use of coal, building coal plants all the time, also to get out from under, especially if they were in Europe, the pressure from Russia, which has been incredibly intense. So we did say natural gas is a bridge.”

Clinton promoted fracking for natural gas in other countries during her tenure as secretary of state, saying in 2010, “[t]he United States will promote the use of shale gas.” The Department of State helped advise African and other world leaders on the benefits of fracking during her tenure, connecting them with American energy experts and organized visits to drilling sites in America.

The State Department hosted several conferences on fracking in other countries while Clinton was secretary of state and sent U.S. experts to help foreign officials develop fracking programs. State’s fracking program continued under Secretary of State John Kerry, known as the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program.

Much of the fracking proposed by the Department of State would have been done on public lands in other countries, but Clinton now supports phasing out fracking on public lands in America. Clinton claimed in the debate that by the time the Enviromental Protection Agency finishes regulating fracking, there will be much less of it in America.

The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately hung up when contacted in December by The Daily Caller News Foundation about the presidential candidate’s record on fracking.

Environmentalists have accused Clinton of “soft climate denial” for her fracking history and her criticism of Sanders’ environmental record.

Friends of the Earth Action, which has endorsed Sanders, claimed Clinton lied about the Vermont senator’s environmental record during an interview earlier this month.

Friends of the Earth claims to have “over 2 million members and supporters around the world,” but is poorly funded compared to more established environmental groups. Larger environmental groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters, have endorsed Clinton.

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As former acting attorney general Sally Yates prepares to testify, Donald Trump lashed out this morning via his customary outlet, Twitter, to attack both the Obama administration and Sally Yates herself.

In his first tweet, Trump went after the Obama administration, attempting to shift blame for the hiring of Michael Flynn off himself and onto his predecessor:

General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration – but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017

Oh, dear, things seem to have gotten too deep for Trump almost immediately, as national security expert and former NSA analyst John Schindler quickly pointed out:

WH does not adjudicate clearances. IRL Obama fired #MoscowMike as DIA director because he's an incompetent asshat. https://t.co/R0ZYtK5hQZ — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017

Schindler further dismantled Trump’s absurd attempt at blame-shifting by a simple appeal to logic and fact:

Flynn was commissioned in Army MI in 1981. By Trump's "logic" Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 & Obama all cleared him. This is insane BS. — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017

Trump’s second tweet was directed at Sally Yates:

Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017

Again, Schindler quickly pointed to the fly in Trump’s buttermilk (a mistake Trump has since quietly corrected to “counsel”):

There's a WH Counsel. And there's a National Security Council. There is no "WH Council". POTUS is a complete moron. https://t.co/hUMBsq7NKS — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017

Schindler followed that up with a stinging condemnation of Trump’s continued dishonesty and where it’s going to get him (hint: not a good place):

There's so much dishonest desperation in this tweet you can taste it across the room. Gonna be a bad week for Trump & his #KremlinGate pals. — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017

Donald Trump has good reason to be frightened and good reason to want to shift blame for his hiring of Kremlin mole Michael Flynn onto Obama, who fired the guy and to discredit Sally Yates, who has the proverbial “goods” on Donald Trump.

John Schindler called it: Trump is a complete moron and he has only himself to blame for the fix in which he finds himself.

His desperate and increasingly pathetic attempts to blame everybody himself for everything he did wrong will stand out in historical accounts of his dizzying fall from the heights vaulting ambition.

If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
In the conservative commentariat and intellectual classes, the deal with the devil that is Trumpism seems increasingly complete. Stalwart conservatives who for years—in some cases decades—defended the principles of limited government, personal liberty, and strict adherence to the Constitution have hiked their skirts and dropped their panties, swooning as Big Donnie Trump talks dirty to the media.

In a depressing twist, many members of my party and ideological persuasion have become advocates for Donald Trump on a scale that ranges from grudging to toadying, for a simple reason that seems to overwhelm all other factors: He attacks the media. Many are willing to forgive almost any sin because of it.

All it took to break the spirit of far too many in the conservative class was for Trump to leaven his deranged, autocratic rantings with “fake news” and “duh librul media” bait to compromise the ideals and credibility of a large swath of the conservative firmament. People who think of themselves as being smarter than the average bag of hammers are missing that they’re the just the latest victims of the Trump Con.

We now routinely see a formulation something like this:, “Well, Trump isn't perfect, but at least he's attacking the media.” It's the haute-bourgeois pleasure of watching someone else to do your dueling.

For decades, the rallying cry on the right was: “If only we could overcome the liberal media monoculture, the truth and strength of our ideas would finally break through. If only we could really be heard on economic matters, on foreign affairs, and on race, the Republican Party and conservatism would finally get a fair hearing in the minds of the American people.” It wouldn’t have to be a zero-sum game of replacing one set of biases with another; the rightness of our ideas would carry the day.

But in a White House press room that includes staff “writers” for Infowars and Breitbart in press conferences, the Trump Administration isn’t looking for up-the-middle coverage; they’re looking for partners in the fake news explosion that helped Trump win the election. Conservative writers and thinkers who look away from the creepy authoritarianism, apocalyptic religious war fantasies, lavish corruption, overt economic statism, and general ineptitude simply because Trump snubs the established press aren’t doing the movement any favors.

Let’s be clear; the mainstream media deserves a kick in the ass so hard they reach orbital velocity for their professional missteps, insularity, ideological blinders, vast self-regard, and occasional outright malice against conservatives. However, as a justification for every one of Trump’s failings, reveling in their misery falls wildly short of the mark. It’s certainly not enough for the movement once graced by the ideas of Burke, Hayek, Kirk, and Buckley to sell so cheaply.

It’s not an argument for mainstream media malpractice, Obama, Clinton, social justice silliness, George Soros, or the Pentaverate to say that imitating the worst behavior of the liberal elements of the national media doesn’t honor the ideals we claim to serve. Instead, it makes a mockery of our ideas if we believe our a Trump-centric media monoculture is a positive outcome.

Yes, in 2008, the media lost their collective minds in a paroxysm of Obama-driven adulation. The superlatives flowed in an ridiculous, flowery stream of praise that bordered at times on the creepy. Yes, “the One” was a media absurdity. I remember emailing a reporter a snarky note after reading one of her pieces, “Are you practicing writing ‘Mrs. Katherine Obama’ in loopy script in your mash book?” (Name changed to protect the embarrassed.)

Obama was referred to in terms so glowing, so fulsome, so toadying that it was easy to pin down the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance. That nearly mindless adulation was still a strong element in Obama's coverage until he walked out of the Oval Office. Conservatives rightly mocked it, while recognizing that the normative power of media and pop culture had combined in one fell swoop to overcome Barack Obama’s thin resume, his lack of experience, and questions about his ideological underpinnings.

Now, though, writers who just two years ago would have torn the bark off Barack Obama for picking winners and losers or for advocating some form of pie-in-the-sky “everyone gets covered” single-payer-ish health care plan today direct a large fraction of their ire to media outlets scrambling to find a way to process the election and governance of Trump. Rather than examine his daily assaults on conservative values, common sense, and that little thing we used to value called “the truth” they look politiely away as “conservatives” who have for decades sung the praises of free trade, low tariffs, and multilateral trade agreements now mutely nod at the brute stupidity of Trumpian economic populism... because at least he’s battering CNN, The New York Times, and BuzzFeed, right?

Of course, intellectual conservatism is a fairly small pool in the great scheme of things. What really mattered then and now is that a half-dozen gatekeepers in the conservative movement decided Trump would be lucrative fodder for their audience. They monetized the transition from promoting conservative ideals to selling the umber con man with the same vigor they pitch reverse mortgages, catheters, survival food, and gold.

This constellation of media players could have at any moment pumped the brakes on Trump and Trumpism during the 2016 election, and could do so now. At any moment, Rupert or the sons could have told Roger Ailes, “OK...that's enough.” The as-yet unchronicled conspiracy – and I use that word deliberately – between the c-suite at Fox News, Matt Drudge, Trumpbart, Rush Limbaugh is a story waiting to be told. They and others actively elected to elide Trump's endless catalog of ideological sins, moral shortcomings, mob ties, Russian moneymen, personal weirdnesses, trophy wives, serial bankruptcies, persistent tax shenanigans, low-grade intellect, thinly-veiled racial animus, and conspiracy email-forwarding kooky grandpa affect.

The “populist movement” explanation for 2016 isn't entirely wrong, but it took the full throttle efforts of the high-volume media enablers to promote Trump as the singular remedy for the moral, economic, and political collapse they decried each day for their credulous viewers and listeners to make that “movement” happen. Even after 25 years in this movement, I can't help but feel a sense of wonder at how brazen their marketing and monetization of Trump has been, and at its spectacular cost to conservatism.
Sometimes, a bra can look too small when it fits well, because the strip of fabric/elastic under the top of the lace is too tight across the top of the breast. European bras, in particular are nearly infamous for this. If you have firm breast tissue, your breasts will fight against the elastic and shape the bra. Not all of us are that lucky. Soft tissue molds to the shape of the bra, so the elastic pulls down over the top of the breast. If the bra is not a full coverage style, it will not sit against the breastbone, but actually against the breast tissue, causing the breasts to bulge out of the top of the bra and give the appearance of a bra that is too small.

This seam is put in place to pull the top of the cup closer to the chest and prevent the bust from spilling out. That’s probably just fine for someone who is predominantly full on bottom, but someone with a more even or full on top shape will run into this problem pretty consistently in European bras, so I’m going to talk about how to fix that.

Tools You’ll Need:

1 seam ripper & 1 pair of scissors.

Seriously, that’s it.

Difficulty Level: Easy. Seriously, a well behaved toddler could do it.

The bra I will be performing this alteration on is the Samanta Hana (A122 cut) in 70I. Samanta is a Polish brand, and I will refrain from discussing the finer points of the style in detail, as the brand has already been broken down quite well by Miss Underpinnings, but I will say for the purpose of this post that I would refer to this as a mesh balconette.

As you can see above, the bra looks too small on close up. I’m clearly bulging out the top of the cup. If you look closely at the top center, you can even see my bust trying to escape through the gaps in the lace. What may not be obvious in photographs is that there is actually plenty of room in this cup for me, but the top of the cup is being pulled down very tightly across the top of my breast, causing me to quadboob even though the bra actually fits.

This is the problem:

This seam is slightly elastic, and so makes the top of the cup too closed off for me. It fits beautifully everywhere else.

Now, you’re going to work from the inside of the bra. Grab your seam ripper. We need to remove the stitches from inside of the elastic.

You want to work from the elastic side to avoid potentially tearing any mesh or lace with your seam ripper. You can stab a piece of elastic to your hearts content and it doesn’t really matter, but stab a bit of lace and you might poke a hole in your bra.

As you start to remove these stitches, you’ll see the elastic start to come away from the bra, like so:

Keep going. You have to remove all of them. At which point, you’ll have something that looks like this:

Now, up to this point, we’re doing fine. We haven’t cut anything. We are still at a place where this alteration can be reversed by sewing the elastic back down, but we won’t be for long.

This alteration always has the potential to open the cup too much for you (You can correct this by sewing a dart near the wire, but that’s another alteration.), so you definitely want to try the bra on again at this point to make sure the alteration is going to work for you before you move onto the next step, at which point the alteration can not be reversed.

As you can see, this is probably going to work out well for me. There’s a tiny bit of gaping, but that’s mostly due to the position I have to put my arm in to take the photo and the elastic still being connected on both ends.

You’re done with the seam ripper now. Grab the scissors. We need to cut the elastic out on both sides beside the wire.

Cut as close to the wire as possible.

That’s it. The alteration is complete. There is no need to finish the elastic or add no fray. You’re welcome to if you’d like, but if you cut it as close to the wire as you can, the bra won’t give you any issues with fraying or loose threads, and you won’t really even notice that there was ever a seam there in the first place.

This is what you’ve removed – you don’t need them, so unless you have some other use planned for them, just throw them out.

And this is what your bra will look like when it’s done:

The Final Fit Test:

This bra now fits me pretty darn well. It will gape slightly when I move my arms certain ways, but not enough to make me fall out, not enough to cause fit issues, and not enough to show under clothing. This alteration has made this bra the best fit of my current rotation.

If I hadn’t altered it, I would only be able to wear it under loose t-shirts and tunics, and so it would probably spend most of its time in the back of the lingerie drawer.

If this is a problem you find you run into consistently, this is an alteration you definitely want to consider. The entire alteration can be completed in less than 30 minutes, and there is absolutely no sewing required.

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B. Sherwood Lollar et al. A scientist takes a sample of water from a mine deep underground in Ontario, Canada. The water turned out to be 2.6 billion years old, the oldest known water on Earth.

By Charles Q. Choi

LiveScience

A pocket of water some 2.6 billion years old — the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multicellular life — has now been discovered in a mine 2 miles below the Earth's surface.

The finding, announced in the May 16 issue of the journal Nature, raises the tantalizing possibility that ancient life might be found deep underground not only within Earth, but in similar oases that may exist on Mars, the scientists who studied the water said.

Geoscientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto and her colleagues have investigated deep mines across the world since the 1980s. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what their environments were like at the time they were sealed off.

In gold mines in South Africa 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) deep, the scientists previously discovered microbes could survive in pockets of waterisolated for tens of millions of years. These reservoirs were many times saltier than seawater, "and had chemistry in many ways similar to hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean, full of dissolved hydrogen and other chemicals capable of supporting life," Sherwood Lollar said. [Strangest Places Where Life Is Found on Earth]

To see what other ancient pockets of water might exist, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues investigated copper and zinc mines near the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada. "As the prices of copper, zinc and gold have gone up, mines now go deeper, which has helped our search for long-isolated reservoirs of water hidden underground," Sherwood Lollar said.

'Mind-blowing' find

"Sometimes we went down in cages — they're not called elevators underground — that dropped us to the levels we wanted to go," Sherwood Lollar told OurAmazingPlanet. "Other times, we went down ramp mines, which have curling spiral roadways, so we could actually drive all the way down."

The scientists analyzed water they found 2 miles (2.4 km) deep. They focused on noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon. Past studies analyzing bubbles of air trapped within ancient rocks found that these rare gases could occur in distinct ratios linked with certain eras of Earth's history. As such, by analyzing the ratios of noble gases seen in this water, the researchers could deduce the age of the water.

The scientists discovered the fluids were trapped in the rocks between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years ago.

"It was absolutely mind-blowing," Sherwood Lollar said. "These weren't tens of millions of years old like we might have expected, or even hundreds of millions of years old. They were billions of years old."

The site was formed by geological activity similar to that seen in hydrothermal vents. "We walked along what used to be ocean floor 2.7 billion years ago," Sherwood Lollar said. "You could still see some of the same pillow lava structures now seen on the bottom of the ocean."

Signs of life?

This ancient water poured out of the boreholes the team drilled in the mine at the rate of nearly a half-gallon (2 liters) per minute. It remains uncertain precisely how large this reservoir of water is.

"This is an extremely important question and one that we want to pursue in our future work," Sherwood Lollar said. "We also want to see if there are habitable reservoirs of similar age around the world."

Sherwood Lollar emphasized they have not yet found any signs of life in the water from Timmins. "We're working on that right now," she said. "It'd be fascinating to us if we did, since it'd push back the frontiers of how long life could survive in isolation."

And the implications of such a finding would extend beyond the extremes of life on Earth.

"Finding life in this energy-rich water is especially exciting if one thinks of Mars, where there might be water of similar age and mineralogy under the surface," Sherwood Lollar said.

If any life once arose on Mars billions of years ago as it did on Earth, "then it is likely in the subsurface," Sherwood Lollar said. "If we find the water in Timmins can support life, maybe the same might hold true for Mars as well."

Follow OurAmazingPlanet @OAPlanet, Facebook and Google+.Original article at LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

Aug. 28, 2016, 12:14 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 28, 2016, 1:37 PM GMT By The Associated Press

AMATRICE, Italy — Bulldozers and other heavy equipment rolled through Italy's quake-devastated town of Amatrice on Sunday, pulling down dangerously overhanging ledges and clearing rubble as investigators tried to figure out if negligence in enforcing building codes added to the quake's high death toll.

Investigations will focus on a number of structures, including an elementary school in Amatrice that crumbled when the quake hit Wednesday. The school was renovated in 2012 to resist earthquakes at a cost of 700,000 euros ($785,000).

Questions also surround a bell tower in Accumoli that collapsed, killing a family of four sleeping in a neighboring house — including a baby of 8 months and a 7-year-old boy. That bell tower also had been recently restored with special funds allocated after Italy's last major earthquake, in L'Aquila in 2009.

Firefighters gather near the damaged Sant'Agostino church in Amatrice on Sunday. ANDREAS SOLARO / AFP - Getty Images

The quake early Wednesday killed 290 people and injured hundreds as it flattened three medieval towns in central Italy. Giuseppe Saieva, the prosecutor in the regional capital of Rieti, said the high human death toll "cannot only be considered the work of fate."

He said for now, police investigators remained focused on recovery efforts but once that emergency phase has passed, they will concentrate on the investigations.

Italy's state museums, meanwhile, embarked on a fundraising campaign, donating their proceeds Sunday to relief and reconstruction efforts in the earthquake zone.

Wednesday's 6.2 magnitude quake destroyed not only private homes but also churches and other centuries-old cultural treasures. The idea is to use art for art — harnessing the nation's rich artistic heritage to help recover and restore other objects of beauty in the hard-hit towns.

Related: Tears Flow as Italy Holds Mass Funeral for Quake Victims

Overnight was relatively calm, the first since the quake struck without strong aftershocks. In all, the region has seen 1,820 aftershocks, according to the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

On Saturday, mourners prayed, hugged, wept and even applauded as coffins carrying earthquake victims passed by at a state funeral in the town of Ascoli Piceno.

The caskets of 35 people had been brought to a community gym — one of the few structures in the area still intact. The local bishop, Giovanni D'Ercole, celebrated Mass beneath a crucifix he had retrieved from one of the damaged churches.

Relatives mourn over a coffin of one of the earthquake victims prior to the funeral service Saturday. Gregorio Borgia / AP

Emotions that had been dammed up for days broke in a crescendo of grief. One young man wept over a little girl's white coffin. Many mourners were recovering from injuries themselves, some wrapped in bandages.

As all of Italy observed a day of national mourning, Bishop D'Ercole urged residents to rebuild their communities.

"Don't be afraid to cry out your suffering — I have seen a lot of this — but please do not lose courage," D'Ercole said. "Only together can we rebuild our houses and our churches."
The American coal industry is terminally ill — and that should serve as a warning to investors who might be tempted to put their money into other fossil fuels.

That’s the gist of a new report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which warns that oil and natural gas could also wind up becoming stranded assets — property that under other scenarios could be worth a lot of money, but not in the real situation we face as the climate warms and the market shifts in response.

Coal use has been decoupled from America’s economic growth for a number of reasons, the report finds. The biggest is the availability of other cheap sources of energy — since 2008, the abundance of shale gas from America’s fracking boom has played a big role in driving that trend, but so have renewable energies like solar and wind. Increasingly strict regulations on air pollution and the energy sector from the Obama administration’s EPA have also played a role.

“Cheap gas has knocked coal off its feet, and the need to improve air quality and ever-lower renewables costs has kept coal down for the count,” said Luke Sussams, co-author of the report and a Carbon Tracker senior researcher. He and his colleagues posit that investors in oil, and eventually even natural gas, could see a similar trend. The Carbon Tracker Initiative was one of the first groups to promote the idea of a “carbon bubble,” in which, as the world confronts global warming, fossil fuel investors would see the value of their assets collapse. Companies stand to lose billions, the think tank said.

This week’s Carbon Tracker report comes on the heels of a separate report from CoalSwarm and the Sierra Club that looks at international coal use. That picture, too, does not look good for fossil fuel investors. From “Boom and Bust: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline”:

In India, projects shelved or cancelled since 2012 outnumber project completions by six to one, and new construction initiations are at a near-standstill. In both Europe and the U.S., the coal fleet is shrinking, with retirements outnumbering new plants. China faces a looming glut in coal-fired generating capacity, with plant utilization rates at a 35-year low.

The report also finds that more than two dozen U.S. coal companies have gone bankrupt in the past three years, and those that haven’t lost more than 80 percent of their share value.

The coal industry, of course, disputes these gloomy assessments. Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the U.S., recently predicted that U.S. coal usage would increase 10 million to 30 million tons by 2017, and global demand could grow by 500 million metric tons during the same period.

The company and its coal-loving friends are also making every effort to challenge forthcoming EPA regulations that could hasten coal’s collapse. The company is paying well-respected constitutional scholar and former Obama mentor Laurence Tribe to argue that the administration’s Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional. And coal’s allies in Congress are trying to undermine the EPA plan with, among other things, an amendment to a big budget bill that would allow states to opt out. If the amendment passes, it will likely face a presidential veto, spurring yet another budget standoff.

But, as the Carbon Tracker report shows, the EPA’s efforts are just one factor among many that have weakened coal’s prospects. Ultimately, the industry is up against a global energy economy in which coal, with its huge environmental and health costs, increasingly just doesn’t make sense. And no amount of lobbying Congress or arguing in court will slow that trend.
Here are some Larry King statistics:

• Larry King has had a talk show on CNN for 73 years now.

• Larry King owns 4700 pairs of suspenders.

• Larry King doesn’t look good in any of them.

• Larry King has been married 56 times.

• Larry King’s real name is Saul Rabinowitz.

• Larry King is 206 years old.

• Larry King has fielded thousands of phone calls from wackos over the years.

I am one of those wackos.

***

One night in the mid-80s, I was sitting on my ratty couch in my one-bedroom apartment in Peoria, Illinois. I had smoked a lot of pot and drank a bunch of beer and Larry King was on the television with the sound muted. My stereo was blaring “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who. I remember feeling great pity for poor Pete Townshend. Someone had fooled him and I wondered who would do such a mean thing to that big-beaked guitarist. While pondering this thought, I absent-mindedly glanced at my 14-inch Panasonic color television set with real plastic wood-grain on the sides, and I saw that Larry’s guest for the evening was Jay Leno. Now this was way before Leno became the host of The Tonight Show. This is back when he used to do bits on the David Letterman’s show when Letterman was on NBC. I thought he was pretty funny back then and so I turned the Who off and turned up the volume. Larry King was speaking. “Our guest tonight is funnyman Jay Leno. If you have a question for Jay call the number below,” Larry croaked out in that old-man, froggy voice of his. As I looked at the number at the bottom of the screen, all of the sudden I had a desperate urge to call the show, so I scribbled it on a well-worn one-dollar bill that I yanked from my pocket, as a tampon commercial came on the air. Brenda Vaccaro’s deep mannish voice extolled the wonders of Playtex tampons, and I tried to think of a good question for Jay Leno.

Marijuana can cause unusual focus in obsessive moments, and this was one of those moments. I wanted to ask Jay Leno a question and I wanted it to be funny. I wanted to make Jay and Larry laugh. I had to make Jay and Larry laugh. This was more important than who fooled Pete Townshend. This was more important than Brenda Vaccaro. This, I daresay, was more important than a tampon.

I had to think hard and I had to think funny. I was furiously pacing the room back and forth, like a tiger in a zoo cage that’s two sizes too small. Then it hit me like 12 tons of mashed potatoes. I had the question and the question was thus: “I’d like to ask Jay what his favorite sandwich is.”

Ha! Now that’s what I call comedy. Everybody else would be asking about his comedy, his background, his influences and then I would roll in and hit him with, “What’s your favorite sandwich, Jay?” Ha! It was kind of Andy Kaufmanesque. And I loved Andy Kaufman. I picked up the phone and dialed the number. The line started ringing and my heart was racing wildly. On the fourth ring, it was picked up and a woman with a monotone voice said, “Larry King show, do you have a question for Jay Leno?” She sounded almost robotic.

“Yeah, I’ve got a question,” I answered the robot operator enthusiastically. “I want to ask Jay what his favorite sandwich is.”

This was greeted by silence. Dead silence. For a nanosecond, I thought I had been accidentally disconnected.

“Hello?” I queried to the silence.

“Hi,” the robotic woman replied. Great! We were still connected. She continued in her monotone voice, “Ummm, why do you want to ask Jay Leno what his favorite sandwich is?”

“Because it’s hilarious!” I told her. “This is really going to crack Larry and Jay up,” I assured her, and then I shut up I didn’t want to oversell the bit.

“It will?” she asked in her robotic monotone.

“Oh hell yes,” I said hoping that throwing in a minor curse word would bond us like kids hatching a plan to egg mean old Mr. Wilson’s house.

“Can I put you on hold for a few seconds?” she asked.

“Of course you can,” I responded in relaxing voice, trying to soothe her weary robot mind so she would see the genius of this question. Well, it worked. Within 15 seconds, she was back on the line. “Okay, you’ll be caller number three, turn the volume down on your TV. When you hear Larry talking on your phone, get ready to ask your question just like you said it to me.”

I was on. I WAS ON! I was the third caller. I was the king of the fucking world. Larry and Jay would love my question. They were going to crack up. We would all laugh together. They would laugh with me, not at me. Maybe Jay would talk about it on the Letterman show the next week. Maybe David Letterman would want to have me on as a guest. Maybe I would become a star out of this. I was just about to become the man who asked Jay Leno what his favorite sandwich was and soon the world would love me. Strangers would want to embrace me and take me into their homes and feed me pizza. About five minutes later, as I came to this realization, all of a sudden I heard Larry King’s voice in my phone.

“We have a caller from Peoria, Illinois. Do you have a question for Jay Leno?”

Oh, boy, did I have a question. And I asked it.

“Yeah, Larry,” I said, and then paused for comedic effect. “I’d like to ask Jay what his favorite sandwich is.”

Baboom. It was asked. I waited for heaven to part and the angels start singing and Jay and Larry to acknowledge my genius. I looked at the Panasonic and Larry was grimacing. Jay Leno looked like he had a sour stomach. Did they hear my question? Did I somehow speak in a foreign tongue? After an uneasy few seconds, Jay Leno spoke. “Well, I guess I’d say a Philly cheese-steak sandwich. Gee, Larry, what an inquisitive audience you have,” he said his voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt. “What’s the next caller going to ask me: What’s my favorite color?”

Larry was scowling. All of the sudden my world was spinning in the wrong direction. My stomach twisted into a pretzel knot as Larry uttered the following words: “Next caller.”

Next caller.

Fuck. Then my phone went dead. When the dial tone came on, I finally surrendered it to the base. They didn’t get it. Nobody laughed. Jay Leno thought I was stupid. Larry King hated me. David Letterman was never going to call me. And the poor robotic phone screener, she probably got handed her walking papers 10 seconds after the call hit the airwaves. Fuck! I turned the TV off and put the Who back on. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Pete Townshend would’ve gotten it. He would’ve thought it was funny. And Keith Moon? Shit, he would’ve busted a gut over it.

“What’s your favorite sandwich?” That’s funny fucking stuff. I’m cracking myself up right now as I type the words. Fuck Larry King. Fuck Jay Leno. A lot of people never got Lenny Bruce, either. Shit, they locked that son of a bitch up in jail over some of his bits. Nobody knows the trouble me and Lenny have seen. Jay and Larry didn’t get my humor, but I knew as I passed out after drinking six more beers and cursing the lives of Jay Leno and Larry King, that Lenny was looking down at me and he was laughing. With me. Not at me.

The next day I woke up hungover and still a little high from the pot. I took a shower, took a bunch of aspirin, washed them down with a can of Diet Coke and wearily drove downtown to the printing factory where I worked as a four-color film stripper. I parked, made my way into the room where I worked with around nine other people, swiped my timecard and started making my way back to the light table where I sat. On my way there, I heard one of my coworkers, Dick Maurer, talking.

“I was watching Larry King last night and he had Jay Leno on,” Dick explained to about five co-workers gathered around his light table. “All of a sudden some guy from Peoria gets on, and this asshole asks Leno what his favorite sandwich is!”

“Hey, that asshole was me!” I shouted out to Maurer and his compatriots. “Holy shit! I thought I recognized that voice last night and it was you,” Maurer said, breaking out into laughter. “Why the hell did you call in and ask Jay Leno what his favorite sandwich is?”

“Because it’s funny. You know, everybody else is asking questions about his career, his background, his family and then I hit him with, ‘What’s your favorite sandwich, Jay!’ It’s on the level of an Andy Kaufman bit,” I explained to the group. They all just stared blankly at me. “It was funny!” I shouted out, and stomped my left foot on the concrete floor for emphasis.

No one said anything. They all slowly went to their light tables and went to work. I went to mine, muttering “fucking assholes” under my breath. For over 10 years, I never talked about that night of the Larry King show. By then, I was living in New York City, working nights and publishing my own humor magazine, fishwrap. It was 1996 and Ellen and Tracie, the two women who ran the company that distributed my magazine, were in town. We were having lunch at an outdoor cafe on the Upper West Side. About three bites into my grilled chicken sandwich, Tracie’s eyes got wide and she said, “Oh, my God, look who’s walking towards us.”

I turned around and saw a tall, stunning fortysomething blonde strutting our way on the sidewalk. Next to her, all slouched over, carrying all kinds of bags and a huge scowl coloring his face, was none other than Larry King. I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Ellen asked.

“Years ago,” I explained, “Larry King had Jay Leno on his show and I called in and got on air,” still laughing at the memory. “Oh, yeah,” Ellen inquired, “What did you ask him?” “I asked him,” I said, looking at the both of them while smiling widely and holding my hands up in the air for emphasis: “ ‘What’s your favorite sandwich?’”

Ellen looked at me like I was nuts.

Tracie just said six words: “Why did you ask him that?”

I decided right then and there that I’d never tell that fucking story again.

This essay originally appeared in Marty Wombacher's book The Boy Who Would Be a Firetruck.
Chapter Text

The world turned upside down on a Tuesday.

Thomas had been sitting at his computer, looking at pictures of other peoples’ cats. There was a brief moment of unaccustomed weightlessness, followed by a lurching feeling as he started falling. He hit the ceiling half a second later, denting the plaster and hurting his head. He lay there for a moment, rubbing his scalp, which was bleeding profusely in the way that minor head wounds sometimes did. Thomas let out a groan and moved slowly. When he looked up, he saw his cat, Bartleby, staring at him. From the floor.

“Help?” asked Thomas. His cat meowed.

He placed a hand on the ceiling, where he’d cracked the plaster. Bits of it fell past him, to where his cat was sitting. Bartleby, having seen enough, sauntered out of the room. Thomas stayed where he was. He touched the wound on his head, causing his fingers to come away bloody. He stared at them for a moment. There was enough blood for it to drip down; it fell toward the ceiling for a few brief fractions of a second, then reversed direction and fell toward the floor. Thomas looked up at the plaster and blood next to his computer chair, which had fallen over. Everything in the room was sitting just where it had been.

Thomas did what any savvy young person would do in a time like this; he pulled out his smartphone to consult the internet. Unfortunately, when he pulled it from his pocket, he suddenly realized that it was trying to get away with him, fleeing toward the floor. If he’d been prepared, it would have been no work at all to keep it in his grasp, but while he had decades of practice keeping a phone from falling from his grasp, he had no experience whatsoever with keeping a phone from falling up. The whole concept of gravity had been sundered into two pieces: the objective (everything in the world) and subjective (just Thomas). This would have been a pleasant epiphany had it not immediately followed his phone crashing into the ground. He winced when he saw the shattered screen.

The internet wasn’t going to be any help. It was unlikely that the internet would have been any help anyway, since Thomas was certain that he would have heard about it if anyone had ever had their personal gravity reversed; there wouldn't be any readily available FAQs or decades-old forum threads where the issue was hammered out. Still, he would have been able to go online to ask some pointed questions, which might have led him somewhere.

He rose on slow, unsteady feet, until he was standing on the ceiling. When he reached (subjective, Thomas oriented) up, he could just barely touch the phone. The screen was cracked, but there was no way of telling whether it was still working. Even going up to the balls of his feet, he only really succeeded in pushing the phone around. He was finally able to grab it by jumping for it, which brought another dusting of plaster past him as he landed back on the ceiling.

Thomas looked down. He was on the ceiling of the second floor of his house. The actual floors were built for the strain of people walking on them, but he wasn’t so sure that the same could be said for the ceilings. He had no idea what was beneath the plaster. There were probably some joists and insulation, then shingles beyond that. If he fell through the ceiling, what would happen? Would he continue falling into the sky? The thought was sobering enough that he moved away from the windows.

The phone wasn’t working, even after pulling the battery out then putting it back in to reset it. With the idea that this might actually be a dangerous situation to be in, Thomas reached up to grab his keyboard; luckily, it was a wireless one. While he was standing, he wasn’t in too bad of a position to look at his computer screen, though he had to hold into the keyboard with one hand so it wouldn't go falling to the floor, which meant typing with a single hand. It took a few moments to get his computer to flip the output of his monitor (Ctrl+Alt+F1), but then he was in business, with an open conduit to the internet and the wealth of problem-solving it contained.

It was all anyone was talking about. That was a relief -- it was proof that Thomas wasn’t crazy and wasn’t alone -- but it also meant that Thomas was nothing special. There were brief, half-buried thoughts at the back of his mind, that perhaps something strange and unique had happened to him. Maybe he wouldn’t have been Upside-Down Man, but there had been plenty of thoughts percolating, thoughts of money and attention. These all evaporated in the face of the worldwide news.

The thing that really brought it home was a video. It looked like a traffic cam, but it was much better quality than that, so Thomas thought perhaps it was one of those static cameras that TV stations cut to during commercial breaks. It showed a crowded pedestrian crosswalk somewhere in Asia. It was evening in America, which meant that it was early morning in China; people were going to work. One moment the mass of people were crossing the street, the next they were accelerating toward the sky. It was almost exactly what the Rapture was supposed to look like, at least in the movies and television shows that Thomas had seen. There was nothing peaceful about it though; these people were falling, their mouths open in screams that the camera's microphone wasn’t close enough to pick up. It only took a small slice of time for the crosswalks to be devoid of people. That was when Thomas saw the cars; there were people inside them, pressed up against the roofs. A few of the cars started to idle forward, heading towards collisions that their drivers weren't in control enough to stop. That was where the video cut out.

Thomas stared at the computer screen in mute horror. Then he rewound the video and did the math. He advanced it frame-by-frame, making best-guess measurements for height. Because there were so many people, it was easy to get references. He charted the seeming ascent of the people to confirm their acceleration away from the Earth. In the first second, they’d gone ten meters. In the second second, they’d gone thirty meters. That meant acceleration approximated ten meters per second per second, which was almost exactly equal to the force of gravity, only working in reverse.

The second half of the math was much more grim. Terminal velocity for a human was about two hundred kilometers per hour, which they would reach in about twelve seconds. People started having substantial trouble with oxygen deprivation at eight kilometers above sea level, which the people falling into the sky would reach in about two minutes. From there, the air would get thinner, increasing their speed and hastening their death from asphyxia. All this would have happened within five minutes. While Thomas was rubbing his head and fumbling with his phone, people had been dying. Anyone who had been standing outside when the change happened was almost certainly dead by the time he finally watched the video.

It was more than that though. Anyone in a car would have been lifted from their seat, jolted and disoriented even if they were wearing a seat belt. Thomas had felt mildly dizzy after his fall, which must have been from the fluid in his inner ear sloshing around. There would be car crashes, lots of them. Car crashes aside, even if you were stuck in an unmoving car, what would you do? How would you escape to the safety of indoors if you were under threat of falling into the sky? How would people get food? How was anyone who survived this first day supposed to keep on living?

Thomas began downloading a local copy of Wikipedia. If the change had happened worldwide, then it was only a matter of time until basic services were interrupted. Men and women at the power plants would have been thrown to the ceiling, which wouldn’t immediately cause the electric grid to shut down, but would impact their ability to correct any problems. That would lead to eventual failure. The same went for water pressure and internet service. While the five minute download of Simple English Wikipedia was going, Thomas began charging his e-reader to full power and moving over likely looking books from Amazon, grabbing everything that looked like it might be relevant. He reached up to grab his laptop from its satchel and began charging that as well. When he had all the transfers going, he moved to the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. If water pressure went, a bathtub full of water would keep him from dying of dehydration.

Once all that was finished, Thomas sat on the ceiling of his bedroom and thought about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Physiological needs came first; that meant food, water, air, clothing, and shelter. The bathtub full of water would take care of dehydration for the time being. Assuming that he could get down to the first floor, he could eat something in the kitchen. He made a quick mental note to eat things that were frozen or refrigerated first, in case the loss of electricity was imminent. He would have to take inventory, but he doubted that he had enough food for more than two weeks, and that was with rationing factored in. He had shelter and clothing covered just fine, though his shirt and pants seemed to follow the regular laws of gravity, which meant that they would need some modifications in order to reduce annoyance; his shirt was resting on his armpits rather than his shoulders. He'd have to find some suspenders and garters to keep everything where it was supposed to be. Reducing annoyance was high up the hierarchy of needs though; comfort would have to come later.

Thomas began preparing to go looting without any real conscious decision; it simply came to him as a thing that needed doing.

Getting downstairs was a challenge, one that mostly involved standing on the second floor ceiling in order to try to find a grip on the first floor ceiling. He’d never really taken note of the fact that the stairs from the first floor to the second floor had a high ceiling, but now it was all too apparent. If he planned to stay in his house, Thomas was going to have to put some upside down stairs there, secured with nails, or at least make an incline of some sort. Once on the first floor, he made his way to the hall closet, where he found one of the things he’d need to make it in this new world; his climbing kit.

He and Lillian had gotten into rock climbing together. There was an indoor rock-climbing gym downtown that had cheap prices and an auto-belay system that didn’t really require any sort of knowledge except how to wear a harness and how to clip in a carabiner. That had been the gateway that they’d needed. From there, it wasn’t too big a jump to buying his own harness instead of renting one. The shoes had followed soon after, a pair that he and Lillian had bought together, so that their kit matched. He’d bought the rope and carabiners for outdoor climbing, though they’d only done that two or three times at a few of the local spots.

As with most hobbies, Thomas had eventually dropped climbing. He’d considered himself fortunate to have come away from it having only spent a few hundred dollars. There had been other hobbies that had taken him in much more completely, which had eaten thousands of dollars before he’d eventually grown bored. Lillian had kept up with climbing though; that was one of the things that had driven a wedge between them. Climbing had been something they’d done together, a few hours three or four times a week. After Thomas had stopped, it became something that kept them apart for a few hours three or four times a week. It wasn’t too much of a surprise when Lillian said that their relationship had run its course, though it still hurt.

The only reason that his climbing gear was in a closet in his home instead of a cubby at the climbing gym was that Lillian had called him up to ask him whether she could use it. Thomas had said yes, because he didn’t want to feel like an ass, but the only explanation for Lillian borrowing a men’s harness was if she was going climbing with an uninitiated man who didn’t have equipment of his own. Thomas had gone down to the gym the next day (careful to go at a time when he knew that Lillian wouldn’t be there) in order to take his climbing gear back. If she called him to ask again, he could simply say that he’d decided to sell it, or that he’d gone outdoor climbing, or some other excuse. They’d had a reasonably amicable breakup, but that was no reason to let Lillian’s new boyfriend have something of his.

That small, admittedly petty act was now going to put Thomas in the top percentile of people most likely to survive. He started by stepping into the harness, which needed only a few straps loosened to compensate for the pudge that came with months of a sedentary lifestyle. After that, he threaded the rope through and tied the necessary knots, then tested them, mostly to make sure that he still remembered how to tie them correctly. The next question was where to find the appropriate counterweight.

Thomas weighed 190 lbs. He would need to find something that weighed that much just to keep him stuck to the earth. Anything less would just be pulled with him as he fell into the sky, like a teddy bear being pulled from a child’s hand by a helium balloon. Just for the sake of safety, Thomas figured on needing an extra twenty pounds of weight. His other big parameter was movement; the nearest place to stock up on food was a gas station, but that was still three full blocks away. In addition to the problem of getting there, Thomas also needed to consider the problem of trying to get back.

There were weights in the basement, but only two adjustable dumbbells that totaled up to a hundred pounds. They were fancy, because you could dial in however much you wanted to exercise with to within five pounds. In this particular situation (one he had never considered when he was buying the dumbbells) Thomas would have been much better off with separate weights that could all be tied together. After looking around his house for a bit, Thomas settled on using the coffee table in the middle of the room as additional weight. It was a huge, ugly thing, but it was also a hundred pounds, which served his purpose. Lifting the coffee table was far easier than he’d expected it to be; all he had to do was reach up, grab it, and then pull down on it using his full weight. It didn’t feel like carrying anything at all; instead, it felt like hanging down from a pull-up bar so that he was only putting a small amount of weight on his feet.

He assembled everything in the basement, where the ceiling was much lower. That way he could reach up towards the floor without having to try for extra height. He used the coffee table and the weights together, wrapping his rope around them several times and tying the knots as tight as he could. When he was finished, he pulled himself up and dangled from this contraption, so that his feet were a few inches from the ceiling. He tugged on it in a few different ways, then began swinging himself from side to side in order to do a stress test. If it failed here, he would fall a foot or two to the basement ceiling. The worst that would happen would be that he would bruise his tailbone. If the counterweight system failed out there, he would fall into the sky, where he would die of hypoxia and presumably become a floating corpsicle. Everything held, which meant that it would be safe enough.

The only thing keeping him back was the thought that perhaps gravity would take another turn. Before today, his prior probability for the personal gravity of everyone in the world reversing direction was in the thousandths of a thousandth of a percent, but after it had happened once, his prior probability that it would happen again necessarily had to increase by a very large margin.

If he knew that gravity was going to go back to normal in the next few days, he would certainly stay in his house instead of venturing out; food and water weren’t going to be an issue in the immediate future.

If he knew that gravity was going to stay in its current configuration indefinitely, or at least as long as the next month, he would leave the house as quickly as possible in order to gather enough food to prevent starvation, and ideally gather whatever supplies would be needed to survive into the future, beyond the timescale of months.

He could try to split the difference and bide his time. Even though he had no way to gauge the odds of gravity returning back to normal, he knew that if t was the time since the change, then as t increased, the odds that gravity would change back at t+1 decreased. Every passing minute made him marginally more confident that this was simply the new order of the world. So as t increased, the confidence in the necessity of making this perilous journey would also increase. Unfortunately, looting had definitive advantages for the people who moved first. Worse, waiting too long would begin to exhaust Thomas’ supplies, not just in terms of material things like food, but willpower and mental acuity as well. If he stayed at home with not much to do, with the gears turning, would he still have the courage to embark tomorrow?

He wore an old biking helmet, which would hopefully protect him in the event of a sudden acceleration towards the ground. In his backpack, one he hadn’t used since college, he put two liters of water, a number of snacks like trail mix and protein bars, a first aid kit from the bathroom, his wallet, and his laptop, which was now full of charge and loaded down with every resource he’d thought to cram it with. Backpacks were unfortunately designed to be assisted by gravity; their straps rested the weight on the shoulders. He had to use carabiners in order to secure it to his climbing harness, but that put the weight right on his legs, which were already carrying the weight of his body in a way that the human musculoskeletal system wasn’t designed for. The last thing he grabbed before setting out were two flashlights, in case it had grown dark by the time he returned. His cat watched these preparations with idle curiosity.

Thomas’ inner ear had finally stopped fighting with his visual cortex. In the beginning, the inner ear had been saying that he was right side up when his feet were on the ceiling but his visual cortex had been saying that he was upside down, likely based on decades of training in making just that determination. It was mildly disorienting, but nothing that he hadn’t been able to handle. Now though, the inner ear -- which was much more insistent -- had won out. The houses and trees were stalactites on the roof of an enormous cave so tall that the bottom was invisible.

With a deep breath and not too much more time for second guessing, Thomas set out toward the garage. Movement was a matter of lifting up one of the dumbells and swinging it forward, then swinging the other one forward, then reaching up to grab the coffee table and awkwardly rocking it. It was slow, but seemed safe enough. After a few cycles of this, Thomas was out of the house and dangling into the open air. There was nothing to catch him if his counterweights or ropes failed. After debating it for a few moments, he left the door partly open so that Bartleby could escape. There was no sense dooming the cat to death by starvation if Thomas fell into the sky.

The trip to the garage took fifteen minutes of awkward movement, where before it had taken a handful of seconds. Extrapolating from that and accounting for increases in efficiency as he got better at it, Thomas still would have taken half a day to get to the gas station, which was the nearest point where there was food to be found in quantity. It was bad enough without the psychological terror of looking at the sky and seeing a quick death by oblivion there. Fortunately, he had a car.

Getting into the car was an ordeal. Opening the car door was easy enough from his dangling position, as was lifting the weights in, but the coffee table proved unwieldy. Without it, Thomas would have no way to get out of the car without risking death by falling. He eventually crammed it into the backseat with some difficulty by moving his weight around, but the ropes meant that he wouldn’t be able to fully close his doors. He got in the driver’s seat by flipping himself around, pushing his hands against the ceiling of the car, and then hastily buckling himself in. The average seat belt wasn’t really designed to keep someone from floating up, but it was better than nothing. He clipped himself to his seat belt as well, so that in the event of a crash he would have some redundant mechanisms keeping him stuck to the earth.

Driving was a slow, painful process. In fact, everything outside the house seemed to consist of awkward and tedious processes. The car functioned the same as it ever had, but the pedals that controlled the gas and brake were difficult to reach because he had to work against gravity. Blood was pooling in Thomas’ brain from almost the moment he had turned himself upside down, so after he was out of the driveway, he had to turn the car off, turn himself around so he was sitting on the ceiling of the car, and wait to regain some semblance of proper blood flow. This mostly confirmed his initial thought that everyone who had been in a car or truck when the change happened was not long for the world.

During that rest, Thomas began thinking in the long-term. Stocking up at the gas station would mean that he could survive for a matter of months. He would be able to set out rain barrels, which would take care of water easily enough by the time his bathtub cache had gone dry. It was early September, which meant that winter would need some thinking about. His house was insulated, but he had to assume that electricity would be a thing of the past when he would need to heat the house. That meant he would either need to move to a warmer climate, with all the problems that driving there would involve, or find a way to make a fire every day in a house that didn’t have a fireplace. Thomas was thinking like a scavenger, but eventually there would be nothing left to scavenge. He would have to learn how to farm, but with all the added effort of clipping weights to himself. He would also have to scavenge weapons from somewhere in order to be able to hunt.

But beyond those concerns, was there a life worth living in this new world? A conservative estimate said that maybe 20% of the people in his city were now dead. More would die from wounds they had sustained in those brief, unexpected falls that had marked the change. How many people had broken bones with no hope of emergency services or doctors coming to help? Starvation (and the desperation that came with it) would eventually claim more lives. Everyone that survived would be reduced to subsistence farming.

Yet even with these thoughts, Thomas continued on. If there was no life worth living with things the way they were, suicide was as easy as unclipping his harness, but there was no way to chart out the course of the future with the information he had available to him.

When he pulled up to the gas station, he was surprised to see people inside. He maneuvered the car as close to the front door as possible, then opened his car door. An older man, who was standing on the ceiling of the gas station next to a rack of postcards, opened the door.

“You an idiot?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” asked Thomas.

“Why in the hell are you out driving?” asked the man. He rubbed his head. “We seen too many fall into the sky. Indoors is the only place that’s safe.”

“I needed supplies,” said Thomas. He wasn’t sure why he had thought there wouldn’t be people in the gas station. In his head, he’d matched what was happening to the patterns that the movies always presented of apocalypses. Maybe that was because he’d seen the video of all those people falling to their deaths; it was easy to imagine what had happened as being the Rapture. He’d thought that if he was going to run into anyone, it would be another looter. Yet now that he thought about it for five seconds, of course it made sense. A gas station almost always had at least one person in it. When the flip happened, they would have ended up on the ceiling. In a zombie apocalypse, the gas stations ended up abandoned, because the workers didn’t really have a reason to be there. But here, they wouldn’t have had any ability to leave.

“Supplies?” asked the man. He rubbed his head again. “Well, come on in, I guess. How is it out there?”

“I didn’t come too far,” said Thomas. “Just three blocks.”

A woman was sitting cross-legged on the ceiling with a phone in her lap. She wore a t-shirt with the local college’s name emblazoned on the front. The older man was wearing a button-down shirt with his name on a patch. Thomas mentally labeled them customer and attendant. There were two cars out by the pumps though, which meant there was an extra person not accounted for.

“So you’re here to loot us?” asked the woman.

“I can pay,” said Thomas. He was about to unzip his backpack when he realized that it would be disgorge its contents onto the floor if he did that. “I can pay,” he repeated lamely. Most of his money was in the form of credit cards, not cash. Both were now of dubious worth.

“I don’t blame you for looting,” said the woman. “It’s what I would have done, if I thought I could make it to my car.” She pointed to a silver Toyota next to one of the pumps.

“No one is looting anything,” said the attendant. “I don’t know that I can let you just buy things though.” He frowned in thought.

“You can have whatever you want,” said the woman, “So long as you help us get out of here.”

“Now hold on just a minute,” said the man. He turned to the woman. “You don’t have any claim on what’s in this store.”

“What’s the plan then?” asked the woman. “We were stuck here until he showed up. Our options included trying to get into one of the cars or staying here until the power went out and we ran out of food. You were planning on splitting food with me, right?”

“I suppose,” the man said slowly.

“Well, if you take into account the fact that I would be eating half the food in this place, then if this guy leaves with me, it seems like he should be entitled to some amount of the food as a reward.”

“My name’s Thomas,” said Thomas.

“Juliette,” said the woman. She held out her hand, which Thomas shook.

“Randall,” said the attendant with a nod. “Now I suppose I would split some food, if it came to that, but maybe this whole thing works itself out. Maybe I can explain to my boss that I couldn’t let you starve, but that’s a whole heap different than letting you take off with half the food.”

“It won’t just be food,” said Juliette. “We’ll need batteries, rope, flashlights, I saw some patching kits over there, tools we can use, things like that.”

“No,” said Randall. He shook his head. “That’s too much. Things you need to survive, that’s one thing, but you’re talking about the long term. You can’t use these resources to hunker down on your own.”

“I’m not hunkering down,” said Juliette. “I’m going to launch a rescue mission.”

“You’re what?” asked Thomas.

“A rescue mission,” replied Juliette. She turned to look at him. “Most people are trapped inside their houses or places of business. Everyone who survived the initial fall into the sky is safe, so long as they stay in one place. But in the long term, we’re going to need to work together if we want to pull through this. Right now, I think our first priority is going to be mobility.” She pointed at the ropes and harness that Thomas was wearing. “I assume you know where we can find more of those?”

“There’s a climbing gym downtown,” said Thomas. He felt slightly dazed. Though neither of them had mentioned it, his head was still sticky with blood where he’d hit it on his ceiling.

“We’ll go there first,” said Juliette. “Wait, there’s a gym a block from here, maybe we’ll stop there first in order to get some weights. We’ve got to figure out a foolproof method of moving around and weights are going to be part of that.”

“I didn’t agree to anything,” said Thomas.

“You have some rudimentary understanding of rock climbing,” said Juliette. “I need you. And what are our other options here? Grab as much food for ourselves as we can, hide out until civilization crumbles, then starve to death or be reduced to hunter-gatherers? That’s crap.”

Thomas wavered. “I don’t think two people can keep civilization together.”

“Of course not,” said Juliette. “Civilization is a process, one that take more than a handful. But the first step is getting mobility, not just for us, but for a small core of people. We need to do it while the communication networks are still up and running. Furthermore, we need to build communication networks that can survive a temporary or even semi-permanent loss of power. Hand-cranked radios, if we can find them. Walkie-talkies, maybe. If I’d had my laptop, I’d be downloading as much information from the internet as possible, survival manuals and schematics for how to build things back up if it comes to that … but before any of that, I need to secure a way out of this gas station. How about it?”

Thomas paused. She’d just thrown his plans into disarray. She’d driven a sense of hope into him like a stick stuck into the wheel of a moving bicycle. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll give it a shot.”
Nine hundred years ago an Arab traveler, as he walked through what is today Iraq, observed: “To the right of the road to Mosul is a depression in the earth, black as if it lay under a cloud. It is there that God causes the sources of pitch, great and small, to spurt forth.” (washingtonpost.com, Oct. 21) That pitch was oil, which should be a source of wealth and prosperity to all of Mosul’s and Iraq’s residents.

But the craving by U.S. imperialism for control over the ocean of oil in Iraq, which led to the overthrow of the Iraqi government in 2003 and long years of the Pentagon’s occupation of the country, has wreaked terrible death and destruction on the Iraqi people. And nowhere is that suffering more clearly evident than in the city of Mosul.

For nearly nine months, 100,000 troops from the Iraqi central government and from the Kurdish region, supported by 5,000 U.S. trainers and special troops and U.S. air power, battled the Islamic State group (IS) that had seized and occupied the city of Mosul since 2014. This “coalition” dropped 29,000 bombs on the city. The second largest city in Iraq, Mosul had a population of 1.8 million in 2003.

But the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation took a terrible toll on the city’s residents. And in the battle with IS, some 897,000 people were made homeless, with just 600,000 remaining in the city. (pri.org, July 13)

During an eight-year occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British officials maintained their rule by creating and exacerbating religious and ethnic conflicts in the country. When the bulk of U.S. forces left in 2011, the imperialist-supported Iraqi government, and reactionary sectarian militias associated with it, carried out punitive measures against the resistance forces close to the former ruling Ba’ath Party, which were often majority Sunni Muslims. Thus, when IS forces invaded the country in 2013 and took control of Mosul in 2014, Mosul residents hostile to the Baghdad regime at first gave them some support.

But over time the fanaticism and brutality of the IS regime caused Mosul residents to drop their support. And as the battle raged for control in the city, the population became hostages of the war between IS and the U.S-supported Iraqi government.

Airwars, a group that monitors casualties caused by the anti-IS coalition, estimates that at the least nearly 6,000 civilians were killed in the western Mosul battle between February and June. Some 1,200 were killed by the U.S. bombing. Uncounted thousands of bodies still lie under the rubble. (pri.org, July 13)

On March 17, a single 500-pound bomb dropped by a U.S. war plane on Mosul’s al-Jadidia neighborhood killed some 200 civilians.

A report by Amnesty International, released a day after Iraqi forces declared victory in Mosul, stated that it had “identified a pattern of attacks by Iraqi forces and the U.S.-led military coalition backing them that violated international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes.” The report also accused IS of committing war crimes by deliberately using civilians as human shields. (aljazeera.com, July 11)

In the same Aljazeera article, United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein told reporters: “The women, children and men of Mosul have lived through hell on earth, enduring a level of depravity and cruelty that is almost beyond words.” He said that thousands of residents will not be able to go back to the city because of “extensive damage caused during the conflict.”

The destruction of Mosul is of concern to neither the tycoons on Wall Street nor the generals at the Pentagon. They only care about the unimpeded flow of oil from the region and profits into their banks. But the terrible suffering caused by their wars and occupations must be recognized by all those who oppose their rule here and abroad. U.S. out of the Middle East!
The world has gone cuckoo for cold brew and let us tell you, we don’t blame them. First a disclaimer: making cold brew is not push-button simple. It takes a long time (12-24 hours, to be exact) and can be a bit of a mess.

Which is why we try to make it easy on y’all with Stubbies, growlers, and cans, oh my. But if you’re a DIY-er, big batch cold brew at home is as delicious as the summer day is long.

We sell the Filtron Cold Brewer online so we are obviously Filtron fans, but we decided to do a round-up of several options on the market and see how it fares against our home team favorite.

For the round-up, we brewed up our House Blend, a great choice for cold brewing, and brewed each method according to the directions in the box. The next day we did a blind taste test to find our favorites.

We looked for things like ease of brewing and clean-up, functionality of brewer and most importantly, the resulting flavor and profile of the brewed coffee.
The Jelly Bean (JRO03O) update that popped up on a Verizon Galaxy Nexus last night is now available for download. If you want to flash it though, there are a couple of things you should know. First, you need to make sure your stock G-Nex is running IMM76Q. Second, this is a test build and apparently not the official build that users will see. So if neither of those things bother you, then you should jump all over this.

It’s being reported that this JB build contains both a new bootloader and, wait for it, new radios (FF02 CDMA/FG02 LTE). That may make it worth it, right there.

Download: Google Link [mirror]

Instructions:

The easiest way to do this, is to get yourself back to stock IMM76K. That may mean that you will need to flash factory images and wipe everything. From there, install ClockworkMod Recovery, download the IMM76Q file and flash it using “install zip from sd card.” After that, download the new Jelly Bean (JRO03O) file to your phone and flash it in CWM Recovery just like you did with IMM76Q. (This is a fantastic resource.)

Also, you could wait until someone turns this into a flashable .zip for any ROM.

Update: Radios from the update have been posted here.

Via: XDA

Cheers El Madhatter, oldblue910, Jason and Manny!
A Google logo is seen at the garage where the company was founded on Google's 15th anniversary in Menlo Park, California September 26, 2013. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

(Reuters) - Google Inc has acquired solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace as the Web search giant ramps up plans to deliver wireless Internet access to remote parts of the world.

Titan Chief Executive Vern Raburn declined to provide information on the price of the deal, which he said closed on Monday morning.

The 20-person company will remain in New Mexico for the foreseeable future, Raburn said, with all employees joining Google.

The deal could further Google’s efforts to deliver Internet access to remote regions of the world. Last year Google launched a small network of balloons designed to deliver Internet access over the Southern Hemisphere, dubbed as Project Loon.

“Atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation,” Google said in an emailed statement confirming the Titan acquisition.

Google’s acquisition of Titan comes several weeks after rival Facebook Inc announced plans to build solar-powered drones and satellites capable of beaming Internet access to underdeveloped parts of the world. A few weeks before Facebook’s announcement, press reports said that Facebook was in discussions to acquire Titan.

Titan is developing a variety of solar-powered “atmospheric satellites,” according to the company’s website, with initial commercial operations slated for 2015. The drones, which fly at an altitude of 65,000 feet and can remain aloft for up to five years and have a 165-foot (50-meter) wingspan, slightly shorter than that of a Boeing 777.

News of the acquisition was first reported on Monday by the Wall Street Journal.
A new Pokémon Rumble game will become the first to feature Skylanders style interactive toys, as Nintendo takes a typically cautious approach to NFC technology.

We wouldn’t bother catching ‘em all

You’d never guess it at the moment but the Wii U GamePad has NFC (near field communication) technology built into it, the same tech that the powers the Portal Of Power from Skylanders. But at the moment not a single game uses it or has even been announced for it – until now.

Unfortunately though you could barely get anything less exciting than downloadable game Pokémon Scramble U, the third entry in what is known in the West as the Pokémon Rumble spin-off series.

The game was announced last month in Japan and seems to be the same sort of low grade arena-based shooter as 2011’s Super Pokémon Rumble, which we awarded a scathing 2/10 in our review.

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For some reason Nintendo keep making the games though (we assume that means they’re popular in Japan, although we’ve seen no evidence for that in the sales chart) and Japanese magazine CoroCoro has revealed that Pokémon Scramble U will have its own range of toys to accompany it.

The conceit in the Pokémon Rumble games is that you’re not actually controlling real pokémon but instead little wind-up toy versions of them, hence the odd angular designs. As you can see in the image above that means the physical toys don’t look much like regular pokémon either, so presumably wouldn’t be reused for other games.

Only six basic figures and a special character have been announced so far though, which suggests Nintendo are merely testing (or perhaps muddying) the waters. Each toy will cost the equivalent of £1.40, which is considerably cheaper than any Skylanders toy.

By placing the Pokémon toy near the GamePad it opens up the character to be used within the game. Given the low price though the figures are unlikely to store any game data, unlike their Skylanders equivalents.

Skylanders has been such a success, becoming the second biggest money-maker in gaming, after Activision’s own Call Of Duty, that Disney has overcome its usual distaste for console games and announced its own take on the idea called Disney Infinity.

Thoughts? Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk or leave a comment below
The Pentagon budget will shrink slightly next year for the first time since 1998, the Obama administration said Thurs­day, in an attempt to chip away at the federal deficit while reorienting the armed forces toward Asia.

Under the proposal, the administration will reduce the size of the Army and Marine Corps, trim the number of fighter aircraft and ships, and seek congressional approval for another round of military base closures.

The administration will instead spend more on unmanned vehicles and Special Operations forces that can be deployed quickly and will not require large, expensive bases. The military will also largely preserve its manpower and weapons systems geared toward the Middle East.

The Pentagon said it would ask Congress for $525 billion in 2013, which represents a 1 percent decrease from the current year. While the difference may sound small, it represents a new era of austerity for the Defense Department that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when the military was still accustomed to huge annual raises after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pentagon leaders characterized the cuts in solemn tones. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called them a “difficult undertaking.” Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added: “Make no mistake, the trade-offs were tough. The choices were complex.”

The changes are part of a broader effort by the Pentagon to decrease its projected spending by $487 billion over the next decade in accordance with a deficit-reduction deal President Obama reached with Congress in August.

Those cuts could soon swell substantially. If Obama and Congress cannot agree on another package of spending reductions or tax increases by next January, the Pentagon could be forced to slash an extra $600 billion over 10 years. “It basically takes a chain saw to the budget,” said Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Many analysts say that the chances of that happening are small, and that Obama and Congress are likely to work out a compromise ahead of time. But even if they do, many believe the Pentagon is in for more pain as lawmakers search for a long-term solution to the nation’s fiscal troubles.

“In terms of the overall federal budget, these changes are a rounding error,” Thomas Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said of Obama’s Pentagon budget for next year.

Donnelly said the Pentagon’s fiscal future will depend on the outcome of the presidential election in November.

“Either it will get worse for the Department of Defense if Obama gets reelected or Newt Gingrich gets elected, or it will get better for the Pentagon if Mitt Romney gets elected.”

Aside from the cuts to the Army, which will eventually reduce the number of active-duty soldiers to 490,000 from 547,000, most of the reductions revealed Thursday had been previously announced or involved less costly items. Panetta noted that the Army and the Marine Corps will still be slightly larger than they were in 2001, before the invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent war in Iraq.

Among the few weapons systems getting the ax are a defense weather satellite, a version of the Global Hawk surveillance drone and a radar with a mouthful of a name: the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.

Of the total $259 billion in cuts to projected spending over the next five years, almost one quarter — $60 billion — will come from what the Pentagon obliquely called “efficiencies.” Defense officials said they would save more on “streamlined staff,” better use of “information technology” and “inventory management” but weren’t more specific.

Several big-ticket items that had been under scrutiny survived.

The Pentagon said it will preserve all versions of its next generation F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, although some planned purchases will be delayed. The Air Force will also eliminate six of its 60 tactical air squadrons. Each has from 18 to 24 fighter aircraft, mostly older F-15s or F-16s.

The Navy got to keep all 11 of its aircraft carriers, although it will have to retire seven aging cruisers earlier than expected. It will also cut back production of two Littoral Combat Ships and eight Joint High Speed Vessels.

Panetta signaled that the Pentagon is willing to tackle a couple of politically sensitive topics: closing military bases and limiting compensation for troops and veterans.

He said the Obama administration will ask Congress to establish a new Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which would enforce another round of military base closures nationwide. Congress approved the last round of base closures in 2005. Most lawmakers, however, hate the idea of shuttering bases in their districts.

“Make no mistake, the savings we are proposing will impact all 50 states, and many districts across America,” Panetta said. “This will be a test — a test — of whether reducing the deficit is about talk or action.”

He also said he will ask Congress to approve a separate commission to authorize reductions in retirement benefits, which have accounted for an increasingly steep share of the defense budget. Moreover, he said the Pentagon would limit pay raises for active-duty troops — another idea that is unlikely to win much favor from lawmakers, who consistently award pay hikes larger than those sought by defense officials.

Panetta emphasized that any changes to retirement benefits would affect only future recruits, not those currently in the armed forces. He also said the less-generous pay raises would not take effect until 2015.

Also declining will be a separate budget dedicated to the cost of fighting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and certain other overseas operations. Obama is asking Congress for $88 billion for the Afghan war next year, down from $115 billion in the current fiscal year, which included the costs of winding down the war in Iraq.

Although the defense budget will decline next year, to $525 billion from this year’s $531 billion, under Obama’s current projections it will inch upward in constant dollars between 1 percent and 2 percent annually thereafter.

Some analysts, however, said those projections are far too optimistic and that the Pentagon will be squeezed further.

Gordon Adams, a professor of international relations at American University, predicted that if lawmakers are to stabilize federal finances, they will have to agree on about $4 trillion in spending cuts and revenue increases over the next decade.

“Defense budgets will come down deeper than the secretary thinks,” said Adams, a former White House official for national security budgets who worked for Panetta in the Clinton administration. “To find those cuts, everything, including defense, will still be on the table.”
On his fourth full day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that was supposed to settle this whole Dakota Access Pipeline thing—no more delays due to protests, no more reconsidering the route because of environmental worries. And for a while, it seemed to work. The protest camps are gone, and the pipe has been pumping oil since March. But Thursday, a federal judge ordered a do-over on the rush-job environmental review Trump ordered back in January.

Trump came into office aiming for a blitzkrieg on environmental regulations. He got trench warfare. That's because firing from the other side of no man's land is a nimble alliance of environmental groups that have spent decades preparing for the likes of him. You have probably heard of many of them: the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, and so on. Others are smaller, focused on regional issues—like the Standing Rock Sioux that just won a small victory against the Dakota Access Pipeline. What they all have in common are stubborn, attrition-minded legal teams. Trump's assault is just a more bombastic version of what these lawyers have weathered under past administrations. And if there's any green left in the government by 2020, they'll be the ones responsible.

President Trump is famous for, among other things, his love of infrastructure and hatred of regulations. His January 24 executive order didn't actually target the Dakota Access Pipeline specifically. It was a sweeping declaration, meant to fast track every new, large, high priority infrastructure project through environmental review. "The White House's strategy is to deconstruct the administrative state and give favors to the fossil fuel industry," says Pat Gallagher, director of the Sierra Club's environmental law program. So these environmental NGOs are changing tack to adapt.

"This is not an abrupt change in our overarching goals," says Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center. "This is just a change in footing from offensive to defensive." Obviously, things were different under the Obama administration. Groups like the Western Environmental Law Center often worked with the government to develop policy.

For example, the Bureau of Land Management's Methane Waste Prevention Rule. Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, with more than 86 times the warming potential as carbon dioxide, plus a tendency to leak out of oil and gas drilling equipment. A lot of that drilling happens on public lands, managed by the BLM. So starting in 2008, the Western Environmental Law Center led a coalition of environmental groups in an effort to have the BLM force drillers to plug up their leaks. Their efforts paid off in November 2016—a week after Donald Trump's election night victory—when the BLM published a rule that was very close to what the groups had been pushing for.

If you happen to be an environmental news junkie, you already know that the past six months have been quite a ride in methane rule land. First came challenges from drill-happy states like Wyoming and Montana, then more challenges from the drilling industry itself. Congressional Republicans tried to rescind the rule in May, but that effort failed in the Senate. The latest twist came just this week, when the Department of Interior (which is the BLM's parent agency) announced it was delaying implementation of the rule. Schlenker-Goodrich says the Western Environmental Law Center plans to sue. Back to defense.

So far, some of that defensive action has been relatively easy. "They pulled the plug on a lot of stuff without consideration of requirements they are required to go through to change the rules," says Michael Wall, the NRDC's litigation lead. For example, on inauguration day, Trump's chief of staff ordered all federal government agencies to immediately withdraw any last minute rules made by the Obama administration that hadn't yet been published in the Federal Register. One of these rules had to do with mercury discharges from dentists’ offices. On February 1, the NRDC filed the first environmental lawsuit of the Trump era, charging that the Environmental Protection Agency didn't go through the right procedures before rescinding the rule. Long story short, the NRDC caught them on a technical foul.

"This mistake probably reflects an interest by the administration in appearing to get something done without putting in the effort to make sure it was done right," says Wall. Trump's EPA eventually relented, and lo and behold the Federal Register finally published the rule this week.

But what the Trump administration's tactics lack in sophistication they make up in volume. His pan-deregulatory agenda has even environmental lawyers who survived George W. Bush's eight years of oil industry coziness on their heels. And that's on top of the usual threats to the environment and public health from various states, local governments, and private industries. So, in addition to litigating, these lawyers maintain intelligence networks to keep track of all the emerging patterns. "We work with grassroots and community groups, or meet with individuals in coffee shops and cafes to learn about local issues," says Schlenker-Goodrich. He says they also maintain requisite ties in Washington, and use things like Freedom of Information Act requests to keep up on the latest machinations within the federal agencies.

The Standing Rock Sioux's court victory against the Dakota Access Pipeline is another type of defense. The tribe's case is essentially fighting to uphold the National Environmental Policy Act, a law passed in 1970 that requires federal agencies to review the environmental impacts of any of their activities. The Dakota Access Pipeline passes under Lake Oahe, which is actually a reservoir created by a dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Missouri River. In early December 2016, after their prolonged standoff, the tribe successfully sued the Army Corps to withdraw the pipeline's easement under the lake. The Corps said it would begin looking for alternative routes, "through an Environmental Impact Statement with full public input and analysis."

Then came Trump's January 24 executive order. Two weeks later, the Army Corps trashed the environmental review and granted the pipeline's original easement through Lake Oahe.

Despite this week's court victory, the Dakota Access Pipeline is still pumping oil. For now, the ruling only requires the Army Corps of Engineers reopen its environmental assessment of the pipeline. Depending on how that turns out, the pipe could get shut down for good. And the outcome could have an even longer reach. "Without environmental review, the $1 trillion infrastructure Trump has promised will be a bulldozer for the environment," says Schlenker-Goodrich. So this is where he, and the other lawyers, will hold the line. Fighting to protect what remains of US environmental protections. Until 2020, or as long as is necessary.
Ethereum’s (ETH) troubled but uncontentious Byzantium is officially here as the cryptocurrency’s fifth hard fork.

As creator Vitalik Buterin celebrated with other developers Sunday, Byzantium fought off last-minute bugs and calls for delays to have a stable issuance.

The move was notable in its lack of contention, with no significant community arguments resulting from Byzantium’s creation.

Similarly, ETH prices remained relatively stable both before and after the fork’s execution, rising around $40 October 13 and maintaining new levels since.

This takes ETH towards the upper end of its price spectrum, which this year saw all-time highs of around $410 and a July low of $146.

Despite the frenetic growth of investment in Ethereum this year, Byzantium is part of a package of improvements to the protocol that has been in development since 2015.

Known as Metropolis, its roadmap currently extends to an unknown date in 2018, when a further hard fork, Constantinople, will activate.

“Metropolis is a planned Ethereum development phase that includes two hard forks: Byzantium and Constantinople. Byzantium is occurring at block number 4.37mil. Constantinople does not currently have a release date, but is expected in 2018,” a blog post from late last week confirms.
The most popular article in the leading economics Web archive doesn’t concern tax policy, international trade, or the theory of the firm. It’s about an online fantasy game.

During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony’s popular online fantasy world of Norrath. “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics. The article, which you can download here, not only outpaces the online works of every Nobel laureate, it is also the fourth-most popular article on the entire Social Science Research Network, which contains more than 75,000 professional articles and abstracts in range of social sciences.

For cybergaming naifs—most males over age 30 (me included) and almost all women—virtual worlds are elaborate, multiplayer, role-playing online environments in which each player’s actions can affect many others. At any given moment, 50,000 or more people from more than 120 countries are online at EverQuest, moving their personal “avatars”—wizards, trolls, amazonlike women, and a dozen other types—through the fanciful landscapes of Norrath. These dramas unfold on more than 40 dedicated Sony servers, each accommodating up to 2,000 players interacting with the program and each other. (EverQuest is only one of several popular MMORPGs—”massively multiplayer online role-playing games.” The oldest, Ultima Online, has 225,000 players; and the largest, Lineage, has more than 4 million subscribers, mostly in Korea.)

What intrigues Castronova and other economists about EverQuest—beyond the fact that more than 500,000 people pay Sony $13 a month to participate—is that something resembling a nascent economy has emerged in Norrath. Inadvertently, EverQuest has become a virtual experiment in some of the fundamental questions in economics: What are the necessary conditions for markets; how much government does capitalism require; and how do equality and inequality affect economic development?

According to Castronova’s account of it, EverQuest has something to gratify economists of all political stripes. For natural-law types, Norrath suggests that the conditions for vibrant markets to develop are pretty minimal. Libertarians can delight that “government,” in the form of rules restricting a player’s activity, is also limited in Norrath. And liberals can take heart that Norrath’s market and society rest on initial conditions of radical equality.

The most basic condition for market activity built into EverQuest is that resources in Norrath are limited. In particular, a player chooses his avatar’s initial traits, but a character with the power to heal wounds, for example, will lack agility; and another smart enough to decipher codes will be physically weak. Unlike real life, therefore, everyone in Norrath starts out with roughly equal resources.

The second basic condition of self-regulating economic life in this virtual world, as in our own, is that nothing is free. An avatar’s initial assets aren’t enough to make much headway in the game, so players intent on navigating Norrath’s challenges have to work at either developing new skills or earning new assets.

The intriguing part is that most MMORPG players expand their assets and abilities not through violence or chicanery, the modus operandi of a typical single-player computer game, but through virtual market transactions. Hundreds of thousands of EverQuest players spend most of their time in Norrath trading or cooperating with other avatars, buying goods from creatures (“bots”) built into the program, or using auction sites inside the game. To facilitate this, EverQuest adopted two other key conditions from real economic life: A currency called “platinum pieces,” or PP, can be earned by completing various tasks, and there are rudimentary rules for buying, selling, and bartering.

These few conditions are apparently all it takes to precipitate capitalism in cyberspace. As in a real economy, virtual market conditions change in response to how players behave. For example, shrewd players who know Norrath’s nooks and crannies will purchase goods in a game zone where they’ve become abundant and then sell them in another where they’re in greater demand.

The kicker for economists is that these virtual economic relationships have broken into the real U.S. economy. When players found EverQuest’s bartering rules inadequate, they started exchanging the armor, spells, and other Norrathian objects of value at real-world auction sites. These transactions are conducted not in Norrathian PP but in U.S. dollars and then completed between avatars inside the game. (You pay in dollars at a real-world site, then the seller’s avatar gives your avatar the goods in Norrath.) You can even buy another player’s avatar, complete with its accumulated skills and assets. Sony tried to stop all these transactions and persuaded eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to bar them on the grounds that they involve Sony’s intellectual property. But this kind of protectionism is hard to enforce whether the goods are real or virtual: Trade in Norrathian goods and services simply migrated to other sites.

The exchange of goods and services in Norrathian PP, inside the game, and U.S dollars, outside, creates an exchange-rate relationship between the two currencies. Based on surveys of these market exchanges, Castronova calculated that one unit of PP was worth a little more than one U.S. penny. That technically makes Norrathian PP a “stronger” currency than the Japanese yen or Italian lira, albeit a thinner and less liquid one. (But Sony apparently could use lessons in central banking: As in real-world Japan, price deflation has hit the market for Norrathian goods.)

The economic dynamics of EverQuest also allow Castranova to calculate wage levels in Norrath. Take the PP value of an average avatar’s skills and assets, divide it by the average number of hours required to accumulate those holdings, and an average avatar “earns” 319 PP/hour, or $3.42/hour at the prevailing exchange rate. (This doesn’t sound like much, but Norrath’s deflation means that “real” wages are actually rising.) Castronova estimates that Norrath’s per capita GNP is higher than India’s or China’s.

The similarities to real-world market behavior certainly owe much to the fact that EverQuest players know how real markets work and probably believe in markets. In this respect, Norrath resembles the more successful transitional economies of Central Europe, whose citizens had a history of capitalism to draw on when their communist regimes crumbled. (Russia, by contrast, had no history of market capitalism and has struggled to make the transition to free markets.)

EverQuest liberates its players from some of the dismal restrictions of real economic life. Norrath is a truer meritocracy than our own, with no one hindered or helped by personal history or family background. The game also offers the ultimate safety hatch (a superenhanced version of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection): Fail at one of Norrath’s deadly challenges, and you can start over with a new avatar and new identity.

What may be most striking about Norrath is that the virtual market doesn’t require a powerful government. Norrathian economic life, conducted in PP or dollars, proceeds without laws stipulating the terms of exchanges, regulations dictating who can participate in various activities, or authorities enforcing contracts. There are no monetary or fiscal policies to manage demand and prices, and no safety net.

In this virtual world, a powerful government appears only briefly at the start, in the iron rule that everyone starts out with roughly equal assets. Then it retreats and lets economic nature take its course. In Norrath, more equality permits freer markets. This may provide the most important lesson of all from the EverQuest experiment: Real equality can obviate much of a democratic government’s intervention in a modern economy. Many of our own government’s current policies—progressive taxation, securities regulation, social insurance—are aimed at offsetting some form of inequality. If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government.
Month after month I've taken the "over" for the employment report ("over" the consensus), and that has been correct most months. However, for January, I'll take the "under" ... however I think there is a good chance that employment will be up 3 million year-over-year (it would take 192 thousand jobs added including revisions).

Friday at 8:30 AM ET, the BLS will release the employment report for January. The consensus, according to Bloomberg, is for an increase of 230,000 non-farm payroll jobs in January (with a range of estimates between 215,000 and 268,000), and for the unemployment rate to be unchanged at 5.6%.

The BLS reported 252,000 jobs added in December.

Here is a summary of recent data:

• The ADP employment report showed an increase of 213,000 private sector payroll jobs in January. This was below expectations of 220,000 private sector payroll jobs added. The ADP report hasn't been very useful in predicting the BLS report for any one month, but in general, this suggests employment growth slightly below expectations.

• The ISM manufacturing employment index decreased in January to 54.1%. A historical correlation between the ISM manufacturing employment index and the BLS employment report for manufacturing, suggests that private sector BLS manufacturing payroll jobs were unchanged in January. The ADP report indicated a 14,000 increase for manufacturing jobs in January.

The ISM non-manufacturing employment index decreased in January to 51.6%. A historical correlation between the ISM non-manufacturing employment index and the BLS employment report for non-manufacturing, suggests that private sector BLS non-manufacturing payroll jobs increased about 115,000 in January.

Combined, the ISM indexes suggests employment gains of 115,000. This suggests growth below expectations.

• Initial weekly unemployment claims averaged close to 298,000 in January, up from 291,000 in December. For the BLS reference week (includes the 12th of the month), initial claims were at 308,000; this was up from 289,000 during the reference week in December.

Generally this suggests a few more layoffs, seasonally adjusted, in January compared to the previous four months (employment gains averaged 284,000 per month for the previous four months).

• The final January University of Michigan consumer sentiment index increased to 98.1 from the December reading of 93.6. This was the highest level in over ten years. Sentiment is frequently coincident with changes in the labor market, but this increase is probably mostly due to sharply lower gasoline prices.

• On small business hiring: The small business index from Intuit showed a 20,000 increase in small business employment in January, down from 30,000 added in November and December.

• Trim Tabs reported that the U.S. economy added between 190,000 and 220,000 jobs in January. This was down from their 210,000 to 240,000 range last month (that was low but close). "TrimTabs’ employment estimates are based on analysis of daily income tax deposits to the U.S. Treasury from the paychecks of the 141 million U.S. workers subject to withholding" December and January are challenging for TrimTabs due to year end bonuses - so they provided a range again this month.

• Conclusion: There is always some randomness to the employment report, but most indicators suggest fewer jobs added in January compared to the previous several months. The consensus forecast reflects some slowdown in employment growth, but I'll take the under this month (below 230,000).

Special Note: In addition to the normal revisions, the annual benchmark revision will be released with the January report. The preliminary estimate was an additional 7,000 jobs as of March 2014 (not a large revision).

Also, the new population controls will be used in the Current Population Survey (CPS) estimation process. The BLS notes that the "household survey data for January 2015 will not be directly comparable with data for December 2014 or earlier periods".
The economic pessimists are winning the argument in the U.S. Treasury bond market.

Yields on Treasury issues have fallen across the board Monday to their lowest levels in more than a year as some investors continue to seek a haven.

The 10-year T-note yield (charted below), a benchmark for mortgage rates, was at 3.04% at about noon PDT, down from 3.11% on Friday and the lowest since April 2009.

The two-year T-note was at 0.63%. That’s about half the yield investors were demanding as recently as April 5.

Traders say some investors are taking their cue from budget-cutting promises made over the weekend by the world’s wealthiest nations at the G-20 group summit. The biggest countries committed to slashing their budget deficits in half by 2013.

The more the industrialized nations talk about reducing spending, the greater the risk that the global economy tilts back toward recession and deflation. At least, that’s how new bond buyers see it, said Tom Di Galoma, head of U.S. rates trading at Guggenheim Partners in New York.

“This is carryover from the ‘double-dip,’ deflation outlook” that fueled heavy buying of Treasuries last week, Di Galoma said. The 10-year T-note yield was 3.24% a week ago.

Economist Paul Krugman has been leading the pack of analysts warning about the risk of sinking into a new morass if governments and central banks pull back on policies to boost the economy. “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression,” Krugman wrote in the New York Times over the weekend. The first two U.S. depressions were in the years following 1873 and in the 1930s.

The stock market wasn't buying the bond market’s grim message Monday. After slumping last week, stocks were up modestly with about an hour of trading to go. The Dow Jones industrials were up 42 points to 10,185.

Some of the fresh demand for Treasuries is tied to end-of-quarter book-juggling, as banks and other financial players look to bolster their balance sheets with liquid securities, traders say.

But buyers also must be betting that the raft of economic data this week won’t tell a story of a stronger recovery that could fuel a sudden snap-back in interest rates. A tepid report Monday on May consumer spending helped bolster the econ bears’ case.

On Friday the government will report on June employment trends. The private sector is estimated to have added a net 111,000 jobs this month, up from a dismal 41,000 in May, according to economist estimates tracked by Bloomberg News.

Di Galoma thinks the 10-year T-note yield will soon fall through 3%. Any backup in yields just brings out more buyers, he said.

-- Tom Petruno
The Los Angeles River is on the verge of a new era. In the few years since the flood control channel was reclassified as a “navigable waterway,” the region has re-embraced its oddball amalgam of concrete and nature, which winds roughly 51 miles from the San Fernando Valley out to the ocean in Long Beach.

A $1-billion-plus plan to restore 11 miles north of Downtown LA is (slowly) working its way through federal approvals.

Famed architect Frank Gehry is working with Los Angeles County officials and numerous nonprofits and stakeholder groups to create a comprehensive plan for the whole river. The river was one of the selling points in the city’s winning bid for the 2028 Olympics. Developers are still clamoring to build along the river’s banks.

The last time the LA River was reborn it was the late 1930s, and it had been drowning the young city periodically since its birth. At some points, the river was just a trickle; in other parts, it was uncontrollably wild, and flooded frequently and devastatingly.

After a terrible flood in March 1938, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began work to lower the riverbed, widen the channel, and choke the whole thing in “a continuous trapezoidal concrete channel to carry the river from Elysian Park to Long Beach,” as described in The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth.

Gehry thinks the LA River can be great again with its concrete still intact; the Army Corps aims to remove at least some of it.

In 2013, just as the LA River’s moment was beginning, we looked at 25 photos from the LA Public Library’s collection showing just how unrecognizable it was before it was paved. Peter Bennett, who runs the Los Angeles River Photos blog, found where nine of those photos were taken, and, using his iPad to match up with the originals, took the same shots of the river as it is in the 21st century. In an email, Bennett writes:

The idea was to get as close to the original spot the older photos were taken, and try to match up the lens and framing with the original… There was a sense of time travel as I viewed the landscape as it is today and... as it was back in the ’30s. The visual contrast was quite striking, and the changes apparent in the 75 years or so since the photos were taken was at times quite dramatic.

Below, the two versions are matched together, along with Bennett’s notes, so you can take the trip yourself.

“The first photo I took was from the Glendale Hyperion Bridge. It was probably one of the easiest to match up as the lamppost is still there, and I felt like I was standing on the exact spot where the photographer of the original photograph stood when they took it back in 1937.”

“The shot south of Compton Boulevard had no real landmarks, so I took it just south of the Compton Avenue Bridge. In the 1926 photo, you can see the river veer off to the right a bit, but I cannot say if that was a result of the flooding heading inland or if it was taken farther Downstream, where the river does veer to the right. In either case, you get a good idea of the contrast.”

“The most difficult photo to match up was the one from Elysian Park toward Cypress/Glassell. It took a couple of trips to find the location from where this photo was taken, but I finally spotted a blocked off fire road and walked down it a ways and found the view between some old eucalyptus trees...

I could not get to the exact spot, because it was simply too steep now, but the contrast between the 1898 rural farmland setting and the urban landscape it is now is quite stunning. The small country road in the foreground has been replaced by the multilaned 5 Freeway, and the crops just behind them are now a schoolyard in the densely packed Elysian Valley (Frogtown) community.”

“The photos of the Downtown bridges are interesting as you can really contrast the original unpaved river with the paved version that we are familiar with today. The photo [previously] labeled looking north from the Seventh Street Viaduct was actually taken from the Olympic Boulevard Viaduct, and while you can see the Seventh Street Viaduct in the distance. Today that view is blocked by the 10 Freeway."

“The photo of the dry section of Studio City was taken from Lankershim Boulevard, and you can see the edge of Universal Studios on the right.”

“The Dayton Avenue bridge hardly exists in its original form. It has become a mishmash of bridges that have been added to over the years. But if you look closely at the recent photo, in the upper left corner, you can still see some of the balustrades of the original railing of the bridge that still remain. The Riverside-Figueroa Bridge, which is what it is currently called, is being replaced again by a new bridge, and it is unclear whether anything from the original bridges will remain after the construction.” [Update: The Riverside-Figueroa bridge’s replacement opened in January 2017.]
Once we enter Open Beta, we will stop selling the current set of

Many people who have supported Path of Exile financially will receive physical goods posted to them (such as t-shirts, posters, copies of the game and soundtrack). We are about to start preparing these and we expect that they will be printed and posted before August.

A few months ago, we stated that we hoped to enter Open Beta in June. Some of the crucial features that we must enter Open Beta with are not yet finished, so we will delay the Open Beta until they are. As mentioned above, we expect that this will be mid-August. While we strongly believe that this estimate is accurate, we will update it over time if work progresses ahead or behind of schedule.

One of the advantages of not having a publisher is that we are able to create our own deadlines without being forced to open up the game to the public in an unfinished state. While I am sure that many of our patient fans are disappointed by this announcement, please rest assured that the game is almost done - lucky testers (and our generous supporters) have been playing the Closed Beta for ten months and can hopefully attest to our high quality standards.

Here's the plan for the last remaining patches before Open Beta. The patches will take approximately three weeks each, and will be available to Alpha testers a week before they are deployed to the Beta realm.

0.9.10: Will be deployed Tuesday, June 5. I've discussed its contents

0.9.11: Among other changes, this patch will enable the new end-game (which we have been hinting at for a while) and the Act Two final boss. It will include the ability to swap between weapon sets.

0.9.12: This patch will fix most of the issues with Minions. It will also introduce PvP arenas and the ability to challenge other players to duel. We expect to improve the Brutus fight in this patch as well.

0.9.13: A secure trade screen and substantial update to server stability and capacity is scheduled for this patch.

0.10.0: The official Open Beta release, which we expect will be deployed a week or so after 0.9.13. It will have Act Three enabled, voice acting for most of the NPCs and characters, as well as a range of cosmetic micro-transactions to purchase.

There are hundreds of minor bug fixes and small features such as additional skill gems and monsters scheduled during the above timeline as well, but they are too small to individually list here.

While the Closed Beta has expanded in features and some content in the last year, most of our artists have been working on Act Three. We expect that Path of Exile will enter Open Beta in mid-August. At that point our final character wipe will occur and the game will be permanently available for everyone to play.Once we enter Open Beta, we will stop selling the current set of Supporter Packs and will instead offer other options for purchasing micro-transaction credit. If you want to buy a Kiwi pet, you will need to do so while Path of Exile is still in Closed Beta.Many people who have supported Path of Exile financially will receive physical goods posted to them (such as t-shirts, posters, copies of the game and soundtrack). We are about to start preparing these and we expect that they will be printed and posted before August.A few months ago, we stated that we hoped to enter Open Beta in June. Some of the crucial features that we must enter Open Beta with are not yet finished, so we will delay the Open Beta until they are. As mentioned above, we expect that this will be mid-August. While we strongly believe that this estimate is accurate, we will update it over time if work progresses ahead or behind of schedule.One of the advantages of not having a publisher is that we are able to create our own deadlines without being forced to open up the game to the public in an unfinished state. While I am sure that many of our patient fans are disappointed by this announcement, please rest assured that the game is almost done - lucky testers (and our generous supporters) have been playing the Closed Beta for ten months and can hopefully attest to our high quality standards.Here's the plan for the last remaining patches before Open Beta. The patches will take approximately three weeks each, and will be available to Alpha testers a week before they are deployed to the Beta realm.: Will be deployed Tuesday, June 5. I've discussed its contents here : Among other changes, this patch will enable the new end-game (which we have been hinting at for a while) and the Act Two final boss. It will include the ability to swap between weapon sets.: This patch will fix most of the issues with Minions. It will also introduce PvP arenas and the ability to challenge other players to duel. We expect to improve the Brutus fight in this patch as well.: A secure trade screen and substantial update to server stability and capacity is scheduled for this patch.: The official Open Beta release, which we expect will be deployed a week or so after 0.9.13. It will have Act Three enabled, voice acting for most of the NPCs and characters, as well as a range of cosmetic micro-transactions to purchase.There are hundreds of minor bug fixes and small features such as additional skill gems and monsters scheduled during the above timeline as well, but they are too small to individually list here.While the Closed Beta has expanded in features and some content in the last year, most of our artists have been working on Act Three. Here's a teaser of some of their recent work. YouTube |

Lead Developer. Follow us on: Twitter Facebook | Contact Support if you need help! Last edited by Chris on Oct 31, 2012, 9:43:40 AM

Posted by Chris

on Grinding Gear Games on
America may be one of the richest countries in the world, but its people are less healthy and more likely to die early from disease or accidents than those in any other affluent country, a damning official US report has found.

Even the best-off Americans – those who have health insurance, a college education, a high income and healthy behaviour – are sicker than their peers in comparable countries, says the report by the US National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

"We were struck by the gravity of these findings," said Steven H Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and chair of the panel that wrote the report. "Americans are dying and suffering at rates that we know are unnecessary because people in other high-income countries are living longer lives and enjoying better health. What really concerns our panel is why, for decades, we have been slipping behind." The report, US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health. It compares the US with 16 affluent democracies, including Australia, Canada and Japan and many in Europe including Britain. There have been similar findings from the Commonwealth Fund over some years, but they have compared the US with only a handful of nations.

The new report looked in detail at data from the late 1990s to 2008. "Over this time period, we uncovered a strikingly consistent and pervasive pattern of higher mortality and inferior health in the United States, beginning at birth," it said.

For many years, Americans have had a shorter life expectancy than people in almost all the comparator countries and for the past three decades the gap has been widening, particularly for women.

The US does badly in nine specific areas. It has the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy country and also does poorly on other birth outcomes, such as low weight babies.

Deaths from injuries and homicides are far higher than elsewhere and a leading cause of death in children, adolescents and young adults. US adolescents have had the highest rate of pregnancies of affluent countries since the 1990s and are more likely to acquire sexually transmitted infections. The US has the second highest HIV rate and the highest incidence of Aids among the 17 countries.

Even taking out drunk driving, Americans lose more years of life to alcohol and other drugs than people in other affluent countries. The US has the highest obesity rate and, from age 20, one of the highest levels of type 2 diabetes. The death rate from heart disease is the second highest in the 17 countries. There is more lung disease and more deaths from it than in Europe and older people report more arthritis and other limitations on their activity than in Europe or Japan.

The US is, however, good at looking after the health of the most elderly. People who reach 75 are more likely to live longer, have lower death rates from stroke and cancer, better-controlled blood pressure and cholesterol levels and lower rates of smoking than elsewhere.

But death and disease take a huge toll on the younger American population, even though the US spends more on healthcare per capita than almost any other country in the world. Poverty, inequality, racial and ethnic differences and lack of health insurance are part of the story but not all. Even non-Hispanic white people with money and insurance who are not smokers or obese do less well than those in other countries.

Unless action is taken, the report says, the health of Americans will probably continue to fall behind. "The tragedy is not that the United States is losing a contest with other countries but that Americans are dying and suffering from illness and injury at rates that are demonstrably unnecessary. Superior health outcomes in other nations show that Americans also can enjoy better health," says the report.

The US public is unaware of the issues, says the report. "I don't think most parents know, on average, infants, children, and adolescents in the US die younger and have greater rates of illness and injury than youth in other countries," said Woolf.

The report says the situation will not improve unless Americans wake up to the truth about their health and a public debate begins.
About

With most of my time spent remaking the game i loved to play when i was younger and at school, i have really noticed my passion for game designing and this project has taken me just over 3 years to make and i have hit a point where i can take it no further.

which for me is very sad but i am only just a designer, i have made contact with coders who would love to help with this project and get it finished aswel as music artist to make custom soundtracks for the game but sadly that funding so with this so to speak wall in front of me i have come here to kickstarter the last line of defence for my game to finally get finished, i just hope that some of you have played the original thing thing arena and would love to see a remake.

To all those who pledge i thank you from the bottom of my heart and promise to not let you down in bringing back a classic flashplayer game with a new and wonderful twist,
On October 26, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continued their successful operation on the eastern bank of the Euphrates and entered the oil fields of al-Tanak and Galban, according to pro-Kurdish sources. Earlier, the US-backed force reportedly established control over the oil fields of Azraq and Jarnof, Saban, Northern Omar, Maleh and Mqaat.

Thus, the SDF de-facto won the race for the oil and gas infrastructure located in the area with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

Pro-opposition sources reported that ISIS just handed over the al-Tanak oil field to the SDF within the framework of the previously reached agreement. No more details were provided. Most likely these reports are linked to the alleged SDF-ISIS deal reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on October 22. According to this report, ISIS was set to surrender the entire area including Hajin village to the US-backed force.

Pro-SDF sources explain the situation with the top-class US air support and combat characteristics of SDF troops.

On October 25, the SAA liberated the Industrial Area and a large part of Khassarat district from ISIS in the city of Deir Ezzor. Now, government forces are aiming to separate further Saqr Island from the rest of the ISIS-held area in Deir Ezzor. When this is done, the SAA and the NDF will be able to isolate the remaining ISIS units in Saqr Island and to clear it from the terrorists.

The separatist Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is facing hard times in Iraq. On October 24, the Department of Foreign Relations of the KRG released a statement asking for a ceasefire with forces of the Federal Government. In return, it promised to “freeze the results of [independence] referendum”, and asked for “an open dialogue between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraqi Federal Government on the basis of the Constitution.”

However, on October 25 and October 26, Iraqi forces advanced further in areas seized by KRG forces beyond the borders of the Kurdish autonomous region. Experts believe that the army and its allies will continue operation in the contested areas until KRG military forces fully withdraw from it.

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As the film Philomena heads into awards season, draped with nominations for Oscars and Baftas, you might think nuns are having a bad PR moment. But then over at Team Convent, Call the Midwife is the star of BBC TV's Sunday nights with a much more sympathetic crew. Both these are fictionalised versions of real stories, and they are just the tip of the iceberg: there are large numbers of nuns in books – surely higher than their incidence in the real-life population – with nearly all the descriptions coming from women authors, though there are a few good men below. (Strangely, I made the same point about flat-sharing in books – is it something to do with women and single-sex groups?).

Muriel Spark liked her nuns – one of the main characters in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ends up as Sister Helena, and there is a Marxist Church of England convent in Symposium: in one splendid scene the haloes on the figures in a mural are revealed as the fur hats of Lenin and friends. The Abbess of Crewe is wholly set in a convent, but is well known to be a satire on the Watergate scandal.

And that demonstrates a key feature of convents, fictional or otherwise – they are not actually mysterious hotbeds of unknowable religious transcendence or wickedness. They are communities like any other, with secrets, dramas and troublesome elections. And so, ideal as a vehicle for a good story: any closed community is interesting (see also: country house party, boarding school), there is an opportunity to have good strong female characters without their being framed by their relationships with men, and there is always the underlying question: "Why did these women become nuns?"

Roman Catholic women of a certain age will remember being obsessed as teenagers with Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, book and film – "Is God calling me to be Audrey Hepburn?" It's still a good strong read, and even more fascinating when you know the story behind it. It is a novel, but based on the life of the author's long-term companion, a former nun.

One aspect of nuns in books is that the names are confusing and you get your Sister Mary mixed up with Sister Maria – and apparently the considerable profits from The Nun's Story are languishing unclaimed because no one knows which nuns should have inherited them. More straightforwardly non-fiction are books from Karen Armstrong (Through the Narrow Gate) and Monica Baldwin (I Leap Over the Wall – so much the better name) dealing with the challenges of leaving the convent behind in, respectively, 1981 and 1949.

Of course we all like to read about nuns going off the rails: Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus is an overwrought and enjoyable look at a convent in the Himalayas, and a nun who wants a last chance. There is also the very splendid Lambs of God by the Australian author Marele Day, with its feral nuns including sheep in their community. Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (overshadowed now by the 1971 notorious-in-its-day Ken Russell film) is non-fiction, full of hysterical and demonic sisters in 17th-century France. The book very much reflects its author's non-believing, child-of-the-enlightenment stance, though it's a rattling good read, and he does his best to be fair.

Other men who have bravely written about nuns include the American novelist Ron Hansen, with his well-imagined Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), paralleling the story of St Therese of Lisieux, and Mark Salzman with Lying Awake (2000) – an extraordinary look at a nun who has visions and writes poetry, but fears both may disappear if she has treatment for epilepsy.

These have all been books with the nuns as the direct focus, but there is also a subgenre looking at them through the eyes of girls attending convent schools. In Edna O'Brien's Country Girl (1960), Cait and Baba deliberately get themselves expelled, amid some fairly unsympathetic nuns. Antonia White wrote what amounted to a misery memoir in Frost in May (1933), a lightly fictionalised version of her own experiences.

(But then it turns out her memories weren't reliable – Samantha Ellis writes rivetingly about this in her new book on literary heroines.) Much more enjoyable is Land of Spices (1941) by the under-rated Kate O'Brien – the title comes from a George Herbert poem and shouldn't be taken to imply anything exotic or cosmopolitan in the content (it means prayer) but, the relationship between Reverend Mother and a child at the convent school is engrossing. And adults get pulled in too: Iris Murdoch's The Bell (1958) is set in a religious community attached to a convent, but the nuns' role is mostly symbolic.

There are astonishing numbers of detective stories with nuns as sleuths or key characters: Antonia Fraser's 1977 Quiet as a Nun (convent, boarding school and the estimable Jemima Shore – triple threat) stands out, and the US author Jane Haddam's crime books often feature religious settings to great effect.

Once you start looking at nuns in history from a modern perspective, there comes a whole new topic – was it actually fun being a nun? Of course there must have been an unknown percentage of women closed up against their will, but it's rewarding to examine the idea that being a nun wasn't that bad an option in earlier times. In fact, dare we say it, was it the feminist choice? Look what they missed: a nun was free from the horrors and dangers of childbirth and the rigours of unwanted marriage. Often they could pursue an interest in medicine, horticulture, art or music. They didn't have to wear corsets or attract men …

This is what fascinates female authors and readers. Sarah Dunant's marvellous Sacred Hearts – published 2009, set in 1570 in Italy – looks at the idea of different choices for different women. Sylvia Townsend Warner in The Corner That Held Them (published 1948, set in an English convent in 14th-century Norfolk) gives us gossip, politics, particular friendships and details of church music.

Charlotte Brontë – daughter of the parsonage – is deeply suspicious of Roman Catholicism in general, and the figure of the nun in Villette is quite troublesome. But as s/he isn't a real nun – well, perhaps we won't examine the psychology of that too closely. She was certainly reflecting back to Gothic fiction and supernatural, creepy religious figures, rather than looking at career opportunities, and she and her heroine Lucy Snowe take a good Protestant line against Papist nonsense.

But Brontë is the exception: most authors understand more and condemn less.

Which other writers created convents worth reading about, and which books make the life sound attractive? Please offer up your thoughts …
​Thor, the classic God of Thunder in the Marvel comics, exploded onto the screen in 2011's "Thor".

The film did well, both with critics and financially, giving Marvel even more momentum to push its planed cinematic universe forward. Surprisingly though, Thor's debut film was a make or break moment for Marvel.

In a recent interview with the director of the film, Kenneth Branagh, discussed just how nervous the company was about the film.

Branagh had the following to say in the interview, as reported by ​Comicbook.com:

"Remember, there were only two pictures in the Marvel Universe. Iron Man, genius, the first one. [The Incredible] Hulk hadn’t worked as they’d hoped," he continued, "And then [ Thor was] number three, it was sink or swim before Captain America and then suddenly, oh, it was fine after that. We make Iron Man 2 and Avengers and everything’s tickety-boo."

"But everybody who was there knows that that was an incredibly sweaty time," he continued.

When asked if Thor failing would have hurt Marvel and the plan for their film timeline, Branagh had the following to said, "That’s certainly how they felt."

What a twist! Sounds like Thor succeeding was the best thing that could have happened for everyone!

Thor recently starred in the third film for the character, "Thor: Ragnarok", which has become a smash hit. Looks like everyone has this thunder god to thank for making sure we would continue to enjoy high quality superhero films produced by Marvel!

"Thor: Ragnarok" is out now, be sure to check it out!

​​
This product hasn't received any reviews yet. Be the first to review this product!

Read reviews all over internet... So I watched some Unboxing vids, and read online reviews, and freaked myself out, AFTER ordering this jacket. Some people online are really NOT fans of this website, or their products. All I can do is speak from MY experiences...

The item shipped fast.

The item arrived fast.

The packaging was perfect. Well sealed, compact without damaging the jacket. Professional looking.

The jacket was exactly how it was advertised. It fits perfect (which for me is the hardest part of shopping online).

I really can't say anything bad about my experience with this company or product. In fact, I'll probably order myself the Star Lord jacket for Christmas. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Look NO further tha right here I could not believe the quality of the product I received. It is expertly made, uses very supple and attractive leather and fits like a glove. READ the measurement chart and make sure you USE it to guaranteed the right fit.

Had a little bit of a time with communications BUT the item arrived within 4 days. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Tis a good buy a great medium to light jacket, good color not exactly like the movie which is good because i dont want to look like im cosplaying in everyday life. The best part about this jacket is not being attacked by a girl with a big metal stick and a droid that shocks you. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Recommended It is the best and most amazing jacket of Finn. Recommended Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

OH MY GOSH. I don't usually review products but I could not resist for this item.

So this jacket just arrived (within a week!!!) in time for the holidays. I purchased it as a gift for my brother. Not only is the material soft, comfortable, and warm, but it seems very durable and high quality. I am usually skeptical about ordering online, but this gamble was worth every penny.

If this jacket fit me, my brother would be getting something else for Christmas. I would have kept it myself!

Overall, wonderful product and it even comes with a garment bag for easy storage and wrapping. Would order it again ten times over. True to size, true to description. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Good jacket. Probably best option for the money Good quality leather jacket. The beige color is a little light but I weathering it it seems a little darker and more movie accurate. I originally got the distressed brown which starts out way too dark, so I figure this is the way to go and glad I did. It fits a little big in the shoulders and a little long in the sleeves and a little shorter in length than the movie. I'm 5'11" ~150 and the medium is good on me. Large would be too big and small would be too small... Also ships super fast, got mine within 6 days I think! I got some greeblies from Barton and bishop on etsy to make it more movie accurate too and now it looks awesome! Not a 5 star bc of the shoulder fit and sleeve length, but overall very satisfied with this jacket! I would recommend! Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

I've got a good feeling about this After looking at the few Finn jackets on here repeatedly I ended up going for this one. Arrived within a week. Fits great, feels good quality and nice soft leather. Detailing is great and even has some loops below the left hand pocket which aren't too obvious. The 3 inner pockets are decent size with one of them just right for an iPhone 6 which is also true of the breast pocket.

Love this jacket and only wish weather was cooler so I could wear it more.

I'm 5'10, 190 lbs and 43" chest and the Large is just right. If anything, the sleeves could do with being 1 to 2" shorter but that is not big problem. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Great quality, excellent customer service Mistakenly ordered this jacket instead of the Distressed brown jacket which includes a zipper. I'm currently exchanging it for that one, but I must say that I was still impressed with the quality of the jacket. I did try it on to check if my sizing was accurate, I ordred a large and it was a bit snug on me so I made sure to go with the XL on my exchange. I'm 5'9" and about 220 pounds.

The customer service team here is outstanding, highly responsive and does a great job of letting me know what is going on during the exchange process. I'll definitely be recommending this company to others! Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Good opinion from France Sorry for my english, I'm a french buyer. I have to say that I was very surprised of the quality of this Jacket, that is really really good, for only 169 $ and that is real leather. I found no defaults.

I received it 6 days after I ordered it. That is the exact model of the film. I choosed the Finn Beige Leather Jacket, because it looks "fresh" and not so "tired" that another model of jacket, (Poe Dameron Finn Brown Waxed Jacket) so I can wear it frequently.

Just one thing about the measure, I usually wear XL clothes in France, my chest measure is 109 cm, so I choosed the L model, and I have to say it is not too small. Perhaps a little little bit large, but, only if I wear a small t-shirt under. If I change and choose the M model, the arms will be too shorts.

If I wear a shirt under, it's perfect.

So you made me very happy. Thank you. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

It's calling to you...just let it in. Out of all the many Star Wars replicas I own, this is without a doubt the one of the highest caliber. Not only is it well-crafted, but it is also light, comfortable, and has the spot-on character quality that you need to be a part of the Star Wars universe. It is great to wear around the house or for Halloween. You can even become "that guy" that wears a Star Wars jacket in public with this one (it is that cool!). Now all I need is a starfighter, and I'd be set for life. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Great quality, quick delivery The jacket is near identical to the actual thing, high quality materials and feels sturdy. Delivery was great, went with the cheapest delivery option and it arrived to me in the uk in 5 days. The jacket fits well in the chest and is a good length, only problem I have is it is very tight on the upper arms around the armpit/deltoid area Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

OH.MY.GOD. Seriously, you have no idea how happy you made me. I got this jacket for my fiancee as a wedding gift to him and I swear, it is beyond gorgeous! It is worth every penny and the leather is seriously soft as described. Although the colour is slightly lighter than in the photos but it is still very gorgeous. Now, it would be so great if you could tel me how to maintain this jacket because I am all the way in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with scorching tropical weather. It is very humid here and it can go up to 38 degrees on a normal day. What is the best way to care for this jacket? I would hate it if anything were to happen to it. Alright then, thanks so much guys for an amazing jacket and superb service. Be sure to hear from me again soon. I would surely come back for more ;) Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Great quality and excellent service. The jacket is of really great quality and is very comfortable to wear.

The delivery has been lightning fast and the support team has been of great help regarding sizing and so on.

Highly recommended you will not regret it. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Can't complain except that it's tailored a little wide I'm going to first say the quality is very impressive and is a soft leather, looks fantastic just like the movie. Wish the back upper shoulder area had the vertical stitching like the authentic and the back of the collar with the horizontal stitching (Maybe they'll add it in the future ;) but aside from that this jacket comes as close as it could. You could be nit picky and ask for the loose straps on the bottom left of the front of the jacket but there are straps there, just not loose. So once again this is a raving review its quite a beautiful jacket.

Here is my one legitimate complaint, I am 5'9" very active with a muscular build I weigh 175. I always wear a medium in my clothing and was skeptical if for a jacket I should be ordering a large or medium but decided to go medium seeing it's to be a fitted jacket instead of like a winter one. I should probably have gone with a small, the arms fit me pretty snug but the armpits down to the bottom of the jacket were made rather large, boxy could be the best description. Obviously I can't expect a tailored look because they don't know if it's someone fit or wide so it's tough to complain but I thought a medium would fit slimmer. Shoulders were a little wide too like a suit jacket instead of rounded and relaxed to the body. Maybe I just need to break it in some, I'm writing this as of the day that it arrived. Shipping took about 3 weeks from order day, but rest assured people I am from Pennsylvania and live in the States. This is not a fake site and you will receive your product with a smile on your face.

My only advice is that if you think ehh maybe I should get a small then you probably should, idk what the small fits like but I sure wish I could have tried them on before purchasing because I may have gone with it. I doubt I can exchange

Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Vary wary but super happy with purchase I was very wary of ordering a jacket, hoping the jacket would look and fit as advertised and not to get ripped off. My concerns were for naught, as the jacket arrived fitting well and looking just like the product pictures. This is a tremendous jacket, and shipping was prompt. I think I had the jacket within 2 weeks of ordering and discussing the fit with customer service. I will order again and I recommend the company. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

A very pleasant surprise I was very skeptical when I first ordered this jacket but I'm a HUGE fan of Star Wars and I had to take a chance. Well that chance paid off. This jacket is amazing. It really is real leather, it fits like a glove. I don't know what else to say. The shipping took a little longer than I anticipated, but I placed my order around Christmas. When I did contact their customer support they responded very quickly and assured me it would ship as soon as it was done being processed. If you're reading this review, don't buy this jacket from ANYWHERE else. This is the best choice. This jacket is amazing and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. I'll definitely buy from these guys again. Keep up the good work! Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Best Reproduction Out There I ordered this jacket while they were switching from the brown and bright red shoulders, to the weathered beige with darkened red shoulders. They gave me an option of choosing, to make sure I received the item I wanted.

Seeing that the beige was closer to the movie, I ordered that one. There are a few differences between this and the real on but the main color and details of the jacket are accurate, and looks much better than any other out there.

I am 6'2" and 200 lbs, and the Large fits just the tiniest bit larger than optimal, but is light and comfortable.

Can't wait for the weather to warm up and give this jacket a real weathered look. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Quality Product! I ordered this for my son for a surprise for his 22nd birthday. He is a huge Star Wars fan and had shown it to me before. When he opened his gift and saw it he was in shock! It is so well made and fits perfectly and didn't think I had gotten it for him. This jacket is gorgeous and the customer service is amazing! It arrived quicker than expected. I highly recommend this company and jacket for any Star Wars fan. Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

I love this jacket so much To any customer that is thinking about purchasing this jacket i am a verified happy customer.I have ordered multiple jackets from this company before this one and have never had a problem with shipping except this last time but that shipping mishap actually ended up working to my benefit to where i ended up extremely happen with the product in the long run. If you order this jacket, It will take a week maybe less to actually reach your doorstep once you get the confirmation email that your order was shipped. My particular experience they use Fedex and the package comes in a very professional package.

The quality of the jacket is very professionally well done. I was expecting a little bit heavier cowhide leather almost like camel leather which is what finn wore in the movie but its really fine light real leather. My jacket is a distressed brown color, not the antique beige color. I got that particular jacket because i wanted zippers and the jacket to function, and it works out perfectly. I don't understand why there aren't zippers in the movie jackets (apparently in a galaxy far far away a long time ago zippers didn't exist lol). Overall, everything i particularly requested was worked on and my jacket turned out perfect. I am really glad i took the extra time for the perfect jacket design because Fjackets really delivered a quality product.

I will order more jackets from them they are the best website in my opinion to order your film replica jackets from. Even if they don't have the jacket design you want from your favorite movie, they remain in constant communication within a day of your email. Which is another aspect about this company i love and what keeps me coming back.

Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

5 star for sure Great jacket... Good customer service 5 star for sure...:) Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.

Hope He Likes It and Hope It Works The jacket looks really good but I won’t buy it for myself. I’m going to gift it to my bro, whose room is filled up with SW collectibles. I showed him the jacket and he liked it but he didn’t have the money to buy it so he felt down. Being the awesome sibling, I plan to buy it for him. I had full confidence that this will definitely work. I’m thankful that you guys made the delivery process quicker so that it arrived on time and I can gift it to him. You guys are the best! Yes, I recommend this product. Verified Purchase. I recommend this product.
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A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.” Ad Policy

The policy may be extreme, but the feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it. (William Pannapacker, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education as Thomas Benton, has been making this argument for years. See “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” among other essays.) My own advice was never that categorical. Go if you feel that your happiness depends on it—it can be a great experience in many ways—but be aware of what you’re in for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.

At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

But as Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein point out in their comprehensive study The American Faculty (2006), the move to part-time labor is already an old story. Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass—and yet as far back as 1993, such positions already constituted the majority of new appointees. As of 2003, more than a third of full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. By the same year, tenure-track professors—the “normal” kind of academic appointment—represented no more than 35 percent of the American faculty.

The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.

* * *

You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?) As Louis Menand puts it in The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), the system is now designed to produce not PhDs so much as ABDs: students who, having finished their other degree requirements, are “all but dissertation” (or “already been dicked,” as we used to say)—i.e., people who have entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar’s life.

If anything, as Menand notes, the PhD glut works well for departments at both ends, since it gives them the whip hand when it comes to hiring new professors. Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply.

Still, there’s a difference between a Roger Smith firing workers at General Motors and the faculty of an academic department treating its students like surplus goods. For the CEO of a large corporation, workers are essentially entries on a balance sheet, separated from the boardroom by a great gulf of culture and physical distance. If they are treated without mercy, that is not entirely surprising. But the relationship between professors and graduate students could hardly be more intimate. Professors used to be graduate students. They belong to the same culture and the same community. Your dissertation director is your mentor, your role model, the person who spends all those years overseeing your research and often the one you came to graduate school to study under in the first place. You, in turn, are her intellectual progeny; if you make good, her professional pride. The economic violence of the academic system is inflicted at very close quarters.

How professors square their Jekyll-and-Hyde roles in the process—devoted teachers of individual students, co-managers of a system that exploits them as a group—I do not know. Denial, no doubt, along with the rationale that this is just the way it is, so what can you do? Teaching is part of the training, you hear a lot, especially when supposedly liberal academics explain why graduate-student unions are such a bad idea. They’re students, not workers! But grad students don’t teach because they have to learn how, even if the experience is indeed very valuable; they teach because departments need “bodies in the classroom,” as a professor I know once put it.

I always found it beautifully apt that my old department occupies the same space where the infamous Milgram obedience experiments were conducted in the early 1960s. (Yes, really.) Pay no attention to the screams you hear coming from the next room, the subjects were told as they administered the electric shocks, it’s for their own good—a perfect allegory of the relationship between tenured professors and graduate students (and tenured professors and untenured professors, for that matter).

Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

Sure, lots of people have it worse. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap. (Bell Labs, once the flagship of industrial science, is a shell of its former self, having suffered years of cutbacks before giving up on fundamental research altogether.)

It isn’t just the sciences that matter; it is also the social sciences and the humanities. And it isn’t just the latter that are suffering. Basic physics in this country is all but dead. From 1971 to 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by 20 percent, but the number awarded in math and statistics declined by 55 percent. The only areas of the liberal arts that saw an increase in BAs awarded were biology and psychology—and this at a time when aggregate enrollment expanded by something like 75 percent. On the work that is done in the academy depends the strength of our economy, our public policy and our culture. We need our best young minds going into atmospheric research and international affairs and religious studies, chemistry and ethnography and art history. By pursuing their individual interests, narrowly understood, departments are betraying both the values they are pledged to uphold—the pursuit of knowledge, the spirit of critical inquiry, the extension of the humanistic tradition—and the nation they exist to serve.

We’ve been here before. Pay was so low in the nineteenth century, when academia was still a gentleman’s profession, that in 1902 Andrew Carnegie created the pension plan that would evolve into TIAA-CREF, the massive retirement fund. After World War II, when higher education was seen as an urgent national priority, a consensus emerged that salaries were too small to attract good people. Compensation soared through the 1950s and ’60s, then hit the skids around 1970 and didn’t recover for almost thirty years. It’s no surprise that the percentage of college freshmen expressing an interest in academia was more than three times higher in 1966 than it was in 2004.

But the answer now is not to raise professors’ salaries. Professors already make enough. The answer is to hire more professors: real ones, not academic lettuce-pickers.

Yet that’s the last thing schools are apt to do. What we have seen instead over the past forty years, in addition to the raising of a reserve army of contingent labor, is a kind of administrative elephantiasis, an explosion in the number of people working at colleges and universities who aren’t faculty, full-time or part-time, of any kind. From 1976 to 2001, the number of nonfaculty professionals ballooned nearly 240 percent, growing more than three times as fast as the faculty. Coaching staffs and salaries have grown without limit; athletic departments are virtually separate colleges within universities now, competing (successfully) with academics. The size of presidential salaries—more than $1 million in several dozen cases—has become notorious. Nor is it only the presidents; the next six most highly paid administrative officers at Yale averaged over $430,000 in 2007. As Gaye Tuchman explains in Wannabe U (2009), a case study in the sorrows of academic corporatization, deans, provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle through administrative duties and then return to teaching and research. Instead, they have become a separate stratum of managerial careerists, jumping from job to job and organization to organization like any other executive: isolated from the faculty and its values, loyal to an ethos of short-term expansion, and trading in the business blather of measurability, revenue streams, mission statements and the like. They do not have the long-term health of their institutions at heart. They want to pump up the stock price (i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to the next fat post.

If you’re tenured, of course, life is still quite good (at least until the new provost decides to shut down your entire department). In fact, the revolution in the structure of academic work has come about in large measure to protect the senior professoriate. The faculty have steadily grayed in recent decades; by 1998 more than half were 50 or older. Mandatory retirement was abolished in 1986, exacerbating the problem. Departments became “tenured in,” with a large bolus of highly compensated senior professors and room, increasingly squeezed in many cases, for just a few junior members—another reason jobs have been so hard to find. Contingent labor is desirable above all because it saves money for senior salaries (as well as relieving the tenure track of the disagreeable business of teaching low-level courses). By 2004, while pay for assistant and associate professors still stood more or less where it had in 1970, that for full professors was about 10 percent higher.

What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives—its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace autonomy and its job security—in return for acquiescing to the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise.

* * *

But now those prerogatives are also under threat. I am not joining the call for the abolition of tenure—a chorus that includes two of last year’s most widely noticed books on the problems of America’s colleges and universities, Higher Education?, by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, and Crisis on Campus, by Mark Taylor. Tenure certainly has its problems. It crowds out opportunities for young scholars and allows academic deadwood to accumulate on the faculty rolls. But getting rid of it would be like curing arteriosclerosis by shooting the patient. For one thing, it would remove the last incentive for any sane person to enter the profession. People still put up with everything they have to endure as graduate students and junior professors for the sake of a shot at that golden prize, and now you’re going to take away the prize? No, it is not good for so many of academia’s rewards to be backloaded into a single moment of occupational transfiguration, one that sits like a mirage at the end of twelve or fifteen years of Sinaitic wandering. Yes, the job market would eventually rebalance itself if the profession moved, say, to a system of seven-year contracts, as Taylor suggests. But long before it did, we would lose a generation of talent.

Besides, how would the job market rebalance itself? If the people who now have tenure continued to serve under some other contractual system, the same surplus of labor would be chasing the same scarcity of employment. Things would get better for new PhDs only if schools started firing senior people. Which, as the way things work in other industries reminds us, they would probably be glad to do. Why retain a 55-year-old when you can replace her with a 30-year-old at half the price? Now that’s a thought to swell a provost’s revenue stream. Talk about efficiency.

And what exactly are you supposed to do at that point if you’ve spent your career becoming an expert in, say, Etruscan history? Academia exists in part to support research the private sector won’t pay for, knowledge that can’t be converted into a quick buck or even a slow one, but that adds value to society in other ways. Who’s going to pursue that kind of inquiry if they know there’s a good chance they’re going to get thrown out in the snow when they’re 50 (having only started to earn a salary when they were 30, to boot)? Doctors and lawyers can set up their own practice, but a professor can’t start his own university. This kind of thing is appalling enough when it happens to blue-collar workers. In an industry that requires a dozen years of postsecondary education just to gain an entry-level position, it is unthinkable.

Nor should we pooh-pooh the threat the abolition of tenure would pose to academic freedom, as Hacker and Dreifus do. “We have scoured all the sources we could find,” they write, “yet we could not find any academic research whose findings led to terminating the jobs of college faculty members.” Yes, because of tenure. If deans and trustees and alumni and politicians rarely even try to have professors fired, that is precisely because they know they have so little chance of making it happen. Before tenure existed, arbitrary dismissals were common. Can you imagine what the current gang of newly elected state legislators would do if they could get their hands on the people who teach at public universities? (Just look at what happened to William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin historian whose e-mails were demanded by the state Republican Party after he exposed the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public employee unions.) Hacker and Dreifus, who recognize the importance of academic freedom, call instead of tenure for presidents and trustees with “backbone” (a species as wonderful as the unicorn, and almost as numerous). Sure, and as long as the king is a good man, we don’t need democracy. Academics play a special role in society: they tell us things we don’t want to hear—about global warming, or the historical Jesus, or the way we raise our children. That’s why they need to have special protections.

* * *

But the tenure system, which is already being eroded by the growth of contingent labor, is not the only thing that is under assault in the top-down, corporatized academy. As Cary Nelson explains in No University Is an Island (2010), shared governance—the principle that universities should be controlled by their faculties, which protects academic values against the encroachments of the spreadsheet brigade—is also threatened by the changing structure of academic work. Contingent labor undermines it both directly—no one asks an adjunct what he thinks of how things run—and indirectly. More people chasing fewer jobs means that everyone is squeezed for extra productivity, just like at Wal-Mart. As of 1998, faculty at four-year schools worked an average of about seven hours more per week than they had in 1972 (for a total of more than forty-nine hours a week; the stereotype of the lazy academic is, like that of the welfare queen, a politically useful myth). Not surprisingly, they also reported a shrinking sense of influence over campus affairs. Who’s got the time? Academic labor is becoming like every other part of the American workforce: cowed, harried, docile, disempowered.

In macropolitical terms, the erosion of tenure and shared governance undermines the power of a large body of liberal professionals. In this it resembles the campaign against teachers unions. Tenure, in fact, is a lot like unionization: imperfect, open to corruption and abuse, but incomparably better than the alternative. Indeed, tenure is what professors have instead of unions (at least at private universities, where they’re banned by law from organizing). As for shared governance, it is nothing other than one of the longest-standing goals of the left: employee control of the workplace. Yes, professors have it better than a lot of other workers, including a lot of others in the academy. But the answer, for the less advantaged, is to organize against the employers who’ve created the situation, not drag down the relatively privileged workers who aren’t yet suffering as badly: to level up, in other words, not down.

Of course, some sectors of the academy—the ones that educate the children of the wealthy and the upper middle class—continue to maintain their privilege. The class gradient is getting steeper, not only between contingent labor and the tenure track, and junior and senior faculty within the latter, but between institutions as well. Professors at doctoral-granting universities not only get paid a lot more than their colleagues at other four-year schools; the difference is growing, from 17 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in 2003. (Their advantage over professors at community colleges increased during the same period from 33 percent to 49 percent.) The rich are getting richer. In 1970 (it seems like an alternative universe now) faculty at public colleges and universities actually made about 10 percent more than those at private schools. By 1999 the lines had crossed, and public salaries stood about 5 percent lower. The aggregate student-faculty ratio at private colleges and universities is 10.8 to 1; at public schools, it is 15.9 to 1—almost 50 percent higher.

Here we come to the most important issue facing American higher education. Public institutions enroll about three-quarters of the nation’s college students, and public institutions are everywhere under financial attack. As Nancy Folbre explains in Saving State U (2010), a short, sharp, lucid account, spending on higher education has been falling as a percentage of state budgets for more than twenty years, to about two-thirds of what it was in 1980. The average six-year graduation rate at state schools is now a dismal 60 percent, a function of class size and availability, faculty accessibility, the use of contingent instructors and other budget-related issues. Private universities actually lobby against public funding for state schools, which they see as competitors. In any case, a large portion of state scholarship aid goes to students at private colleges (in some cases, more than half)—a kind of voucher system for higher education.

Meanwhile, public universities have been shifting their financial aid criteria from need to merit to attract applicants with higher scores (good old U.S. News again), who tend to come from wealthier families. Per-family costs at state schools have soared in recent years, from 18 percent of income for those in the middle of the income distribution in 1999 to 25 percent in 2007. Estimates are that over the past decade, between 1.4 million and 2.4 million students have been prevented from going to college for financial reasons—about 50 percent more than during the 1990s. And of course, in the present climate of universal fiscal crisis, it is all about to get a lot worse.

* * *

Our system of public higher education is one of the great achievements of American civilization. In its breadth and excellence, it has no peer. It embodies some of our nation’s highest ideals: democracy, equality, opportunity, self-improvement, useful knowledge and collective public purpose. The same president who emancipated the slaves and funded the transcontinental railroad signed the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which set the system on its feet. Public higher education is a bulwark against hereditary privilege and an engine of social mobility. It is altogether to the point that the strongest state systems are not to be found in the Northeast, the domain of the old WASP aristocracy and its elite private colleges and universities, but in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina and, above all, California.

Now the system is in danger of falling into ruin. Public higher education was essential to creating the mass middle class of the postwar decades—and with it, a new birth of political empowerment and human flourishing. The defunding of public higher education has been essential to its slow destruction. In Unmaking the Public University, Newfield argues that the process has been deliberate, a campaign by the economic elite against the class that threatened to supplant it as the leading power in society. Social mobility is now lower in the United States than it is in Northern Europe, Australia, Canada and even France and Spain, a fact that ought to be tattooed on the foreheads of every member of Congress, so directly does it strike at America’s identity as the land of opportunity.

But it was not only the postwar middle class that public higher education helped create; it was the postwar prosperity altogether. Knowledge, again, is our most important resource. States that balance their budgets on the backs of their public universities are not eating their seed corn; they’re trampling it into the mud. My state of Oregon, a chronic economic underperformer, has difficulty attracting investment, not because its corporate taxes are high—they’re among the lowest—but because its workforce is poorly educated. So it will be for the nation as a whole. Our college-completion rate has fallen from second to eighth. And we are not just defunding instruction; we are defunding research, the creation of knowledge itself. Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students. In fact, the whole California system, the crown jewel of American public higher education, is being torn apart by budget cuts. This is not a problem; it is a calamity.

Private institutions are in comparable trouble, for reasons that will sound familiar: too much spending during the boom years—much of it on construction, much of it driven by the desire to improve “market position” relative to competitors by offering amenities like new dorms and student centers that have nothing to do with teaching or research—supported by too much borrowing, has led to a debt crisis. Among the class of academic managers responsible for the trouble in the first place, an industry of reform has sprung up, along with a literature of reform to go with it. Books like Taylor’s Crisis on Campus, James Garland’s Saving Alma Mater (2009) and the most measured and well-informed of the ones I’ve come across, Robert Zemsky’s Making Reform Work (2009), propose their variously visionary schemes.

Nearly all involve technology to drive efficiency. Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction: this is the future we’re being offered. Why teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail?

The other great hope—I know you’ll never see this coming—is the market. After all, it works so well in healthcare, and we’re already trying it in primary and secondary education. Garland, a former president of Miami University of Ohio (a public institution), argues for a voucher system. Instead of giving money to schools, the state would give it to students, and the credit would be good at any nonprofit institution in the state—in other words, at private ones as well. The student would run the show (as the customer should, of course), scouring the market like a savvy consumer. Universities, in turn, “would compete with each other…by tailoring their course offerings, degree programs, student services, and extracurricular activities” to the needs of our newly empowered 18-year-olds, and the invisible hand would rain down its blessings.

But do we really want our higher education system redesigned by the self-identified needs of high school seniors? This is what the British are about to try, and in a country with one of Europe’s most distinguished intellectual traditions, they seem poised to destroy the liberal arts altogether. How much do 18-year-olds even know about what they want out of college? About not only what it can get them, but what it can give them? These are young people who don’t know what college is, who they are, who they might want to be—things you need a college education, and specifically a liberal arts education, to help you figure out.

* * *

Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying. All the political and parental pressure is pushing in the other direction, toward the “practical,” narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian, the immediately negotiable. Colleges and universities are moving away from the liberal arts toward professional, technical and vocational training. Last year, the State University of New York at Albany announced plans to close its departments of French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater—a wholesale slaughter of the humanities. When Garland enumerates the fields a state legislature might want to encourage its young people to enter, he lists “engineering, agriculture, nursing, math and science education, or any other area of state importance.” Apparently political science, philosophy, history and anthropology, among others, are not areas of state importance. Zemsky wants to consider reducing college to three years—meaning less time for young people to figure out what to study, to take courses in a wide range of disciplines, to explore, to mature, to think.

When politicians, from Barack Obama all the way down, talk about higher education, they talk almost exclusively about math and science. Indeed, technology creates the future. But it is not enough to create the future. We also need to organize it, as the social sciences enable us to do. We need to make sense of it, as the humanities enable us to do. A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts, as Jonathan Cole points out in The Great American University (2009), is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to arrange society or other meanings than the authorized ones. A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world.

Yet of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore.

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren’t the same debate. We all know that students in elementary and high school learn best in small classrooms with the individualized attention of motivated teachers. It is the same in college. Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. The word comes from the Latin for “educe,” lead forth. Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement—the leading forth of new ideas and powers—that can happen only in a seminar. (“Seminar” being a fancy name for what every class already is from K–12.) It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

The key finding of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011), that a lot of kids aren’t learning much in college, comes as no surprise to me. The system is no longer set up to challenge them. If we’re going to make college an intellectually rigorous experience for the students who already go—still more, for all the ones we want to go if we’re going to reach the oft-repeated goal of universal postsecondary education, an objective that would double enrollments—we’re going to need a lot more teachers: well paid, institutionally supported, socially valued. As of 2003 there were about 400,000 tenure-track professors in the United States (as compared with about 6 million primary- and secondary-school teachers). Between reducing class sizes, reversing the shift to contingent labor and beefing up our college-completion rates, we’re going to need at least five times as many.

So where’s the money supposed to come from? It’s the same question we ask about the federal budget, and the answer is the same. We’re still a very wealthy country. There’s plenty of money, if we spend it on the right things. Just as we need to wrestle with the $700 billion gorilla of defense, so do universities need to take on administrative edema and extracurricular spending. We can start with presidential salaries. Universities, like corporations, claim they need to pay the going rate for top talent. The argument is not only dubious—whom exactly are they competing with for the services of these managerial titans, aside from one another?—it is beside the point. Academia is not supposed to be a place to get rich. If your ego can’t survive on less than $200,000 a year (on top of the prestige of a university presidency), you need to find another line of work. Once, there were academic leaders who put themselves forward as champions of social progress: people like Woodrow Wilson at Princeton in the 1900s; James Conant at Harvard in the 1940s; and Kingman Brewster at Yale, Clark Kerr at the University of California and Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame in the 1960s. What a statement it would make if the Ivy League presidents got together and announced that they were going to take an immediate 75 percent pay cut. What a way to restore academia’s moral prestige and demonstrate some leadership again.

But leadership will have to come from somewhere else, as well. Just as in society as a whole, the academic upper middle class needs to rethink its alliances. Its dignity will not survive forever if it doesn’t fight for that of everyone below it in the academic hierarchy. (“First they came for the graduate students, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a graduate student…”) For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them.
TUESDAY AM UPDATE, WRITETHRU with actuals: Disney/Pixar’s Coco has struck a chord in China — and is expected to keep strumming along as play continues. The movie from directors Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina has quickly become the top-grossing Pixar title ever in the market with guitar hero Miguel and his trusty dog Dante tuning up $75.6M after 10 days there ($80M through Monday, based on local estimates). The sophomore Middle Kingdom session came in 148% above last weekend’s opening, pointing to the fantastic buzz and relatable themes.

Coco led overall overseas play for the weekend, followed by Justice League which came in at a higher than estimated $36.8M, and helped to push Warner Bros across the $3B mark at the international box office. Murder On The Orient Express (also better, at $23.7M), Daddy’s Home 2 ($15.6M) and animated Japanese title Fireworks, Should We See It From The Side Or The Bottom? ($10.7M in China) round out the frame’s Top 5.

The full international box office weekend on Coco was $69.6M in 33 markets for an offshore cume of $172.3M and a global tally of $281M. There are still such majors to come as Australia, Italy, Brazil, Korea, the UK and Japan.

Pixar has traditionally been soft in the Middle Kingdom, but local auds are extra sweet on Coco. The movie had the 2nd best sophomore weekend ever for an animated film in the market, behind only Zootopia — and that title multiplied like rabbits with an ultimate $235M there last year (after it was granted an extended run). This past week, Coco saw increases throughout with a No.1 weekend that far outdistanced the market’s other players (including Justice League which is moving close to $100M at Chinese turnstiles).

Marvel Coco, which saw another No. 1 performance domestically this session, earlier this week helped Disney across the $5B global box office mark for 2017. So did Thor: Ragnarok which has now nailed $817.5M worldwide. The hammer-wielder grabbed another $6.6M this frame to lift the international cume to $526.1M, passing X-Men: Days Of Future Past’s $514M.

Warner Bros. In other superhero news, Warner Bros/DC’s Justice League dropped 48.5% from last weekend to lasso $36.8M in the 3rd outing for an overseas cume of $371.8M. The global total to date is $569.2M. In highlights for the group, the China cume of $98.6M (RMB 654M) has now surpassed the lifetime totals of both Wonder Woman and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice to become the highest-grossing DC film ever in the PROC.

Elsewhere, Fox’s mystery train, Murder On The Orient Express, has crossed $150M internationally, with strong openings in Italy, Korea, Indonesia and Brazil. STX’s A Bad Moms Christmas decked the halls by passing $100M global, as did Lionsgate/Participant’s Wonder. And, Paddington 2 is thisclose to $50M overseas.

As we wait for Star Wars: The Last Jedi to storm the world beginning December 13, next weekend will see expansions and holdovers while China gets a roster of new pics including Paddington 2, Only The Brave, Loving Vincent and 47 Meters Down.

In the meantime, breakdowns and actuals on the titles above and others have been updated below.

NEW

DARKEST HOUR

Focus Features Gary Oldman’s star turn in Working Title’s Darkest Hour has been heating awards talk since the film debuted during the fall festival circuit. Universal is just beginning offshore release of the drama from Joe Wright with China kicking things off. The weekend was $2.1M in the Middle Kingdom for 5th place in a frame that was dominated by overwhelming support of animated family pic, Coco.

Oldman plays newly-appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the early days of World War II. With the fall of France imminent, Britain faces its darkest hour as the threat of invasion looms and Churchill must maneuver his political rivals while confronting the ultimate choice: negotiate with Hitler and save the British people at a terrible cost or rally the nation and fight on against incredible odds.

International dates roll out through February. The UK and European majors should see solid play on the prestige title — premieres are being held in London and Paris the week of December 11. Upcoming dates include France on January 3, Brazil on January 4, Australia and Germany on January 11 and Spain and the UK Ireland on January 12.

HOLDOVERS/EXPANSIONS

COCO

Disney Leading the international box office this session, Disney/Pixar’s Day of the Dead-themed family pic continues to charm offshore audiences, and with many majors still to come. The movie had already become the No. 1 film ever in Mexico, and this weekend set a Pixar record in China where it is the animation label’s biggest grosser to date. With $75.6M in the Middle Kingdom, Coco is flying in the face of Pixar’s traditional underperformance in the market. Themes of love, leaving and the world of the dead are really striking a chord locally.

In total, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco plucked up another $69.6M in 33 material markets this weekend, lifting the international cume to $172.3M and the worldwide songbook to $281M.

This weekend saw Coco open in France, Germany and Spain. In the former, the colorful pic stirred up $5.2M ($6.4M including previews), landing it at No. 1 and more than doubling the openings of both Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero 6. Spain was also a No. 1 start with $2.8M, ahead of the debuts of Moana and Big Hero 6. Germany too grabbed No. 1 with $2M to top Moana and Wreck-It Ralph.

Elsewhere in Europe, Coco had an especially impressive opening in Belgium, posting $900K, ahead of all three comps above and with a Saturday that topped Frozen.

In holds, the China performance truly is impressive. After a $17.8M start and lots of social sentiment last frame, this week saw each weekday increase before the sophomore session’s $44.2M. That’s 148% above the opening frame and ranks as the 2nd highest second weekend ever for an animated release in China behind only Zootopia. Recall that Zootopia was a massive hit last year with $235M in Middle Kingdom coin. Coco is already the highest grossing Pixar release ever in China and third highest Pixar/Disney release after only Zootopia and Big Hero 6. Fun fact: The second weekend $44.2M China gross, if ranked against animated opening weekends, would stand at No. 3 all-time, behind only opening frames of Despicable Me 3 and Kung Fu Panda 3.

Elsewhere, Coco held terrifically with increases in a further five markets: Indonesia (+49%), Malaysia (+30%), Portugal (+18%), Taiwan (+15%) and Vietnam (+9%). The Top 5 plays so far are China, Mexico ($55.6M), France ($6.4M), Russia ($5.8M) and Spain ($2.8M).

JUSTICE LEAGUE

Warner Bros. With a 48.5% drop in its third weekend, Warner Bros/DC’s Justice League added $36.8M on 20,375 screens in 66 markets. That billows Superman’s cape to $371.8M overseas and $569.2M worldwide.

There’s a new milestone for the league of superheroes in China where a running cume of RMB 654M ($98.6M) cuffs the best DC score ever, surpassing the total cumes of Wonder Woman and BVS.

Brazil remains the No. 2 offshore market for the Batman and crew. The film is still No. 1 there and saw a small 24% dip to bring the total so far to $31.3M. Mexico is next best with $21.7M to date after ranking No. 2 this weekend. In the UK, the crew has racked up $20.2M, and Korea is now at $12.9M.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

20th Century Fox Rolling into a handful of new stations this session, Fox’s Kenneth Branagh-helmed mystery unearthed $23.7M in a total 72. That lifts the overseas cume to $153.4M. Italy saw a great start at $3.8M, 12% bigger than comp The Great Gatsby and good for No. 1. Korea, where two local movies are leading, gave MOTOE $3.4M, on par with Gone Girl and including previews. Also new this weekend was Indonesia at $1.8M for No. 1, and Brazil bowed at No. 2 with $1.5M.

In holds, Germany was down 30% for a $9.5M total so far; the UK dipped 39% with a cume of $28.8M; and Australia fell off by just 20% to cume $9.9M so far.

Overall, Orient Express is the top film in seven markets and is outpacing The Great Gatsby by 39% and Gone Girl by 68% in the same bucket of markets and at current exchange rates. Next weekend, the film opens in Belgium, Japan and Taiwan.

DADDY’S HOME 2

Paramount Paramount’s holiday comedy grossed $15.6M this weekend in 49 markets, including 25 new openings. The international cume is now $34M. Playing to the family crowd, the drop was 32% from last session.

Mexico got off to No. 1 with $4.8M at 764 cinemas becoming the 2nd biggest all-time opening weekend for a Hollywood comedy behind Pixels. The result is 108% above Daddy’s Home. The UAE was also a No. 1 debut with $650K at 45 cinemas for 26% over the original Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg-starrer.

Argentina roosted at No. 2 in the debut with $408K at 179 locations; the result is 40% above Daddy’s Home which opened during school holidays). Colombia started at No. 3 with $357K at 182 sites. The bow is 26% below Daddy’s Home which likewise opened during school holidays. Israel stepped in at No. 2 with $275K at 27 sites; 17% above Daddy’s Home. Ecuador scored the best opening ever for a comedy with $170K at 40 cinemas.

In holds, the UK added $2.7M in frame 2 on the pic that features Mel Gibson and John Lithgow. The total is currently $10.6M. Other cumes include Australia at $5.3M; Russia with $2.5M; and Brazil’s $1.6M. The next major to go is Germany on December 7.

WONDER

Lionsgate Lionsgate/Participant Media’s sleeper broke the $100M worldwide mark this weekend, thanks to a further $7.8M from 46 markets. The worldwide and international totals stand at $100.2M and $12.2M respectively through Sunday.

Australia started off at No. 1 with $2.3M from 290 locations. The Julia Roberts-starrer also bowed in the UK, with $1.5M from 526 screens, and Spain debuted to $753K from 241.

Brazil is the next major to launch (December 7) with the rest of international rolling out through the holiday season into early next year.

PADDINGTON 2

REX/Shutterstock The little bear with the big heart is closing in on $50M at the international box office after a weekend that added $7.5M in about 30 markets. That lifted the offshore total to $49.9M through Sunday. The UK still leads totals at $36.3M. China and France are on deck this coming session. Both were sizable plays for the Peruvian ursine’s first outing, with $16.8M and $25M, respectively. This is all ahead of the U.S. debut via Warner Bros on January 12.

THOR: RAGNAROK

Disney The son of Odin crossed $800M global as expected this week, lifting to $817.5M. Internationally, Taika Waitit’s take on the Marvel property added $6.6M in 52 markets for an offshore total of $526.1M to date, passing X-Men: Days Of Future Past ($514M).

Holds are good in such plays as the UK (-9%), Israel (-9%), Australia (-13%), Sweden (-28%), Mexico (-29%), Argentina (-30%), the Netherlands (-31%), Japan (-43%) and Germany (-45%).

In the UK, Thor 3 hammered past the £30M mark and will soon surpass the lifetime total of Spider-Man: Homecoming.

China remains the top market at $112.1M, followed by the UK, Korea ($34.9M), Brazil ($29.9M) and Australia ($25.2M).

A BAD MOMS CHRISTMAS

STXfilms The STX sequel opened in seven more international markets this weekend and added $3.9M from 2,597 locations. The offshore cume is $38.2M which helps push the comedy across the $100M mark worldwide. The global cume to date is $102.9M.

In the Netherlands and Belgium this weekend, frosty weather kept some folks home as the weekend approached, but on Saturday both markets saw the sequel outperform the original. The former opened Bad Moms Christmas at No. 3 with $546K from 115 sites. That’s 24% ahead of the previous film and outranks comps like Horrible Bosses 2, Neighbors 2 and Office Christmas Party. In Belgium, the Mila Kunis-starrer opened at No. 3 with $206K from 68 locations, 26% behind Bad Moms, but ahead of the other comps. France came in lower than comps with $444K at 197 locations, 44% behind Bad Moms.

The UK leads holds with a tiny 13% drop for a $9.7M cume. Germany, Austria and Switzerland are at $9.6M to date, followed by Australia/NZ with $8.1M after five frames.

Still to come are Italy, Russia, Spain and Latin America this weekend.

JIGSAW

Lionsgate’s eightquel carved out another $2.5M in 65 markets this weekend, for a $60.4M running offshore cume. Brazil launched to $1M on 480 screens, surpassing Saw 4 (+89%), Saw 5 (+85%), and Saw 6 (+156%), based on local currency. The UK remains the lead market at $6.7M after weekend 6. Venezuela ($5.7M), Russia ($5.1M), Germany ($5.1M) and France ($4M) follow.

HAPPY DEATH DAY

Universal The Universal/Blumhouse micro-budget horror pic scared up $2.3M in 39 markets this session for an international total of $53.2M. Argentina got off to a strong start in the search for the co-ed killer with $418K at No. 3. France, where the movie’s titled Happy Birthdead, was the top hold at $601K for a total $3.6M. The global tally lifts to $109M. Russia releases this week.

MISC UPDATED CUMES/NOTABLES

STX Entertainment The Snowman (UNI): $1.6M intl weekend (19 markets); $34.9M international cume

The Foreigner (STX): $1.2M intl weekend (3 new markets); $103.5M intl cume

The Mountain Between Us (FOX): $1.46M intl weekend (26 markets); $27.5M intl cume

Girls Trip (UNI): $676K intl weekend (5 markets); $23M intl cume

Marrowbone (UNI): $245K intl weekend (Spain only); $7.7M Spanish cume

NEW LOCAL TITLES

Universal Perfectos Desconocidos, a Spanish comedy that Universal is distributing in Spain, opened Friday and placed No. 2 for the weekend with $2.2M. This is the second-best opening of the year for a local film and should see solid holds and extended run through the holiday period. Critics and audiences are responding well to the Álex de la Iglesia-helmed pic that stars Belen Rueda. It’s a remake of Paolo Genovese’s Italian hit Perfetti Sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers) which released last year and scored the Best Film and Screenplay prizes at the David di Donatello awards. The story unfolds at a dinner party during which it’s proposed that everyone leave their cell phone in the center of the table, with text messages, calls and social prompts visible to all and revealing secrets that are perhaps better kept hidden.

Warner Bros Japan released Full Metal Alchemist this weekend with the film grabbing No. 1 at $3.4M on 411 screens. The results are on par with WB’s local hit Rurouni Kenshin. Directed by Fumihiko Sori and based on the manga series, it’s an action story about alchemist brothers Edward and Alphone Elric in search of the legendary Philosopher’s Stone.

New in Korea, mystery thriller Forgotten bowed via Megabox with $3.42M at No. 2 behind holdover The Swindlers. From writer/director Zhang Hang-jun, the film stars Kang Ha-neul and Kim Moo-yeol as brothers Jinseok and Yuseok. When Yuseok is kidnapped on their first day at a new house, Jinseok suffers from hallucinations until Yuseok returns home on the 19th day with a memory loss and exhibiting strange behavior. Finding himself in a hidden murder case inside Yuseok’s twisted memory, Jinseok faces a heartbreaking truth. Netflix recently acquired the pic for global rollout in 2018.
Don't start thinking that landing a rocket's first stage is routine just yet, as SpaceX has just posted video of its latest attempt. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered two satellites to orbit, however when it returned to Earth everything did not go exactly to plan. The live video feed cut out so we weren't sure exactly what happened, but now Elon Musk has tweeted video from afar showing the landing process. According to Musk, one of the engines cut out before it hit the deck of the droneship, causing a landing hard enough to "destroy the primary airframe and accordion the engines." We're guessing there's not enough left for this one to join the trophy case, but that's just how it happens in 2016, which Musk is calling "the year of experimentation."
An 18-year-old man is seriously hurt in a possible fireworks explosion in Central Park.

Authorities say it happened shortly before 11 a.m. Sunday, inside the park near 68th Street and 5th Avenue.

At a press conference held by the NYPD's bomb squad at the park Sunday night, authorities said the victim and two friends who were with him were not responsible for the explosion.

Police say the man's foot was severed above the ankle in what they believe was a fireworks accident, but the exact cause is still being investigated.

"The explosion could have been an experiment with fireworks or homemade explosives," said Counterterror Chief John O'Connell. "We do not have any evidence of a constructed device or commercial grade fireworks. We believe this could have been put here as some sort of experiment.

"It should also be noted, the victim and his two friends, we do not consider them to be part of the construction of this object," O'Connell added.

One man who was close by when it happened described the scene.

"Everyone in the park, or this end of the park, heard a loud boom," the man said. "It was a loud report. Clearly not a car backfiring, more than a firework. Then heard some young men yelling, went over there on the rocks, and their friend was lying down whose foot was severely injured. And they claim he stepped on something."

Lieutenant Mark Torre, commanding officer of the bomb squad, suggested that the device was made by someone with knowledge of chemistry, but said the result of the explosion seems to have been accidental rather than deliberate.

"There is some forsenic evidence that indicates that it was not meant to go off by somebody stepping on it," Torre said. "It may have not gone off at an earlier time and was just left there."

Authorities say the victim was taken to the hospital.

No one else was hurt.

The bomb squad was still on the scene conducting its investigation as of 6 p.m. Sunday.

Stay with Time Warner Cable News and NY1 for more on this developing story.
Honestly, people, why wait to fall asleep with your shoes on when you can just draw dicks on your own face, am I right?

Asia Brautigam, 19, as she was poking fun at our obsession with beauty bloggers, experimented with some eyeliner, and well? It’s dick liner. Cat eyes are out. Dick eyes are in.

Wow MUA Twitter has been so creative with their eye looks, thought I'd have my take ⛽️ pic.twitter.com/Nsfm460HVV — asia (@asialbx) November 18, 2016

And a bunch of people began following her lead.

@asialbx sooo in LOVE with your look my new everyday eye makeup pic.twitter.com/bxlP3NEPJC — jas♡ (@jasmin_c_) November 19, 2016

Asia got ahead of the curve and told Buzzfeed she wasn’t trying to shade makeup artists just in case people started saying she was “makeup shaming.” She assured “I think they’re all creative and amazingly talented!” she said, and added, “My dick-liner will never compare!” There ya have it, folks..
Bitcoin’s momentum among key merchants and platforms on the web keeps accelerating.

After hinting at it a few weeks ago when Braintree enabled Bitcoin-based transactions for PayPal developers, the company is now enabling Bitcoin across the PayPal network for merchants of digital goods.

The company has expressed interest in bitcoin for a while, with eBay CEO John Donahoe saying in the past that it would play an “important role” in the company’s future. Now that large players from Overstock to Wikipedia are now relying on the cryptocurrency for a part of their transactions or donations, PayPal is stepping in.

Through partnerships with BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin, PayPal will let its merchants accept bitcoin for digital goods transactions. They decided to go with a handful of launch partners instead of a single one, as PayPal’s Braintree did with Coinbase earlier this month. To be clear, this isn’t about adding Bitcoin to PayPal’s digital wallet and it’s only in North America for the moment. These are baby steps for now.

“This is a huge endorsement to the digital currency community,” said GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard.

PayPal will earn transaction revenue through referral fees, which are pretty common throughout the payments world.

“PayPal is playing the role of the intermediary, but the cost will be left up to the merchant and the payment processor,” said Scott Ellison, who is PayPal’s senior director of competitive intelligence and corporate strategy.

A few weeks ago at TechCrunch Disrupt, Braintree CEO Bill Ready said that it was adding Bitcoin as a payment to its SDK.
After the most unprecedented denigration of a presidential candidate in US history, the worst may be yet to come, beginning Friday with Trumps inauguration as Americas 45th president.

Pro-Hillary dark forces call him illegitimate. Media scoundrels beat on him relentlessly. Whatever he does or says or doesnt do or doesnt say is criticized.

Nothing in memory resembles whats gone on since mid-2015. The problem isnt Trump. Its Americas debauched system - fantasy democracy, not the real thing.

Leaders like Obama govern by the script handed them, doing the bidding of powerful dark forces running the country. Trumps anti-establishment sounding rhetoric scares them, especially talk of getting along with Vladimir Putin - anathema in neocon infested Washington.

Days before his inauguration, a disgraceful Huffington Post article contemptuously headlined Hillary Clinton is the Legitimate President, saying:

The evidence is clear. Hillary Clinton is the rightful president-elect, and courts must use the broad discretionary powers with which they are vested to enjoin an illegitimate president from taking office.

Shocking stuff, here in America, not in some faraway tinpot dictatorship. The evidence is very clear. Trump won convincingly. Hillary lost whining, whimpering, simpering and groaning, believing it was her turn as a woman to claim the nations highest office.

Her defeat let humanity dodge a possible nuclear bullet. Huffpo saying US courts should intervene on her behalf is seditious or treasonous - despicably promoting coup detat action to prevent an elected US president from taking office.

Huffpo: Every major intelligence agency in the country has reached the same conclusion: Russian hackers engaged in cyber attacks with the express purpose of helping Donald Trump win the election.

They operated at the directive of Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently motivated by his hatred for Clinton.

Fact: This is what passes for mainstream news and information - utter rubbish, knowing, or should know, not a shred of evidence suggests Russian US election hacking.

The whole dirty story was fabricated - a disgraceful scheme to delegitimize Trump and prevent normalizing ties with Russia.

Promoting the notion of Hillary as Americas legitimate president is scandalous, stuff commonplace in banana republics or despotic monarchies.

Itll likely continue after Trump enters office - instead of focusing solely on how he governs, judging him by what he does or doesnt do for good or ill.

A rough ride awaits him. Fidel Castros advice to Hugo Chavez before his death applies to Trump, saying (t)ake care what you eat, what they give you to eat. They inject you with I dont know what.

Watch your back is also sound advice, including carefully vetting security personnel assigned for protection.

Threatening dark forces make survival Trumps top priority.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
Entire neighbourhoods of Fort McMurray were under water on Sunday, less than three months after a fire roared into the northern Alberta city and destroyed one-tenth of its buildings.

Residents of Canada's oil sands capital are wondering what will come next. They've lived through the rushed evacuation of more than 80,000 people and a wildfire that broke records in how aggressively it pressed forward – as well as years of heavy job losses and plunging profits because of oil prices that have stayed low far longer than most expected.

"There was just an incredulous feeling as people were like, 'Are you kidding?' They aren't too upset, they're just shrugging their shoulders at this point," said Tany Yao, the MLA for Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo.

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GLOBE ARCHIVES: A week in Hell: How Fort McMurray burned

At least 37 homes were flooded on Sunday when 85 millimetres of rain fell on Fort McMurray in two hours. Some residents of the city water-skied through areas that had been on fire on May 3.

The flooding caused the area's emergency operations centre to be activated for the first time since the wildfire. "It's important that our community continues to be resilient and work together," Chris Graham, Fort McMurray's deputy director of emergency management, said in a statement.

As crews pumped water from flooded areas, ash was dusted off barricades so they could be put to use keeping motorists away from waterlogged roads. During the wildfire, those barricades blocked access to acres of scorched homes. Some people were once again told to boil their water, only weeks after similar advisories put in place for the fire were rescinded. "You saw the terrible thing in Fort McMurray. My God, I'm sure they were wondering would the locusts be next. I mean, it's so biblical," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist. "They had the fires and the drought and now the floods. They clearly had more than a month's worth of rain in Fort McMurray in two hours, and it's almost as if they couldn't get rain when they prayed for it back in April and May."

Fort McMurray isn't the only place in Alberta to encounter bad weather this year, Mr. Phillips said. A number of tornadoes have careered across prairie farmland, a large hailstorm forced an Air Canada jet to execute an emergency landing and thunderstorms have been a near daily occurrence across the province. The typically dry region has also experienced an unusually humid summer.

Both Calgary and Edmonton have been hit by episodic flooding over the past month. More than 206 millimetres of rain fell on Calgary in July, the most in 89 years. In Edmonton, stranded motorists had to be rescued from a flooded highway last week. One downpour even flooded the provincial legislature building.

RELATED: Wildfires like 'the beast' in Fort McMurray can have a major impact on water quality

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A spokesman for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, the local government that includes Fort McMurray, said the flooding won't hamper recovery efforts after the fire, the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

Much of the rebuilding hasn't yet started. Officials from the Alberta and federal governments, as well as the Red Cross, will be in the city on Wednesday to announce more funding to aid in the recovery. Mr. Yao and Alberta's Official Opposition Wildrose Party are pressing the provincial government for answers on the timeline for rebuilding. There's been little progress in rebuilding or even cleaning up the ash and debris, nearly a month after the wildfire was declared under control, Mr. Yao said.

According to Mr. Yao, the government is waiting on toxicity tests before making a decision on rebuilding three largely destroyed neighbourhoods that remain off limits to residents.

With a report from The Canadian Press
Christina here….

One “Million” Mom’s sent me an email!

Dear Christina, As the Christmas shopping season begins full swing, here is our annual “Naughty or Nice” retailer list. We have taken the top 100 national retailers and reviewed their websites, media advertising and in-store signage in an effort to help you know which companies are Christmas-friendly. Over the past seven years, OMM has stood firm in the “War on Christmas.” Companies who used to refuse to acknowledge Christmas now have Christmas “shops” inside their stores. Many of them now liberally use “Christmas” in their advertising and in-store signage. Sadly, there are still some companies which refuse to use “Christmas.” They continue to insult and offend Christian shoppers by sticking with their politically correct “holiday” term.

Yaay! I love how OMM can Dixie Dogwhistle what is really a “War Against Inclusion” and pretend that when businesses attempt to be more inclusive during the holidays, that they are somehow unfriendly to Christmas.

I really don’t understand why Christians feel insulted and offended when businesses use the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas” – fuck inclusion, right? YOU MUST ACKNOWLEDGE OUR HOLIDAY EXCLUSIVELY OR WE WILL HURT YOU WITH OUR WALLETS.

Criteria – AFA reviewed up to four areas to determine if a company was “Christmas-friendly” in their advertising: print media (newspaper inserts), broadcast media (radio/television), website and/or personal visits to the store. If a company’s ad has references to items associated with Christmas (trees, wreaths, lights, etc.), it was considered as an attempt to reach “Christmas” shoppers.

So even carrying your religious tchotchkes aren’t enough for the AFA? Not mentioning Christmas does not mean someone is against Christmas. You’re confusing neutrality for persecution, AFA.

If prayer actually did anything, I’d pray that you guys get over your petty persecution complex.

p.s. Here are the companies “against” Christmas:

Companies AGAINST “Christmas”

Banana Republic

Barnes & Noble

Family Dollar

Foot Locker

Gap Stores

L.L. Bean

Limited Brands

Maurice’s

Office Depot

Old Navy

Radio Shack

Staples

Supervalu

Victoria’s Secret

Learn more about Christina and follow her @ziztur.
It was Dec. 1, 2013. With the score at 7-7 in the second quarter, the Philadelphia Eagles marched to the Arizona Cardinals’ 6-yard line. It was at this moment when Chip Kelly unveiled a surprising wrinkle.

From Video

If Nick Foles was there, who was lined up as quarterback?

From Video

Meet Brad Smith. He has experience as a wide receiver, running back, quarterback, kick returner and special teams ace.

A few things about this play made people believe this was the Wildcat formation. The starting quarterback was positioned as a receiver, and a player who wasn’t the starting quarterback took the snap. In fact, the Wildcat formation doesn’t require either of those things.

From Video

The Wildcat formation always uses an unbalanced line, specifically the tackle-over set. The tight end lines up next to the weakside guard, while the two offensive tackles are next to each other on the playside.

From Video

Motion always sets up the play’s run from the Wildcat formation: usually a power run by the player taking the snap, a jet sweep by the motion man or a pass.

Kelly insisted after the Eagles-Cardinals game that he did not call the Wildcat formation.

“It was not a Wildcat play,” head coach Chip Kelly said. “It’s just Brad Smith plays quarterback. So let’s straighten that out right now. We don’t run the Wildcat. It’s just a play. He played quarterback. Nick played receiver because Brad’s really good with the ball in his hands.”

From Video

There was no tackle-over set or motion man. Kelly was absolutely correct when he said this play was not the Wildcat. So, if it wasn’t the Wildcat, what was it?

Look at where running back LeSean McCoy lined up. This should be familiar to Oregon and Eagles fans who know how the Inside Zone Read works.

From Video

Ignore the fact that Smith fumbled the ball. That isn’t the important part. McCoy was preparing for the mesh point with Smith, as he would during an Inside Zone Read.

The offensive line was zone blocking the defense. It left the outside linebacker unblocked, probably because Smith was supposed to be reading him on this play.

It is also noteworthy that there were three receivers (Riley Cooper, Jason Avant, Foles) who each faced single-coverage.

From Video

Cooper ran what appeared to be a corner route. Avant ran a crossing route. Foles took All-Pro Patrick Peterson out of the play by lining up at receiver. It is possible Kelly called a packaged play, an Inside Zone Read packaged with an intermediate pass.

It might be reasonable to blame Kelly for inadequately preparing the Eagles to execute this play, but his play-calling should not be at fault. I’ve concluded that this play was either the Inside Zone Read or a packaged run/pass play. Because these plays are staples of the Eagles’ offense, the notion that this play was a flashy gadget play is nonsense.

Yet, it is reasonable to ask the following: Why even bother making Smith the quarterback for a play when Foles was playing well on this drive? Or for that matter, why not use Michael Vick since he rejoined the active roster as Foles’s backup?

It is likely there are some play-calls that Kelly is more willing to make with Smith at quarterback than with Foles or Vick.

From Video

Against the Bears, the Eagles used a tackle-over set with right tackle Lane Johnson positioned between left tackle Jason Peters and left guard Evan Mathis. There was no motion man, so this was still not the Wildcat.

From Video

This was a classic power play. The linemen on the play-side were down-blocking. Running back Chris Polk was the lead blocker and did a nice job blocking the defensive tackle. Right guard Todd Herremans pulled to the left and entered the crease to block the playside linebacker.

From Video

Smith entered the hole for a two-yard gain. His versatility allowed Kelly to simultaneously avoid risking the health of his top two quarterbacks and keep an inside QB power run on the table.

Defenses must always be aware of the possibility that Smith will pass the ball. In fact, this could happen in a formation where he isn’t even lined up at quarterback.

From Video

Smith came into this game as a receiver. Nothing too unusual so far.

From Video

He motioned over and prepared for the surprise.

From Video

Smith ran to the right, as if this was a sweep.

From Video

Smith looked at Foles, who wasn’t even looking for the ball. He was likely just a decoy on this play.

From Video

Foles attracted double coverage, as the safety read Smith’s eyes and assisted the cornerback covering Foles. This allowed Zach Ertz to get open in one-on-one coverage against a linebacker. Unfortunately, Smith’s pass was behind him and he couldn’t make the catch.

There was one Oregon player who resembled Smith as an offensive weapon: Chris Harper. While Kelly was the offensive coordinator in 2008, Harper played quarterback, running back and receiver. He transferred the next year to Kansas State.

From Video

Kelly and head coach Mike Bellotti experimented with putting Harper at quarterback in the middle of games. Against Purdue, they instructed pocket-passer Justin Roper to get off the field.

From Video

Harper was a running threat and raw passer. Bellotti and Kelly didn’t mind tipping their hand close to the red zone. This QB sweep was effective because of Harper’s speed down the sideline. Roper returned to the game after this play.

From Video

Additionally, Harper sporadically played quarterback on zone read plays. It is noteworthy that Harper earned meaningful playing time when Oregon lacked a true “dual threat” quarterback.

Foles’s performance last season proved Kelly did not need a mobile quarterback to make his offense flourish, but it is possible he viewed Smith as a means of compensating for Foles’s lack of mobility. Smith is a situational player who makes the read option more potent and makes Kelly more comfortable calling inside QB runs. If Smith makes the roster this season, expect to see more of the formation with him at quarterback. Just don’t call it the Wildcat.

Top photo from video
The Mayor of London has said Brexit could be halted if the Labour Party made staying in the European Union a manifesto policy, and won the next election.

Sadiq Khan said it could still be possible to ‘trump the referendum’ result by effectively putting it back to the public as a manifesto pledge.

The Mayor has made the intervention at a time his party is in turmoil over its own position, though he has never waivered in his pro-EU stance.

He told the Guardian: ‘For it to have credibility with the British public, there would have to be a Labour manifesto offer, because the public would say, not unreasonably “Hold on a sec, we voted to leave and you’re now sticking two fingers up at us”.

Read more
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Today is the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a movement born from outrage over bank bailouts, as well as a belief that the nation's richest had gotten richer following the Great Recession while everyone else got hammered.

Coincidentally, the Census Bureau is out Tuesday with its annual report on income and poverty in America, and the findings lend some credence to that argument.

After declining markedly every year since the financial crisis, median household income in the U.S. remained flat compared to last year at $51,017. (Technically median household income declined slightly, but by a statistically insignificant amount.)

On the surface, that's a positive sign that the economy is finally starting to turn around.

Yet for those at the top, in the 95th percentile, household income has already begun to go up, according to the Census Bureau. Though income in the 95th percentile is still down from its peak in the mid-2000s, the uptick is striking when you consider that income for average households is only just beginning to bottom out.

Further, median household income is still down 8.3 percent from its pre-recession level in 2007. For those in the 95th percentile, household income is down just 2.5 percent. And as the Washington Post's Neil Irwin notes, median household income is actually a hair lower than it was in 1989, in inflation-adjusted terms, when the average household earned $51,681.

"Growth is not fast enough," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said before the report's release. "And the very definition of what it means to be middle class is being undercut by trends in our economy that must be addressed."

The divergence is more pronounced at the apex of the income ladder. The top one percent saw their income spike 31.4 percent between 2009 and 2012, according to a research paper released earlier this month by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez. With income for everyone else remaining relatively flat, that means the top one percent raked in 95 percent of the nation's total growth in wealth since the economic recovery began.

In a speech Monday, President Obama acknowledged there has been a rise in income inequality during the economic recovery, saying, "The trends that have taken hold over the past few decades of a winner-take-all economy, where a few do better and better, while everybody else just treads water or loses ground, those trends have been made worse by the recession."

But the chances that a gridlocked Congress will actually do anything about it are close to zero. Indeed, analysts are more concerned that the legislature will end up shooting the economy in the foot.
Huffington Post contributor Yashar Ali said Sunday that Fox News's Eric Bolling is attempting to intimidate him into silence by filing a $50 million dollar defamation lawsuit against his reporting.

"He is trying to intimidate me. He sees me as a young reporter that may be scared by big lawsuits. But if he wants to wade into this pond, I'm happy to go in with him," Ali host Brian Stelter on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Ali pointed out that the lawsuit goes after him personally, rather than naming The Huffington Post. The media outlet has said it will stand with Ali regarding a story that included claims by multiple women who allege Bolling sent them lewd pictures.

"My life history has given me a lot of experience to not be scared by these things," Ali said.

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Ali also said he stands by his report, which he said he verified with 14 sources. Bolling has denied the allegations.

Ali called Bolling "wrong" for his decision to take legal action.

"He's wrong because I spent three months on this story. As you said, I have 14 sources. I've spoken to the victims, and that's on a factual basis. I know he's wrong," Ali continued, adding that "the best defense of defamation is the truth."

Ali said Bolling's intent to intimidate him is clear because Bolling filed the lawsuit against him personally, not against his company that has a multibillion-dollar parent.

"It's really important to note, Brian, that he's suing me personally for $50 million. He did not include HuffPost, which is owned by Verizon, in this lawsuit. If he wants $50 million, if you feel that you've been aggrieved and you deserve damages, you go after the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, not an individual reporter," Ali told Stelter.

Ali said he welcomes the opportunity to depose the Fox News host, saying he hopes his case will serve as an example to other journalists should they face similar legal actions.

"I relish the opportunity to see and being deposed and to stand up for not only my First Amendment rights, the First Amendment Rights of many reporters who messaged me after this came out, saying that they would be scared by this kind of action," Ali said.

"And, you know, I'm not trying to turn myself into a representative for the media here, but I feel like I have to really fight this because of other reporters who would be frightened by this kind of action," he added.

Ali has demanded Bolling dismiss his lawsuit over a report, published earlier this month on HuffPost, detailing allegations that the host sent lewd photos of male genitalia to two female coworkers at Fox News and Fox Business.

In a statement included in Ali's article, Bolling's attorney Michael Bowe said the host "recalls no such inappropriate communications, does not believe he sent any such communications, and will vigorously pursue his legal remedies for any false and defamatory accusations that are made.”

Bolling was suspended from Fox a day after the article was published and the network launched an investigation into the matter.

Fox News told CNN that Bolling remains suspended while an outside law firm investigates the allegations.
Two charts from Think Progress make the case that Occupy Wall Street has already won a major victory.

First, here is a look at the focus of economic discussion on cable news during the last week of July:

Now, here is a look at economic discussion on cable news over the last week:Granted, Occupy Wall Street is not the sole cause of this change. For one thing, President Obama has been stumping for his jobs legislation for the past several weeks. Also, the last week of the July was the peak of the debt default showdown, making it perhaps not the best point of comparison.

Still, Occupy Wall Street has made an undeniable impact in shifting the terms of debate on our current economic woes away from a focus on spending cuts, and toward a focus on unemployment and the culpability of Wall Street. That is a big deal.
"Cinder block" redirects here. For the American singer, see Cinder Block (musician)

"Breezeblocks" redirects here. For the song by Alt+J, see Breezeblocks (song)

An interior wall of painted CMUs

A concrete masonry unit (CMU) is a standard size rectangular block used in building construction. CMUs are some of the most versatile building products available because of the wide variety of appearances that can be achieved using concrete masonry units.[1]

Those that use cinders (fly ash or bottom ash) are called cinder blocks in the United States, breeze blocks (breeze is a synonym of ash)[2] in the United Kingdom, and hollow blocks in the Philippines. In New Zealand and Canada they are known as concrete blocks (a name common in the United States also). In New Zealand, they are also called construction blocks. In Australia they are also called Besser blocks and Besser bricks, because the Besser Company was a major supplier of machines that made concrete blocks. Clinker blocks use clinker as aggregate. In non-technical usage, the terms cinder block and breeze block are often generalized to cover all of these varieties.

Composition [ edit ]

Concrete blocks are made from cast concrete (e.g. Portland cement and aggregate, usually sand and fine gravel, for high-density blocks). Lower density blocks may use industrial wastes, such as fly ash or bottom ash,[3][4] as an aggregate.[5] Recycled materials, such as post-consumer glass, slag cement, or recycled aggregate, are often used in the composition of the blocks.[6] Use of recycled materials within blocks can create different appearances in the block, such as a terrazzo finish, and may help the finished structure earn LEED certification. Lightweight blocks can also be produced using autoclaved aerated concrete.

Sizes and structure [ edit ]

The use of blockwork allows structures to be built in the traditional masonry style with layers (or courses) of staggered blocks. Concrete blocks may be produced with hollow centers (cores) to reduce weight or improve insulation. Blocks come in modular sizes, with the most popular typically referred to (by their thickness) as "4-inch", "6-inch", "8-inch", and "12-inch". In the US, CMU blocks are nominally 16 in (410 mm) wide and 8 in (200 mm) long. Their actual dimensions are their nominal dimensions, minus ⅜ in any direction (to allow for mortar joints regardless of their orientation as laid).[7] In Ireland and the UK, blocks are usually 440 mm × 215 mm × 100 mm (17.3 in × 8.5 in × 3.9 in) excluding mortar joints. In Australia, New Zealand and Canada, blocks are usually 390 mm × 190 mm × 190 mm (15.4 in × 7.5 in × 7.5 in) excluding mortar joints.

Block cores are typically tapered so that their top surface (as laid) has a greater surface on which to spread a mortar bed and for easier handling. Most CMU's have two cores, but three- and four-core units are also produced. A core also allows for the insertion of steel reinforcement to span courses in order to increase tensile strength. This is accomplished by grouting the voids of blocks containing rebar with concrete. Thus reinforced, CMU walls are better able to resist lateral forces such as wind load and seismic forces.

A variety of specialized shapes exist to allow special construction features. U-shaped blocks or knockout blocks with notches to allow the construction of bond beams or lintel assemblies, using horizontal reinforcing grouted into place in the cavity. Blocks with a channel on the end, known as "jamb blocks", allow doors to be secured to wall assemblies. Blocks with grooved ends permit the construction of control joints, allowing a filler material to be anchored between the un-mortared block ends. Other features, such as radiused corners known as "bullnoses" may be incorporated. A wide variety of decorative profiles also exist.

Concrete masonry units may be formulated with special aggregates to produce specific colors or textures for finish use. Special textures may be produced by splitting a ribbed or solid two-block unit; such factory-produced units are called "split-rib" or "split-face" blocks. Blocks may be scored by grooves the width of a mortar joint to simulate different block modules. For example, an 8-by-16-inch (200 mm × 410 mm) block may be scored in the middle to simulate 8-by-8-inch (200 mm × 200 mm) masonry, with the grooves filled with mortar and struck to match the true joints.[11]

United States [ edit ]

Uses [ edit ]

Concrete block, when built with integral steel reinforcing or in tandem with concrete columns and tie beams and reinforced with rebar, is a very common building material for the load-bearing walls of buildings, in what is termed concrete block structure (CBS) construction. American suburban houses typically employ a concrete foundation and slab with a concrete block wall on the perimeter. Other common uses for concrete block wall is interior fire-rated partition walls, and exterior backup wall for attachment of building envelope systems and façades.

Structural properties [ edit ]

Concrete masonry walls may be ungrouted, partially grouted, or fully grouted, the latter two enhancing their structural strength. Additionally, steel reinforcement bars (rebar) can be used both vertically and horizontally inside a CMU wall to maximize its structural performance. The cells in which the rebar is placed must be grouted for the bars to bond to the wall. For this reason, high seismic zones typically only allow fully grouted walls in their building codes. The American design code that guides design engineers in using CMU as a structural system is the Masonry Standards Joint Committee's Building Code Requirements & Specification for Masonry Structures (TMS 402/ACI 530/ASCE 5). The compressive strength of concrete masonry units and masonry walls varies from approximately 1,000 psi (7 MPa) to 5,000 psi (34 MPa) based on the type of concrete used to manufacture the unit, stacking orientation, the type of mortar used to build the wall, and other factors.[12][13][14]

See also [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

Sources [ edit ]
Ireland 24 France 9

The scoreline takes some believing. So too the performance. To lose their two most important players, their talisman and their leader, and then respond to put France away handsomely, also takes some beating given Ireland’s history at World Cups. The mutual love-in when the players returned moments after the end was entirely justified.

But despite losing first Johnny Sexton at the end of the first quarter and then Paul O’Connell on half-time, no blow rocked this Irish side. Phenomenal, unyielding mental strength and unquenchable spirit, helped by an umbilical link with a raucous Irish crowd which had the Millennium Stadium rocking, ultimately devoured a blunt, one-dimensional France.

The collective, as ever with this Ireland, amounted to more than the sum of the individual parts. And in the face of a ferociously physical French assault, Irish players kept looking for what little daylight there was in the thick blue line, kept clearing out, kept tackling and, in a game where line breaks were like hen’s teeth, managed a couple before drawing strength from an improved scrum in the endgame.

Heroes nonetheless abounded, none more than Ian Madigan, who epitomised this team’s mental strength with the assuredness and daring of his running and kicking game, while Iain Henderson somehow made light of losing O’Connell with his leg-pumping in contact. Others, such as Rory Best and Devin Toner, have rarely played better, the entire back-row rose to the occasion with big, big games, as did Conor Murray and the immense Robbie Henhsaw. But there were no weak links in the chain.

Ireland’s world appeared to fall in before the 25-minute mark when Sexton was tackled hard by Louis Picamoles, and felt the full force of the number eight’s shoulder. Despite the ferocity of the hit, it appears Sexton had suffered a groin injury. Nearing half-time Ireland suffered another body blow, and a huge psychological one, when O’Connell was stretchered off after the end of the first-half with what seemed like a serious hamstring injury.

O’Connell tried to get to his feet, but couldn’t. Given a rousing reception, he managed a one-hand wave through his pain and crushing disappointment as he was stretchered off, but it was a cruel way to see his test career come to an end. Ireland would also lose Peter O’Mahony, who had a towering match, clearing out, poaching, tackling and counter-rucking.

Thierry Dusautoir’s crunching hits and tackle count were reminiscent of his stunning performance against New Zealand in this stadium eight years ago, and France had plenty of oomph, but little ooh la la.

Ireland’s exit strategy focussed mostly on a kick-chase rather than kicking long. The problem was that Brice Dulin and Scott Spedding gathered the first three of them, and in addition to conceding territory, Ireland also began by conceding four of the first five penalties.

Second Captains

Ireland 24 France 9 - match highlights

Happily for the Irish crowd, Frederic Michalak struck the post when shanking his first kick, and Spedding hit the upright from long-range, before Sexton opened the scoring after his little chip led to Mathieu Bastareaud playing the ball from an offside position.

Spedding would cancel out that Sexton penalty, and another one, with long-range kicks, before Madigan spread confidence through his teammates and the Irish support when unerringly making it 9-6. Ireland should have been more ahead when a lovely strike move from off-the-op line-out ball saw Tommy Bowe, another big game player, drift through the French line from Henshaw’s inside pass and draw Spedding but Earls couldn’t hold onto the pass.

Ireland went through many painstaking phases before Henshaw kicked possession away and then, after Spedding kicked downfield, Madigan attempted a risky touch-finder rather than an up-and-under, which went out on the full.

Ireland would pay a hell of a price, if not on the scoreboard. As France attacked off the ensuing line-out in the Irish half, O’Connell’s foot seemed to get caught in the turf as he attempted a poach and was cleared out. Earls redeemed himself to some degree with a try-saving tackle from behind on Spedding, as did Henshaw by lifting the siege when poaching for a turnover penalty on half-time. But the players left the pitch with O’Connell out of the game, the tournament and test rugby.

About the only positive of that grim scenario, was that Ireland had 15 minutes to regroup. They had responded impressively to losing Sexton and even more so now.

With the battle resumed, an injury break in the 48th minute led to the best version yet of ‘The Fields’ heard on this, or any other day. Almost immediately Henshaw stood up Bastareaud and set off. Although the move stalled, from the ensuing scrum Ireland went through the phases before Rob Kearney broke Michalak’s tackle and took Dulin’s to score.

When Dusautoir knocked on, the crowd chanted “Ole, Ole, Ole.” The French could not be heard. Rory Best was pinged for coming in from the side and Sean O’Brien, not for the first time, was penalised for a turnover that could well have been given prior to this tournament.

O’Brien’s response was to pound the turf but, undeterred, make a brilliant turnover at the next ruck. Back came Ireland through the phases, but there was no way through, so Madigan chipped for the increasingly influential Henshaw to gather. But France won the turnover penalty, and after launching Louis Picamoles up the middle, O’Brien was pinged for not rolling away.

A Morgan Parra penalty brought the French to within a score, but Henderson, at the peak of his stirring second-half effort, drove Bernard le Roux back ten metres off a French line-out and when Alexandre Dumoulin crossed in front of the carrier, ‘The Fields’ reverberated around the Millennium once more. It also summed up France’s blunt attacking game.

When Madigan found a huge touch, it felt like a momentum shift, and it was, the final one. Ireland attacked through the phases, O’Brien, Henderson, Toner and Best making yards in contact that they had no right to make. This was as much about desire and seeking relatively softer shoulders as sheer strength. Murray then had the wit to touch the ball against the base of the posts with the well-placed Owens having no need to take recourse to the TMO.

A scrum penalty for the revamped Irish front-row followed. Madigan nailed it from 45 metres. More ‘Oles’. Another Irish scrum penalty. Ireland now bossing it to the backdrop of The Fields. One of the great days.

Scoring sequence: 13 mins Sexton pen 3-0; 16 mins Spedding pen 3-3; 19 mins Sexton pen 6-3; 23 mins Spedding pen 6-6; 29 mnins Madigan pen 9-6; (half-time 9-6); 51 mins R Kearney try 14-6; 64 mins Parra pen 14-9; 72 mins Murray try, Madigan con 21-9; 76 mins Madigan pen 24-9.

France: Scott Spedding (Clermont Auvergne); Noa Nakaitaci (Clermont Auvergne), Mathieu Bastareaud (Toulon), Wesley Fofana (Clermont Auvergne), Brice Dulin (Racing 92); Frederic Michalak (Toulon), Sebastien Tillous-Borde (Toulon); Eddy Ben Arous (Racing 92), Guilhem Guirado (Toulon), Rabah Slimani (Stade Francais), Pascal Pape (Stade Francais), Yoann Maestri (Toulouse), Thierry Dusautoir (Toulouse) (capt), Damien Chouly (Clermont Auvergne), Louis Picamoles (Toulouse). Replacements: Benjamin Kayser (Clermont Auvergne) for Guirado (69 mins), Vincent Debaty (Clermont Auvergne) for Ben Arous (43-48 and 65 mins), Nicolas Mas (Montpellier) for Slimani (63 mins), Alexandre Flanquart (Stade Francais) for Pape (73 mins), Bernard le Roux (Racing 92) for Choully (55 mins), Morgan Parra (Clermont Auvergne) for Tillous-Borde, Remi Tales (Racing 92) for Michalak (55 mins), Alexandre Dumoulin (Racing 92) for Bastareaud.

Ireland:Rob Kearney (UCD/Leinster); Tommy Bowe (Belfast Harlequins/Ulster), Keith Earls (Young Munster/Munster), Robbie Henshaw (Buccaneers/Connacht), Dave Kearney (Lansdowne/Leinster); Jonathan Sexton (St. Mary’s College/Leinster), Conor Murray (Garryowen/Munster); Cian Healy (Clontarf/Leinster), Rory Best (Banbridge/Ulster), Mike Ross (Clontarf/Leinster), Devin Toner (Lansdowne/Leinster), Paul O’Connell (Young Munster) (capt), Peter O’Mahony (Cork Constitution/Munster), Sean O’Brien (UCD/Leinster), Jamie Heaslip (Dublin University/Leinster). Replacements: Ian Madigan (Blackrock College/Leinster) for Sexton (28 mins),

Iain Henderson (Ballynahinch/Ulster) for O’Connell (half=time), Chris Henry (Malone/Ulster) for O’Mahony (55 mins), Jack McGrath (St. Mary’s College/Leinster) for Healy (57 mins), Luke Fitzgerald (Blackrock College/Leinster) for Earls (62 mins), Nathan White (Connacht) for Ross (65 mins), Richardt Strauss (Old Wesley/Leinster) for Best (74 mins), Eoin Reddan (Old Crescent/Leinster) for Murray (75 mins),

Referee: Nigel Owens (Wales)a
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Originally published in two parts at Skepchick and Queereka and cross-posted here with permission.

Disclaimer: I’ve chosen to focus this article on trans women only for the sake of brevity and clarity. It is not my intent to contribute to the ongoing cultural erasure of trans men, and I believe their voices, experiences and identities deserve to be heard and understood. Cis readers, please note that much of this can be applied to transsexuality in general.

Debunking myths is one of those things that us skeptics are supposed to do, right?

Okay then…

(my triskaidekaphilia isn’t showing, is it?)

Myth 1. Trans women are just really, really, REALLY gay.

This one is impressively persistent, and unbelievably common. It was even pulled out recently while Lance Bass, an openly gay man, was guest-hosting Access Hollywood.

The truth is fairly simple: gender identity and sexual orientation have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. A fairly common adage used to address this misunderstanding is “sexual orientation is about who you want to go to bed with, gender identity is about who you want to go to bed as.”

My own preference in addressing it is to simply point out the existence of trans lesbians (that is, trans women who are attracted to other women). Problem solved. Let’s go have tea and scones.

Or so one would hope, anyway.

I think a lot of this confusion stems from how strongly we associate behaviour with gender. The cultural assumption of heterosexuality is so intrinsic, we see gay men as being somehow in defiance of what it is to be a man. They become regarded as female-like or transgender simply by engaging in a mode of sexuality that is more common amongst women than men, even though many gay men express themselves in an almost hyper-masculine way.

This misconception is amplified by our overemphasis of sex and sexuality when thinking about gender and what gender means, so we can end up regarding any expression of gender as being about sexuality. Such as the widespread assumption by men that women dress nice or stylishly or sexily primarily as a means of attracting men, rather than simply an expression of their own identity and feelings that day.

This myth is damaging to both trans women and gay men alike. It also often leads to trans issues being swept aside or subsumed within broader discussions of LGBTQ stuff.

Such as how this ad that ran in the Canadian newspaper The National Post was largely decried for being homophobic rather than transphobic despite being almost entirely based around promoting fear of transgenderism, and how the narrative of PFC Manning has been written as the story of a gay man in the military, despite the fact that the evidence clearly shows she had been planning to transition immediately upon return to civilian life. She continues to be described even by her supporters in male and masculine terms.

Short answer: sex / gender and sexuality do not have a deterministic relationship to one another. Which is why there are such things as gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the first place.

Myth 2. So you’re going to get your penis cut off?

Another impressively common one.

In short, no. That’s not how it works.

I hope I don’t squick you all out too much, but I’ll provide a really rough, basic explanation of one of the common forms of MtF lower surgery (aka SRS, sexual reassignment surgery, aka GRS, genital reconstruction surgery, aka vaginoplasty), using the “inversion method”.

The penis is basically split into three pieces. The tip is sort of detached from the bulk of the shaft to be formed into a clitoris. The skin of the shaft is removed and the shaft itself split down the middle. It is then inverted into a vaginal canal such that the exterior circumference of the shaft serves as the vaginal lining. This preserves sensation in the event of penetrative sex as well as allows for a certain degree of natural lubrication during arousal. The testes are indeed discarded but they’re pretty much the only bit of tissue that doesn’t get used. The scrotal tissue is used to form outer labia and create the aesthetic appearance of a typical female vulva. Remaining tissue and skin get used to form a clitoral hood and add additional depth to the vaginal canal as needed.

The procedure is remarkably effective, and has come quite a long way over the decades. Trans women today are able to preserve considerable sensation (often no loss of sensation reported at all), and very many report greatly improved sexual satisfaction and full orgasmic potential. The outward appearance is virtually indistinguishable from any other woman’s vulva. The only two things that are typically at all noticeable are that if your partner is particularly well-endowed, he may notice a slight lack of depth, and the vaginal canal is often a little bit steeper than in cis women, though that can be prevented by a trans woman taking care to exercise proper technique while dilating (a process required to ensure the vaginal canal doesn’t close).

There are a few things that I find particularly troubling about this misconception, or even just casual joking reference to “cutting off your dick”. One is reinforcement of the classic misogynist myth that women are incomplete men. Women are men, minus a few pieces. Female genitals are just the absence of male genitals. Castration anxiety, penis envy, blah blah blah, etc.

Clearly, that is not true. Women are their own sex, not simply lesser men. So why should we assume that acquiring girl bits is as simple as lopping off the boy bits and carving a gash?

The other problem is how it reinforces an image of trans women as sexless, mutilated Barbie dolls. It reinforces the idea that we have simply discarded our sex rather than creating for ourselves a new one. It is reductive, and imagines our new state as “less” than our previous one. It reinforces the sense that we’ve rendered ourselves inferior in sacrificing our maleness.

The reality is that transition is not a de-sexing of the body, it is a re-sexing of the body. Our genitals are not discarded, they are simply reshaped.

Myth 3. So you’ve chosen to get a sex change operation?

SRS is not what changes our sex. That’s only one tiny piece of the puzzle. And many trans women choose not to, or can’t, undergo SRS. A woman is not defined by what’s between her legs.

I lay this one at the feet of the media.

Unless a film or TV show is explicitly about the long, gradual, complex, multifaceted, emotionally harrowing, highly individual process of transition, it is impossible to really portray it accurately or fit it into a plot. Most of the times transition shows up in movies or TV, it’s as a plot device. Why waste time portraying something so complex and gradual when it’s just a little hinge in your narrative?

We’ve all seen it a million times. Bob goes into the hospital as a big, burly, manly dudely dude. Out walks Roberta in her heels and mini-skirt, with her D-cup breasts suddenly magically having appeared out of nowhere, her hair miraculously 12 inches longer, and goes swishing off to sleep with the first unsuspecting guy she can find.

No recovery time! No pain! No blood! No dilation! No bandages and packing! No long, tedious four year process for hormones to do their breast development, skin tone, body hair, fat redistribution thing. No irritating legal hassles with changing name and documentation. No emotional roller-coaster. No spontaneous bursts of tears. No voice training. No re-learning your body language and mannerisms. No anxiety about passing. No joyful revelation the first time you realize you are passing. No crying with happiness the first time you discover you can look in a mirror without hating what you see. No dealing with the scariness and awkwardness of beginning to date again. No re-learning the entire language of fashion and how to dress. No getting accustomed to bras and heels and earrings and annoying nightmarishly fiddly little jewelry clasps. No wondering whether the better orgasms are worth their infrequency. No rediscovering your sexuality. No long, complex process of reacquainting yourself with new genitalia and learning to understand them. No learning what you are and aren’t comfortable wearing. No getting nail polish all over your fingers and eyeliner in your eyeball because you never got a chance to learn how to do that stuff as a little girl. No coming out. No losing friends. No being disowned by family. No growing closer to the people who supported you. No adapting to the loss of male privilege and learning how to deal with cat calls. No nothing.

Basically? No transition. None of any of the stuff that makes it such an intense and incredible and traumatic and rewarding and beautiful experience.

And she’s wearing a mini-skirt! After SRS! Which in real life basically amounts to your entire lifetime’s worth of periods condensed into a two month period of recovery. Bloody, hormonal, moody, painful recovery.

And she goes and gets laid, too.

Trivializing? Kinda.

Myth 4. “It’s a trap” / Trans women are just gay guys trying to attract straight dudes.

See above about us not being gay guys.

But this one goes a lot deeper, a lot nastier, a lot more demeaning, and a lot more dangerous.

Dangerous in that a great many trans women have lost their lives to sexual partners who felt they were “tricked”.

The concept of “deception” is a tricky one, and it can be very complicated to unpack the various ethical dimensions of disclosure and where a trans person’s responsibility lies in terms of informing her partner.

That’s far too big a subject to tackle here, but Zinnia Jones provides a fantastic explanation in this YouTube video. I’d just like to say that I really don’t think it’s our responsibility to give you the opportunity to inflict your bigotry and hang-ups on us; it’s your responsibility to ask (if it’s that big a deal to you).

And if a woman was attractive to you one moment and a repulsive, lying whore the next, when all that has changed is that you now know a largely irrelevant detail of her history, the problem is with your perceptions, not her body.

The problematic implications of us being “traps” are a bit too numerous to name them all. A few that come to mind are the basic assumption that we’re “really” men, believing that our decisions all revolve around you andwe’re doing this for your sake, not our own (kind of like the earlier example about how men may interpret how a woman dresses), the issues of conflating gender expression with sexual motivations, the concept that femaleness and femininity are artifice and fake, etc.

But I guess the one that I’d most like to unpack is how, like the thoroughly debunked theory of “autogynophilia”, it looks at trans women’s sexuality and motives through a lens of male sexuality and motives.

A hypothetical cis male sits on his couch and is absent-mindedly flipping through a porn magazine. He comes across an ad for “shemale” porn. He wonders, “why would anyone ever do that? Why would a man want to become a woman? That’s crazy!” (yeah, let’s put aside the implicit misogyny there… we can talk about that some other time) and rather than think about it in terms of why a woman would want a female body and not a male one, he thinks about it in terms of why a man would want a female body.

The conclusions he draws, based upon the assumption that a man is fundamentally a sexual agent and a woman is fundamentally a sexual object, are that the “shemale” is doing it to get laid, to attract men to him with his new hot, curvy, sexual-object of a body. Either that or, as in “autogynophilia”, doing it to have himself as his very own personal sex object.

Never mind what happens to a trans woman’s libido during HRT. Never mind that for very many trans women, that period of time, exactly when the libido starts diminishing, happens to be when commitment often deepens, and any remaining doubts and questions are resolved.

Forget that. It MUST be about sex. Because that’s all the female body is good for: sex.

Right?

Myth 5. Aren’t you sort of reinforcing stereotypical gender roles?

Aren’t you just going along with the idea that having a feminine personality means you must be female? Doesn’t that perpetuate the idea that there are certain ways women and men are “supposed” to be like?

Much like the existence of trans lesbians serves to disprove the “really, really gay” myth, in this case we can point to the existence of butch or tomboy trans women. Ta da! Myth vanishes in a puff of logic. But to explain further…

This is about a very basic confusion: lack of understanding the difference between gender identity and gender expression.

Gender identity is an internal sense of self and what one fundamentally is. It’s the sense of being a man or a woman (or both, or neither, or in-between, or something else). It is divorced from concepts of what a man or woman is or isn’t supposed to be like, and appears to be very much innate and unchanging. It also appears to be related to the neurological “body map” and relationship to one’s body- feelings of either comfort or alienation.

Gender expression is the degree to which one’s personality, interests and manner of self-expression is culturally regarded as “masculine” or “feminine” (or “androgynous”). This is heavily culturally and socially mediated. What is regarded as feminine in one culture may be regarded as masculine in another. There seem to be some gendered traits that are in varying degrees innate to an individual but gender expression is an aggregation of many, many, many such traits which can occur in an immense variety of combinations.

An imperfect but very helpful breakdown from the Center For Gender Sanity (which I think I’ve used before, actually) can be found here.

What makes a person transsexual, and motivates one to pursue physical transition, is typically a conflict of gender identity with physical, assigned sex. It is not a conflict of gender expression or role with physical, assigned sex.

We transition not because we feel we’re too feminine to be men, or that the presence of feminine characteristics means we must be female. The motivation is far deeper and far less analytical than that.

We transition simply because we know ourselves to be female… totally independently of how well we do or do not fit into female stereotypes.

Hence we are not simply basing this off of an overly strict concept of gender roles where we need to get our bodies to conform to a socially mandated binary.

We are only seeking to get our bodies to conform to our sense of self so that we can feel that they are our own rather than a creepy gross alien thingy that happens to be attached to us. And our existence does not in any way support, perpetuate or rely upon those binaries… we are fundamentally transgressing them and asserting that they may be broken, and sometimesmust.

Myth 6. If our culture didn’t have such strict gender roles, there would be no need for transition.

This is another mistake stemming from the confusion of gender identity with gender expression, and also again the belief that a trans woman makes her decision because she is uncomfortable with the male gender role rather than the male body.

The argument runs that, basically, if we were to break down the socially arbitrated binary and “gender straitjacket” we would no longer feel any sense of conflict between our selves and our assigned sex.

But, again, we do not transition out of discomfort with the male gender role. We transition out of discomfort with the male body.

No matter how open, enlightened and non-gendered our society could be, most women would go right on feeling just as alienated and disturbed by having a penis, a pair of testicles pumping her full of testosterone, a hairy face and body, a masculine distribution of muscle and fat, a flat chest, that acidic male locker room smell, ruddy oily skin, etc.

And most men would go right on feeling creeped out and appalled by having a vagina, menstruating every month, having breasts, soft and smooth skin, no beard, a feminine shape, wide hips, the rising and falling cycle of estrogen and progesterone, etc.

Transsexuality is first and foremost about us and our bodies and our right to be happy within them, not all about social conventions or the politics of gender or what you think society should be or what you think is best for us.

People whose gender identity is in conflict with their physiological sex will continue to exist no matter how well we accommodate for variation in gender expression. Solving society’s problems of gender won’t solve all the problems of sex.

Please, take it as a reasonable assumption that we’ve thought this stuff through, our decisions are our own, and we haven’t just been duped by the patriarchy or whatever.

It sucks to have people who are ostensibly your allies tell you you’re living your life wrong and that the biggest, most important, most difficult, most thought-through decision you ever made was just a result of being brainwashed by the system, maannnn.

Myth 7. You’re so brave!

No. That’s a lovely idea, it is, and thank you. I do appreciate the sentiment and we often enjoy hearing that kind of thing. It’s an enormously tempting idea, too, and hard to give up. It would be terrific to believe that I’m this wonderfully brave, courageous, strong woman who overcame unimaginable odds to assert her true self without compromise to a hostile, bigoted world. But it just isn’t true. We aren’t brave. We’re scared shitless and in tremendous pain and desperate for a way out, and don’t really have much of a choice. Imagine you’re being chased by a pack of snarling wolves through a darkened, stormy forest. They’re nipping at your heels, just behind, barking and growling with long strings of saliva dangling from their bared fangs. Your body is aching and sore and straining against the exhaustion, just barely maintaining your sprint through a combination of adrenaline and the terrifying certainty of death should you give in. Somewhere in the darkness and gloom you suddenly catch a glimpse of light. You run towards it, screaming for help as best you can through your bursting, panting lungs. It is a cabin. You finally make it to the door, you throw it open, and just in nick of time as one of the wolves lunges for your throat, you slam the door shut behind you. At last you’ve escaped. You’re safe. Inside the cabin sits a friendly old man smoking a pipe and mulling some wine. As you stand there, shaking and gasping for breath and crying and terrified out of your wits, he smiles and says, “wow, you’re really brave.” Some of us are brave. Some of us are strong. But that’s not always the case, and can’t necessarily be inferred from our transition. We do what we have to do, however we can, no matter how scared we are. But on the other hand, as it was articulated in Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, one of my favorite novels: “Courage is being scared shitless and doing it anyway.” Myth 8. You’re appropriating the female body. Appropriation is about co-opting someone else’s identity. We’re not doing that. We’re expressing our identity. It is not an act of attempting to emulate or express ourselves as The Other, we are attempting to more accurately and honestly express The Self. We don’t transition into being a new or different person. We become more ourselves. We don’t put on a mask, we take one off. We don’t another cliché metaphor, we just cliché metaphor. It is not YOUR body or sex that is being in any way appropriated or affected. We are making decisions about our own bodies, our own sex, specifically just trying to feel at home within them…. Which is our choice to make. Our bodies, our choices, yeah? Myth 9. Why can’t you just accept yourself? Why not just learn to be comfortable with who you are? This one is usually based on analogy to cosmetic surgery and eating disorders. After all, we do teach people to do their best to accept their bodies and not treat themselves with loathing. We rightly teach people that self-acceptance is of great importance to one’s mental and emotional well-being. The appropriate response to body-image issues is therapy, and to reinforce self-acceptance, not to facilitate an obsession with cosmetic surgery or enable an eating disorder. But gender dysphoria is not as simple as a “body-image issue”, and has been proven unresponsive to therapy and psychotropic medication. There are certain reasonable expectations a person can have for their body, and there are certain conflicts between body map or self image and physical configuration of the body that deserve to be addressed through medical means. Consider, for instance, the case of skin grafts for a burn victim, plastic surgery for someone with an extreme socially and psychologically debilitating deformity, or prosthesis for an amputee. In these cases, we don’t simply teach self-acceptance. That is part of the process, sure (as it is with gender transition), but we do provide medical intervention and don’t question or belittle their desire for it. They are only asking for a relatively basic level of bodily integrity. That line is subjective but it is present. If you’re cisgender, ask yourself: were your genitals to be lost or disfigured in an accident, would you want someone to chastise you for wanting a prosthesis or cosmetic surgery? A body consistent with one’s internal conception of sex and gender is a perfectly reasonable thing to want and a very difficult thing to live without. Furthermore, these kinds of procedures, and gender transition, have specific, defined end-points and goals. Eating disorders and cosmetic surgery do not. Someone with a severe psychological body-image disorder will, presumably, never feel pretty or thin enough. They will remain unhappy, and the physical changes won’t solve the underlying issue. In the case of gender transition, and cosmetic procedures for burns and deformities, there is an end-point and the procedures consistently produce a great deal of psychological and emotional benefit with significant improvements in the patient’s well-being. Most medical procedures are not simply about sustaining life. They are about maintaining well-being and improving quality of life. That is what transition provides… a quality of life an individual may reasonably expect. No other procedure or treatment has ever been proven effective or helpful in addressing the extreme detriment to mental health caused by Gender Identity Disorder. Myth 10. You don’t really become female. The process is only cosmetic. You’re still technically a man. I addressed much of this a few weeks ago in this article. It has chickens! To summarize: there is no particularly valid reason to prioritize the genetic definition of sex above all other aspects of physical sex: hormones, secondary sexual characteristics, genital configuration, etc. Chromosomes actually don’t play nearly as much of a role in human sexual differentiation as we often think they do. The Y chromosome is mostly deteriorating junk DNA that’s only real function is to turn the gonads into testes. In an XX cell, one of the X chromosomes is deactivated. As such, there’s no real functional difference between a “female” cell and a “male” cell. The process of sexual differentiation in humans is not genetic in nature, but hormonal. As for the matter of being “cosmetically” female… a trans woman’s secondary sexual characteristics are in no substantial way different from that of a cis woman and are formed through the exact same physical processes. If my breasts are to be deemed “cosmetic”, so too must the breasts of any woman at all. There is no single variable we can point to that suggests someone is “really” female or not. Doing so for any individual trait will necessarily require excluding some cis women from the category. There are some traits that no trans woman possesses, but there will always be cis women who don’t possess those traits either. As such, there is no definitive way that you can suggest trans women are outside of the category “woman” but all cis women are in. At least not without going into tautologies like “only cis women are really women because trans women aren’t really women”. In so far as the term “woman” is to be at all meaningful and consistent, trans women must be included. Myth 11. Drag queens, transsexuals, transgenders, cross-dressers, what’s the difference? First, don’t say “transgenders”. Nouning-the-adjective places the category above the person. Say “transgender women/men/people”. Transgender is an umbrella term that includes all significant deviation from the norms of gender and sex. Drag queens, transsexual people, cross-dressers, transvestic fetishists, people who identity as trans-masculine or trans-feminine, people who are genderqueer, etc. are all included. Transsexual refers specifically to people who permanently transition from one sex to another, usually through one or more medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy and/or genital reconstruction surgery, usually along with legal and social changes such as change of legal name and documentation, alternate gender presentation (clothing, make-up, etc.), voice training and so on. The adjective “trans”, as in “trans woman”, usually means transsexual but sometimes means transgender. It’s usually clear from context. This article, for instance, has been about transsexual women. Drag queens are men (typically but not always gay) who dress in an exaggeratedly, campily female way for the sake of performance or entertainment. There is typically very little emphasis placed on actually passing as female but instead on having a particularly ostentatious and fun outfit. This is an act of playing with gender roles, not an act based on expression of a deeper internal sense of self. A drag queen adopts a female persona but will (almost always) have a male gender identity. Cross-dressers are men with a male gender identity who, for a variety of possible reasons, choose to occasionally dress in women’s clothing and accessories and present as female. The acts of cross-sex presentation are temporary and do not reflect their “true self”. A transvestic fetishist is a cross-dresser who does so for sexual motivations, due to being aroused or getting an erotic thrill from the cross-sex presentation. They also maintain a male gender identity and the cross-sex presentation is temporary. These distinctions are important. Seriously. Myth 12. Transsexuality is just an invention of the modern medical establishment, a symptom of Western culture. Hormone replacement therapy and genital reconstruction surgery are modern medical treatments developed to address and accommodate a long-standing human issue. Gender variance, although it may vary in its particular iteration, will not always be socially accepted or accommodated, and is sometimes only accommodated in very specific ways, occurs in pretty much all cultures and societies throughout human history. Many cultures were actually fairly accepting and tolerant. Some even imagined transgendered identities to be especially blessed, lucky or powerful… such as a shamanic role for certain North American First Nations “two spirit” identities, the Galli priestesses of Cybele in ancient Greece, the paradoxically respected-and-stigmatized social status of Kathoey in Thailand, the positive social standing of Hjira in India prior to British colonial rule (which brought with it British attitudes towards gender variance), etc. Gender variance has existed as long as human beings have. Transsexuality is simply a relatively new option for addressing it and meeting the needs of people with a sense of strong disharmony between gender identity and physical sex. It didn’t create us, it is just a means of allowing us to live full, happy, meaningful lives and feel comfortable and at home in our bodies. Myth 13. You’re infiltrating women’s spaces and making them unsafe. First of all, we are women. So there’s that. I’m not sure why whatever discomfort may arise from a cis woman’s hang-ups about the thought of a trans woman in the same bathroom or changing room or whatever, and the perceived risk, should take precedence over the extreme discomfort and actual physical risk that a trans woman would be forced to endure in using men’s facilities. An argument I’ve encountered repeatedly is “well what’s to stop some male rapist or child molester or voyeur from putting on some lipstick, claiming to be transgender, and then sexually assaulting your daughters!” (Ominous scary organ chord!). Well… there has never, ever been such an incident. No man has ever disguised himself as transgender for the sake of perpetrating such a crime. And if what you are worried about is sexual assault and voyeurism then those are the issues you should be targeting, enacting policies against, and the people whom you should be demonizing. Don’t demonize and punish innocent trans people over some wild, imagined hypothetical. Would you ban lesbians from women’s facilities on the possibility of their voyeurism? No, probably not, and it’s extremely statistically unlikely for lesbians to commit sexual assault in such a setting. But… it’s just as unlikely for trans women to do so. And remember that stuff about our libidos? Our difficulty achieving erection if we even have a penis? If prevention of sexual assault is something you’re keenly interested in, then please start by focusing on dismantling a misogynistic culture that objectifies and devalues women and places their humanity as secondary to their bodies. There is also a lot of anger and controversy within the feminist community about other types of women’s spaces. A particularly prominent example is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which enforces a trans-exclusionist “Womyn-Born-Womyn” policy (though they allow trans men to attend and perform). Many of the justifications are parallel to those of the Christian right in forbidding us access to women’s bathrooms and changing rooms: we’re really men, it makes the environment unsafe (again, there is absolutely no data whatsoever to support this), what’s to stop men from attending under the pretense of being trans, etc. But there are additionally complex issues. One is the general transphobic attitudes within certain branches of feminism (particularly radical feminism)…. The notion that we’re enforcing the gender binary (which relates to the “why can’t you just accept yourselves” thing and the confusion of gender identity with gender expression), the weird hypocritically gender-essentialist insistence that although gender is “just a social construct” we are nonetheless completely bound to our assigned sex and may not transcend it, many bio-essentialist claims (such as, literally: “rape is encoded on the Y chromosome”… I’ve actually come across that claim), etc. It is also sometimes insisted that because we lacked female childhoods and the concomitant gender-socialization that we can’t possibly understand the female experience. That’s true in a sense… there are many aspects of a female life I did not experience and some I never shall. But this is true of every woman. There is no universal, unwavering female narrative that everyone experiences exactly alike. There are as many stories as there are women. To act like any particular thing being absent means someone isn’t “really” a woman and can’t understand womanhood would necessarily mean excluding a whole lot of cis women, too. All of these notions seem to be acts of bending over backwards and performing intellectual acrobatics to try to disguise their transphobia as being somehow an extension of their feminism when it in fact runs directly contrary to several of the fundamental tenets of feminism… that our lives, choices, identities and what we do with our bodies should not be dictated by external forces or forced upon us to conform with what society tells us those with our particular anatomy are supposed to be. Biology is not destiny. Remember? … In summary, almost all of these misconceptions stem from the assumption that we’re really men, and considering us, our lives, our implications and our choices through a male frame of reference. A woman who is attracted to men is not gay. The existence of a woman as a woman does not reinforce traditional gender roles, nor would the breakdown of those roles cause her to disappear. A woman would not be asked to simply accept a male body. A woman would not be accused of appropriating womanhood, or infiltrating women’s spaces. A woman’s body, and the aspects of it that render it female, are not simply cosmetic. If there is one myth to debunk from which all others would perish, it’s the notion that our gender is not legitimate. We are women. Just think of us as such, and you’ll get it. … ETA: When I said that a cross-dresser’s acts of cross-sex presentation do not reflect their “true self”, I should have been more clear: in the case of a CD (as opposed to a trans woman in denial who simply believes herself to be CD), the female presentation / persona isn’t MORE true than the male identity. Both are aspects of that individual’s sense of self. But the primary difference between a genuine CD and a trans woman is that the male identity is not held to be false while the female identity is held to be genuine. Instead, the male identity is still the primary expression of self that is inevitably returned to.

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Error: Your Requested widget "id=‘text-101' " is not in the widget list. Natalie Reed is a trans-feminist grrl blogger, queer, recovering addict, […]-survivor, etc. She got her start blogging at Skepchick, and now writes for Freethought Blogs. Her many ridiculous interests include linguistics, feminism, trans-feminism, anarchism, gender theory, queer theory, poetry, neuroscience, biology, Doctor Who, comic books, cartoons, shoegazing and punk rock. She was born with a Y chromosome but totally kicked its ass. Follow her on Twitter @nataliereed84. Found this article helpful?

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Doug Mataconis · · 7 comments

Today’s New York Times tries to figure out why there was a group of English soccer hooligans at the protests against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” on September 11th:

Among the non-New Yorkers who traveled to Lower Manhattan on Saturday to protest the neighborhood’s decision to allow an Islamic community center to be built were seven men who came from England bearing flags with slogans and the cross of St. George — a symbol of their nation and of the Crusades.

Those flags are often seen at soccer stadiums, when ultranationalist fans of England’s soccer team gather to cheer (and to fight fans of other nations), but they have been cropping up regularly at anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim protests in English cities over the past year.

That is because the men are members of the English Defense League, formed last year to counter what the men see as the threat posed to their national identity by immigrants to England and British-born Muslims who are neither white nor Christian.

As the British anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate explained last month, the E.D.L. is led by a former member of the British National Party, whose leader has made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan, and has “mushroomed from a coalition of former football hooligans into an enormous street army with the propensity for large-scale disorder and city center confrontations with the police.”[

(…)

After spending months working undercover on an 11-minute documentary about the group, Matthew Taylor reported, “A Guardian investigation has identified a number of known right-wing extremists who are taking an interest in the movement — from convicted football hooligans to members of violent right-wing splinter groups.”

(…)

In a report on the group, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked, “What are Israeli flags and Jewish activists doing at demonstrations sponsored by the English Defence League?” The newspaper answered the question this way: “Call it a struggle against a common foe: Islam. Or a journey into the heart of darkness. Or perhaps further proof that Europe is starting to lose its mind again.”
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” said President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning during his maiden speech before the United Nations General Assembly. “Rocket Man”—Trump’s new nickname for North Korean supremo Kim Jong Un—“is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

If there is a war on the Korean Peninsula, as appears increasingly likely, what happens after the guns go silent? The reconstruction of the Korean nation, after more than a century of tragedy and division, would be one of the most difficult and expensive projects in history.

The cost of rebuilding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, is beyond the means of Seoul. There are South Korean estimates ranging from $50 billion to $229 billion. Add in rebuilding the South, and the tab can soar to over $5 trillion.

Yet the real cost is the suffering of more than 25 million North Koreans. Many tell us they would try to move north in the event of the destruction of the Kim regime so Beijing is worried about the influx of refugees in its northeastern provinces.

It does not appear, however, that Chinese officials are especially concerned about the ability of the People’s Liberation Army, backed up by the People’s Armed Police, to close the border with the North. After all, that border is defined by three natural boundaries: the Yalu and Tumen rivers and an active volcano, Mt. Paektu.

In any event, it is unlikely that North Koreans want to leave their fate to the hated Chinese when they can more easily walk across the Demilitarized Zone, the strip of land separating the two Koreas. In an era of considerably less tension, north-south corridors in the border area were de-mined. Refugees, therefore, merely have to stroll south—to be with other Koreans—along safe paved highways and railroad tracks.

That means, if North Korea were to be “totally destroyed,” the first job of South Korean and U.S. troops would be to stabilize the population of North Korea.

The South Korean military would likely execute “stabilization operations that will focus on two key objectives: establish security and restore essential services with the intent to keep the Korean population fixed in their villages receiving essential support to minimize the humanitarian crisis,” David Maxwell, of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

At the same time, South Korean forces, assisted by the U.S., would have to go on the most important Easter egg hunt in history. They would have to, as Maxwell said, “search, locate, secure, render safe, account for, and as appropriate destroy any remaining weapons of mass destruction.”

And they’d have to do this in a hostile environment, one “exponentially more complex than Iraq,” says Maxwell, a former U.S. Army Special Forces colonel with five Korea tours. The North Koreans are indoctrinated to hate Americans, almost all males have military training, and they will have guns. Moreover, the population has been raised on a myth glorifying “partisan warfare.”

So what could be more dangerous? As South Korean and American forces move north, the Chinese would probably move south.

China’s military would also want to find nuclear weapons, stocks of chemical and biological agents, and ballistic missiles. Beijing, however, covets something even more important to China: paper. The Chinese would need to secure North Korean archives, which will likely show their complicity in the Kim family’s weapons programs and its horrific crimes.

This means China almost certainly would try to secure the capital of Pyongyang and weapons sites before South Korean and American forces did so.

South Korean and American military officers and diplomats have, for decades, tried to discuss with their Chinese counterparts what happens when, for whatever reason, the Kim regime can no longer rule. Maxwell points out that “this can hardly be called coordination.”

Why not? “These engagements,” he said, “are generally one-way with no reciprocal sharing from the Chinese side.” Therefore, Beijing, at least at this time, does not seem to be particularly interested in attempts to “minimize misunderstanding and miscalculation.”

It is often said that Chinese officials do not participate in these discussions for fear of offending their North Korean allies. Another reason, however, may be that Chinese military officers do not want to reveal their plans because they want to control the northern portion of the Korean Peninsula.

Leading Korea watcher Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University told me that the Chinese would undoubtedly end up talking to Washington and Seoul if and when the time comes. Bechtol, the author of North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim Jong-un Era, is probably correct, as the specter of great-power war should tend to convince Beijing that it has no choice but to coordinate.

But should the Chinese decide not to do the right thing, the total destruction of North Korea could lead to two large armies with incompatible objectives coming into contact with each other in a wartime setting.

Miscalculation in these fluid circumstances haunts war planners like Robert Collins, who has worked with U.S. Forces Korea in this area. As he told The Daily Beast, if Kim loses control, planning for all sides becomes “exceptionally complex and challenging.”

That’s when the real fighting in Korea could begin.
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Man, is there anything that makes a person feel as fundamentally good about the collective experience of humanity than a really well-designed Lego model? I doubt it. This model of an original Mini may be Lego's best iconic vintage car set yet.

Previous Lego kits have been for the original Beetle (especially challenging, given the Beetle's curves and the Lego brick's brickishness), the Microbus (much more suited to Lego bricks), and they appear to be keeping with the iconic economy car theme with this British Racing Green Mini, complete with racing stripes and fog lamps.

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The basic Mini shape lends itself well to Legoization, and this one is even a Mini Cooper. If you don't trust the little badge, you can verify the Cooper-status by looking at the hood, which has an engine that even has the twin air cleaners of the dual side-draft SUs of the actual car. That's a nice touch.

This thing has more nice touches than a night with a masseuse: a flip down trunk lid that reveals a removable picnic basket and blanket, a rear fog light, spare tire under the boot floor, plaid-pattern seats, a removable roof, and so much British charm you better put down a drop cloth if there's anything around it you don't want all britcharmed.

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It'll be available August 1, and these sorts of kits tend to be pricey, so start planning your low-level smash-and-grabs now.
Earlier today we brought you word that one LSU offensive lineman would be (controversially) returning to the Tigers. Now there’s word of a loss at the same position group.

The university has confirmed that Jonah Austin (pictured, No. 71) has decided to take his leave of the football program and transfer to an undetermined location. No reason for the decision to leave was given, although a search for a better opportunity at playing time would be a good place to start.

If Austin were to end up at another FBS institution, he’d be eligible to play in 2015 as a graduate transfer.

Austin was a three-star member of LSU’s 2011 recruiting class who was rated as the No. 58 tackle in the country. He did not see any game action his first two seasons in Baton Rouge, then played in a total of 12 games the past two years — five in 2014, seven in 2013.

As was the case each of the past two seasons, the 6-6, 330-pound Austin was slated for a backup role in 2015.
A clown urges passersby to sign a petition calling for the retirement of Ronald McDonald as a mascot for the fast-food chain. The demonstrators, organized by Corporate Accountability International, claim McDonald's uses the corporate mascot to market unhealthy, fatty foods to children. UPI/Brian Kersey | License Photo

HYATTSVILLE, Md., July 23 (UPI) -- Nearly a third of American children and adolescents aged 8 to 15 years misperceive their weight, according to a new CDC study. The majority of that 30 percent chunk are obese and overweight children who don't see their weight as an issue.

The study, conducted and published by researchers at CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, found that 76 percent of overweight boys and girls believe they are "about the right weight," while about 42 percent of obese kids consider themselves about right.

Although new evidence suggests obesity rates among kids has leveled off in recent years, the problem is still prevalent and the health risks more and more apparent.

"I am seeing people younger and younger coming into my office with osteoarthritis from weight," explained Dr. Daniel Neides, director of medicine at the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. "We weren't learning about kids with these problems when I was in medical school."

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The CDC study found minority children and those from poorer backgrounds -- demographic groups with higher rates of adult obesity -- were more likely to misjudge their weight. The evidence suggests kids with obese parents may be more likely to misperceive their own weight issues.

"As our country gets heavier, children don't necessarily see it as abnormal," Neides, who was not involved with the CDC study, told TIME.

Neda Sarafrazi, a nutritional epidemiologist with NCHS and the report's lead author, told NPR that a child's proper perception of his or her weight is important for inspiring behavioral changes -- like eating healthier and getting more exercise. "Children who don't have a correct perception of their weight don't take steps to lose weight," she said.

But Marlene Schwartz, a psychologist and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, warns against the dangers of labeling. "Shame is a terrible motivator," she said. Schwartz thinks education and encouragement are more effective at inspiring healthy change than ensuring kids' weight issues are properly categorized and labeled.

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A searcher walks through the debris of a deadly mudslide in Oso, Wash. At least 18 people have been confirmed dead. Up to 30 more are probably entombed in a thick gray muck, swallowed by the land, perhaps never to be seen again.

March 29, 2014 A searcher walks through the debris of a deadly mudslide in Oso, Wash. At least 18 people have been confirmed dead. Up to 30 more are probably entombed in a thick gray muck, swallowed by the land, perhaps never to be seen again. Elaine Thompson/AP

People are still unaccounted for after a March 22 massive landslide in rural northwest Washington state killed at least 18 people, authorities said.

People are still unaccounted for after a massive landslide in rural northwest Washington state killed at least 16 people and forced evacuations of the area because of fears of flooding, authorities said.

People are still unaccounted for after a massive landslide in rural northwest Washington state killed at least 16 people and forced evacuations of the area because of fears of flooding, authorities said.

LoAnna Langton saw the mountain move.

It roared. It shook. It tossed aside trees — 100 at a time, she said — as it tumbled in an avalanche of mud and rock toward her back door. It moved so fast she immediately gave up any hope of surviving. Langton gathered the children and hugged them close, so they would be buried in the same spot. “I just knew,” she said, “we were going to die.”

But Washington state’s deadliest natural disaster since the 1980 Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption — and one of the worst in a century — came to a miraculous stop in Langton’s back yard. Elsewhere in her small rural town of Darrington, residents were killed in a variety of ways: Some were swept off a highway in their cars, others were crushed by huge mud balls that demolished everything in their path, and many simply disappeared.

At least 18 people have been confirmed dead, and up to 30 more are likely entombed in a thick gray muck, swallowed by the land, perhaps never to be seen again.

For two tiny logging towns — Darrington’s population is 1,400 and Oso’s is 180 — the death on such a wide scale is unimaginable. Bogged down by relentless rain that continued Saturday, workers have failed to unearth many bodies, all but assuring that the landscape will be preserved in the short term as a mass graveyard.

Nearly every adult in this part of Snohomish County, a patchwork of little towns about 50 miles north of Seattle, knew someone who died or knows someone close to them. It is a tightknit community of loggers who earn low-wages in jobs cutting timber, and wealthy people, some of them retirees, who built dream homes on emerald hills with scenic views of the Cascades, near a river teeming with steelhead and salmon.

But some are now questioning whether many of the homes should have been built at all in the valley below a hillside that commonly shifts, sending mud raining down about once a decade. At least four new homes have been built since the last major landslide muddied the valley eight years ago.

The Snohomish County officials who control land use permits asserted last week that there was no way of knowing a giant mudslide would ever happen there.

In fact, the area was primed for just such an extraordinary event, according to geologist Daniel J. Miller, who twice surveyed the area for local Native American tribes who rely on the river’s health for fishing and for the Army Corps of Engineers. He wrote in his 1999 report that the Hazel Landslide, as the mountain is known, was constantly shifting, experiencing landslides and would one day suffer “a catastrophic failure.”

“This landslide moves every year when it gets wet, and pieces fall off,” said Miller, a consultant in Seattle, in a telephone interview Friday.

It was a nightmare waiting to happen.

An ancient glacier is jutting out of the mountain, making its flat plateau unstable, Miller said. The Stillaguamish River was eroding it from below. Rows of conifer trees that helped to mitigate erosion by sucking water through their roots and releasing it into the atmosphere were chopped down by loggers. Rain fell on the bald spots they left, drenching dirt and sand, making the mountain even more precarious.

March 2014 has been a ­record-breaker, the wettest in Seattle’s history.

Miller realized his warning was not heeded when he visited the site following a major landslide in 2006 that did not do nearly as much harm. He could not believe what he saw.

“There was new construction,” he said. “The sound of hammering competed with the sound of [destabilized] trees snapping after the mudslide. I can’t believe that someone wanted to build their home there. It was a very bad idea.”

Charity Prueher, 41 and raised in Oso, said homeowners rarely mentioned the slides. When they did, the coursing mud was considered a small disruption, more of an annoyance than a major problem.

“They’re so content with the beautiful place where they live, they don’t think anything would happen,” Prueher said.

Prueher said she helped clear debris from the 2006 mudslide when she was a volunteer firefighter. The thought that another slide could come that was far worse never occurred to her.

“It was nothing compared to this,” she said. State geologists estimated the volume of the March 22 slide at about 7 million cubic yards, covering an area equal to 545 football fields and six feet deep in parts.

As Prueher bowled with friends Thursday at Rocket Alley Bar and Grill in Arlington, the largest town nearby, reality sank in. “I’ve been over this in my head many times in the last five days,” Prueher said. “I know close to 20 people who are missing and haven’t been found.”

That includes a family of four who own a store across from the school where Prueher works. When she thought of the family’s two little boys, laughing and playing outside in the spring, her eyes started welling with tears.

“I know I’m never going to hear them laughing again,” she said.

Then she caught herself. “You should always have hope,” she said. But her expression reflected the grim reality that has washed over this county. She feels deep down that all the missing are dead, but “I can’t bring myself to say it out loud.”

After a tragedy writ large, disbelief and grief often turn to anger and a demand for accountability. Already, some engineers have criticized local and state officials for failing to recognize the dangers of development on the mountain.

David Montgomery, a professor of geology at the University of Washington, said questions must be asked, but he is not sure blame is deserved.

Predicting mudslides is like forecasting the weather or an earthquake, he said. The science is not exact.

Montgomery praised Miller, a colleague, because his 1999 prediction appears prophetic in hindsight. But Miller had no way of knowing when his prediction would come true, and he did not take the added step of estimating where debris would flow when the slide happened.

A report such as that might have gotten the attention of policymakers, he said. And then again, it might not have.

Geologists have recorded landslides around Seattle for generations, but dire warnings about shaky ground in their reports are not always greeted as good news. It can hurt homebuilding and businesses that generate tax income.

Regardless of who is to blame, Montgomery said, the state and other stakeholders must do whatever is needed to better understand the geology of its mountains and hills. “We have to use that information to identify the true hazard areas and run-out zones,” where the cascading debris is likely to go.

When the mountain began to move on an ordinary Saturday morning across the Stillaguamish River, it sounded “like a 747 jet was directly overhead,” said Langton, 30.

She was feeding her baby when it started. Her kids playing outdoors yelled for her to come out. Right away, she knew something was weird.

“There was this gray cloud . . . and then I saw it taking out trees 100 at a time,” she said. “I started screaming for my kids to get out of there. I’m screaming, ‘It’s a mudslide!’ ”

Within minutes, the roar was gone, and Langton opened the back door.

“I looked out on complete devastation,” she said. “I heard two ladies shouting for help. I heard another voice screaming, ‘Help.’ I couldn’t see him. I said, ‘Sir, could you raise your arms so I can see you?’ He said he only had one arm. The other one was just hanging there.”

She helped rescue them. Now she lives in a basement of a friend’s home, because her house is flooded. Her husband, Kris, is among the volunteers slogging through the mud in the pelting rain and wind to find his neighbors. He rarely talks about what he sees.

“We’re a little logging community,” she said. “There are so many missing, so many dead. We definitely feel God protected us. My neighbor’s house is gone. My husband’s out there digging for bodies.”

Richard Johnson in Oso and Julie Tate and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
By: Laura Meyers

You know that one neighbor that always gets their mail in a dangerously short bath robe? And that other neighbor that you avoid because he’s a talker and if you say hi, you’re stuck for hours? And those other pesky neighbors that shoot you if your dog takes a dump in their yard? Oh, wait.

A Florida man spent Father’s Day in the hospital after being shot over some dog poop.

Jose Rey was walking his dog home Saturday night when the pup started to drop a load in neighbor’s yard, and the neighbor, Omar Rodriguez, was not having any of that shit.

Neighbors told police that the two men began arguing loudly and Rodriguez told police that Rey threatened to return and fight him.

Moments after the men had retreated, Rodriguez told police that he spotted what appeared to be a shiny object in Rey’s hand. So he went to his car and retrieved a gun from his glove compartment.

He then pointed the gun at Rey, and shot him in the stomach and spinal cord.

The police report says Rodriguez also threatened to shoot Rey’s wife, Lissy, when she ran over to help her husband.

Neighbor’s aren’t surprised to see this kind of violence from Rodriguez, however.

“He did not like anyone walking on his sidewalk. He considered it his; and if you went by, you were able to become a victim of his aggressiveness,” one neighbor told reporters.

Rey, a father of two, remains in critical condition and has already undergone two surgeries.

Rodriguez was arrested and faces charges of second-degree attempted murder and aggravated assault.

A GoFundMe account has been set up to help the Rey family with medical expenses.

Until then, I say we march to Rodriguez’s house armed with our pups and have every single one of them take a crap in his yard.
New Zealand drug-trafficking accused Sharon Armstrong has admitted she knew of a secret package hidden inside her suitcase, but insists she believed it was nothing more than confidential papers.

Ms Armstrong, 54, a former Maori Language Commission deputy chief executive, was arrested on April 13 after Buenos Aires Airport police allegedly found 5kg cocaine hidden in her suitcase.

Ms Armstrong has said she did not know about the drugs and was tricked by a man she met online.

She is being held in a medium-security women's detention centre in Ezeiza, about 30km southwest of Buenos Aires.

She made a private court appearance on Thursday, where Judge Daniel Petrone ruled he would proceed with a full investigation court appearance, dashing any hopes of an early release.

Yesterday she told the Herald on Sunday an online boyfriend who lives in London, who she had been dating for six months, tricked her into being a drug mule.

"He said that it was documents and a contract. I don't know any more about it and I didn't ask. I just thought it was really important and that the contract was worth a lot of money."

Armstrong refused to say how she came into possession of the suitcase, but it was understood the switch was made with the case she brought from New Zealand just before she attempted to board a British Airways flight to London on April 13.

She said she did not notice the 5kg of cocaine.

If convicted, Ms Armstrong faced at least eight years behind bars.

Speaking to NZPA from jail last week, Ms Armstrong said she needed help but was reluctant to talk about her case because she feared for her safety.

"I'm just a little bit concerned that this might be a lot bigger. I've never been involved in anything like this ever before."

She refused to name the man who she said scammed her.

"I'm not wanting to protect him, but I'm not prepared to name any names for fear of any retribution."

Ms Armstrong said reports she was carrying four driver's licences when arrested were wrong.

She told NZPA she had three licences -- New Zealand, Australian, and Cook Islands -- with her at the time.

She said the Australian licence was for when she visited family, and the $10 Cook Islands licence had expired.

Staff from the New Zealand embassy in Buenos Aires had visited her in prison and had given her a Spanish dictionary, magazines and writing paper so she could write a journal.
(AP Photo/David Goldman) Jeff Ploussard waves an American flag during a rally protesting the NRA's annual convention in Atlanta on April 29, 2017.

We are in the midst of what many pundits call the “Trump era,” but in fact most Americans neither like nor agree with President Trump, as Tuesday’s election results strongly suggest. Since June, Trump’s job approval ratings have hovered between 33 percent and 40 percent, according to the Gallup poll. This is lower than any other president’s approval rating at this point in his presidency. Nine months into the “Trump era”, 65 percent of Americans say he has accomplished “not much” or “little or nothing,” according to a Washington Post-ABC News survey.

A national poll conducted in October asked Americans to name the first word that comes to mind when they think of Trump. The most popular words were “strong,” “determined,” and “bold,” followed closely by “arrogant,” “egocentric,” and “narcissist.” The next most popular words were “incompetent” and “unqualified,” with “idiotic,” “ignorant,” and “great” not far behind.

These words—both positive and negative—focus on Trump’s outsized personality, not his policy ideas. But when it comes to key policy areas, polls show that a vast majority of Americans also depart from Trump by leaning left. That lean isn’t generally reflected in Americans’ self-designations, nor is ideological consistency a notable American trait. A new Pew survey found that about one-third of Americans hold both liberal and conservative views, depending on the specific issue. Another Pew report divides Americans into nine categories based on their political and social views, from core conservatives (13 percent) to solid liberals (16 percent). But even those on the extreme right and left ends of the spectrum share some views in common.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January, much attention has focused on how his racist rhetoric toward immigrants and Muslims, disdain for the rule of law, and hostility toward the free press have polluted the nation’s public discourse and given legitimacy to hate groups associated with the “alt-right.”

But the focus on division and bigotry can obscure views that most Americans share, especially when it comes to such matters as economic fairness, protecting the environment, and the drift toward plutocracy. The vast majority of Americans are liberal or progressive when it comes to these matters. Even some Trump supporters, Republicans, and people who call themselves “conservatives” have liberal views on many topics.

Americans are generally upset with widening inequality, the political influence of big business, and declining living standards. Public opinion is generally favorable toward greater government activism to address these and other problems, like climate change and health care.

Most Americans worry that government has been captured by the powerful and wealthy. They want a government that serves the common good. They also want to reform government to make it more responsive and accountable.

The figures cited below come from surveys conducted by Gallup, Pew, and other reputable polling organizations on the key issues facing the nation. These are the most recent national polls on each topic. Most of them are from the past year, although a few go back further. Each poll is hyperlinked so readers can look at the original sources.

The Economy

82 percent of Americans think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington.

69 percent think large businesses have too much power and influence in Washington.

59 percent—and 72 percent of likely voters—think Wall Street has too much power and influence in Washington.

78 percent of likely voters support stronger rules and enforcement on the financial industry.

65 percent of Americans think our economic system “unfairly favors powerful interests.”

59 percent of Americans—and 43 percent of Republicans—think corporations make “too much profit.”

Inequality

82 percent of Americans think economic inequality is a “very big” (48 percent) or “moderately big” (34 percent) problem. Even 69 percent of Republicans share this view.

66 percent of Americans think money and wealth should be distributed more evenly.

72 percent of Americans say it is “extremely” or “very” important, and 23 percent say it is “somewhat important,” to reduce poverty.

59 percent of registered voters—and 51 percent of Republicans—favor raising the maximum amount that low-wage workers can make and still be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, from $14,820 to $18,000.

Money in Politics

96 percent of Americans—including 96 percent of Republicans—believe money in politics is to blame for the dysfunction of the U.S. political system.

84 percent of Americans—including 80 percent of Republicans—believe money has too much influence in politics.

78 percent of Americans say we need sweeping new laws to reduce the influence of money in politics.

73 percent of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

Taxes

80 percent of Americans think some corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

78 percent think some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes.

60 percent of registered voters believe corporations pay too little in taxes.

87 percent of Americans say it is critical to preserve Social Security, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans.

67 percent of Americans support lifting the cap to require higher-income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages.

Minimum Wage

66 percent of Americans favor raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

59 percent favor raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour.

48 percent support raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour. (A survey of registered voters found that 54 percent favored a $15 minimum wage.)

63 percent of registered voters think the minimum wage should be adjusted each year by the rate of inflation.

Workers’ Rights

61 percent of Americans—including 42 percent of Republicans—approve of labor unions.

74 percent of registered voters—including 71 percent of Republicans—support requiring employers to offer paid parental and medical leave.

78 percent of likely voters favor establishing a national fund that offers all workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.

Health Care

60 percent of Americans believe “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”

60 percent of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.”

58 percent of the public favors replacing Obamacare with “a federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.”

64 percent of registered voters favor their state accepting the Obamacare plan for expanding Medicaid in their state.

Education

63 percent of registered voters—including 47 percent of Republicans—of Americans favor making four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free.

59 percent of Americans favor free early-childhood education.

Climate Change and the Environment

76 percent of voters are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about climate change.

68 percent of voters think it is possible to protect the environment and protect jobs.

72 percent of voters think it is a “bad idea” to cut funding for scientific research on the environment and climate change.

59 percent of voters say more needs to be done to address climate change.

Gun Safety

84 percent of Americans support requiring background checks for all gun buyers.

77 percent of gun owners support requiring background checks for all gun buyers.

Criminal Justice

57 percent of Americans believe police officers generally treat blacks and other minorities differently than they treat whites.

60 percent of Americans believe the recent killings of black men by police are part of a broader pattern of how police treat black Americans (compared with 39 percent who believe they are isolated incidents).

Immigration

68 percent of Americans—including 48 percent of Republicans—believe the country’s openness to people from around the world “is essential to who we are as a nation.” Just 29 percent say that “if America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.”

65 percent of Americans—including 42 percent of Republicans—say immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents.” Just 26 percent say immigrants are a burden “because they take our jobs, housing and health care.”

64 percent of Americans think an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities makes the country a better place to live. Only 5 percent say it makes the United States a worse place to live, and 29 percent say it makes no difference.

76 percent of registered voters—including 69 percent of Republicans—support allowing undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children (Dreamers) to stay in the country. 58 percent think Dreamers should be allowed to stay and become citizens if they meet certain requirements. Another 18 percent think they should be allowed to stay and become legal residents, but not citizens. Only 15 percent think they should be removed or deported from the country.

Abortion and Women’s Health

58 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

68 percent of Americans—including 54 percent of Republicans—support the requirement for private health insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control.

Same-Sex Marriage

62 percent of Americans—including 70 percent of independents and 40 percent of Republicans—support same-sex marriage.

74 percent of millennials (born after 1981) support same-sex marriage.

All this should be good news for Democrats. Although public opinion on these issues varies by geography, many voters in GOP-leaning states and House districts share these liberal and progressive views.

Of course, public opinion on its own doesn’t translate into public policy. It has to be mobilized. For example, a vast majority of Americans—and even a majority of gun owners—support background checks for gun purchasers. But the National Rifle Association, of which only 5 percent of all gun owners are members, is better organized, and more passionate and vocal, than the supporters of background checks.

These survey findings should compel Democrats running for Congress and governor next year, and for president in 2020, to promote a bolder progressive policy agenda. To have credibility with voters, Democratic candidates can’t be close to Wall Street. And candidates must be able to explain how these policy ideas translate into improving voters’ lives. Democratic candidates will need to draw a sharp contrast between their views and their GOP opponents’, linking them with the unpopular Trump.

Few Americans call themselves “progressive,” or think they share similar views with citizens of social democracies like Canada, Denmark, and Germany. But on most major issues, Americans lean left. Although Trump, the corporate plutocracy, and the so-called alt-right may think otherwise, the United States is a more decent and democratic society than we give it credit for.
Turkish policeman fined for voluntarily escorting Paris Hilton

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet

REUTERS Photo

An investigation into two police officers who voluntarily escorted U.S. celebrity Paris Hilton without an official order when she was in Turkey last year has been completed. One of the officers has been handed a warning fine, while no legal action has been ruled for the other investigated officer.When Paris Hilton was in Istanbul for a commercial shoot last October, two motorcycle policemen voluntarily escorted her car to a TV studio, before waiting outside the building during the show. Later, they accompanied her from the studio to the hotel.An investigation was launched by the Istanbul Police Department when the incident was revealed.In the investigation, the two officers reportedly said they had decided to voluntarily escort Hilton in order to reflect Turkey’s image well.The disciplinary committee fined one of the officers on charges of acting against instructions.Paris Hilton was in Istanbul to appear in a clothing brand’s advertising campaign with Turkish football star Arda Turan.
DIY Audio Home

The "NuHybrid" Headphone Amp - Hybrid headphone amp using the Korg Nutube

(Note most photos are hyperlinked to full resolution photos).

I've made some updates to the Mouser BOM due to a few items being out of stock for an extended period. The power switch, and two electrolytic capacitors, have been swapped for parts that are compatible and in stock (at least as of today).

This is a hybrid headphone amplifier that uses the Korg Nutube 6P1. It's based somewhat on the original "Millett hybrid" design that I published way back in 2002.

Like the original, this one can be built as an open PCB, mounted into a plastic base, with the parts (and glowing Nutube) exposed for all to see. Of course, you could also package it in a normal case if you wanted to. Also like the original, it uses a low-voltage tube stage to do the voltage amplification, and solid-state circuitry (this time an OPA551 opamp connected as a follower) to drive the current into the headphones.

The tube used here is the new Korg Nutube 6P1. The Nutube is a dual, very low power, directly-heated triode tube. It is built using a process originally used for Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFDs) - that is why you can see a bluish-white glow when the tube is powered up. I've been working with the folks at Korg in Japan for a while with this part, and use it in the Apex Sangaku headphone amplifier. I also arranged with Korg to distribute the 6P1 to DIYers and small OEMs. To that end I created www.nutube.us. You can find additional info on the 65P1 there, including the full datasheet.

The entire thing, including power supply, knob, etc. will cost you about $116. I am basically giving away the PCB for free with a Nutube in order to try and generate some interest in it.

Like the DIY Butte headphone amp, I want this to be a very easy project for somebody who has little electronics experience. To make it as easy as possible, I put together a comprehensive instruction manual, as well as a BOM (parts list) on Mouser's website, so it makes ordering the parts simple. More on that a bit further down the page...

The Circuit

(Download a full size schematic in PDF form)

The input signal comes from RCA jacks, through a volume control pot, and is capacitively coupled into a pair of emitter followers using 2N3904 NPN transiostors. This is needed because the Nutube 6P1 is operated in "class A2" - that is, the control grid is biased slightly positive, so the grid draws a little bit of current when driven. The output of the buffer is coupled using a 10uF capacitor into the Nutube grids. A positive grid bias of 0V to 3.3V, adjustable using trimpots, is applied to the grids through a 33k resistor.

Filament power - which is only 700mV at 17mA per triode - is supplied via 150 ohm dropping resistors from a 3.3V linear regulator (which also supplies the positive grid bias). Note that the regulator WILL get hot - it's normal.

24V is supplied by a standard wall adapter. The plates of the Nutube are loaded with 475k resistors to the positive supply, which is a filtered (by R10 & C11) version of the 24V input.

The plates of the Nutube are directly coupled to a pair of opamp buffers. I used the OPA551 here, because I've had good success using it. Others will work, including the BUF634 open-loop buffer. I found that the OPA551 gave better performance, especially in that it contributed very little high-order harmonic distortion. The opamp output is capacitively coupled to the headphone jack through some large electrolytic capacitors (bypassed with small film caps). In addition, a pair or RCA jacks can be used to get a line output, for use as a preamp.

One addition that is not in the original Millett hybrid is the inclusion of an output muting circuit. This keeps the output disabled for about ten seconds after power-up, eliminating the big "thump" that you would otherwise hear as the output capacitors charged. This circuit is a simple MOSFET to drive the relay coil, and some diodes and an RC circuit on the gate. When the power is turned on, the capacitor on the gate is slowly charged until the gate voltage gets high enough to turn on the MOSFET, which pulls in the relay. When power is turned off, a diode quickly discharges the cap and drops the relay.

The PCB

The PCB is just under 5.5" x 2.7". The size was chosen to fit into one half of a standard plastic box from Serpac.

Construction

Assembly is as simple as soldering all the parts into the PCB.

To make it easier to build, I've put together a complete detailed assembly manual. It has a lot of pictures,. so it's a pretty big (113MB) file (!) It also includes the parts list (BOM) and schematic. Since the details are all in there, I won't repeat them here on the web page.

You can also download the parts list (BOM) by itself in PDF or XLS format.

Parts come from two sources: the PCB and Nutube are sold by me through my eBay store. The rest of the parts can be bought from Mouser or DigiKey.

To make things easier, I have shared a project at Mouser that you can access and pretty much automatically buy all of the parts needed, including the plastic case, knob, and AC adapter. You can edit your cart after loading the project if you want to change anything. To access the shared project, go to http://www.mouser.com/ProjectManager/ProjectDetail.aspx?AccessID=b68a30231c or http://www.mouser.com/Tools/Tools.aspx and enter this access code: b68a30231c

Upgrades

I am often asked what can be done to upgrade the designs that I publish. In this case, there are a couple of upgrades that I will mention right out of the gate. They are also shown in the notes section of the parts list.

One is the volume control pot. Unfortunately, all small (and cheap) volume controls suck. They have lots of channel mismatch, and they are noisy or get nosier with time. The pot I used here is not bad, but it is noisy at the bottom end of travel, which bugs me. So on this PCB I put in pads for the standard (Alps or others) small cheap control, and also a TKD 2CP601. The TKD pot is available from audiophile parts sources, like Parts Connexion. It IS expensive - it costs about $40, which is a lot considering the rest of this entire amplifier will cost about $116 to build. But if you do one upgrade, I would recommend this one. Although it is possible to build it with the standard pot and install the upgrade later, it is painfully difficult to remove the small pot to replace it - if you try it, I would suggest enlist the help of a soldering expert to avoid damaging the PCB pulling it out.

You can also upgrade capacitors - the electrolytic caps I used are pretty good (Nichicon "fine gold" audio electrolytic caps and Wima polyethylene film caps), but you may want to use something else. You can also upgrade the connectors to have gold plating for a few dollars if you want.

You can substitute your favorite opamp or buffer for the OPA551. It needs to support a 24V power supply, and be unity gain stable. Other than that it's up to you.

Although the 2N3904 transistors make surprisingly good followers, it's possible to swap in a JFET like the 2SK170 (or LSK170). If you do that, add a gate stopper resistor to prevent oscillation - 1k in series with the gate terminal works.

Performance & Measurements

In general, the NuHybrid amp performs a lot like the original Millett hybrid amp.

I made no attempt to tweak or trim the gain, so the gain is what you get from the Nutube stage. In this case it gives a voltage gain of about 6x. This seems OK for most applications, though its a little on the high side for IEMs and a few very high sensitivity headphones. Drive capability is limited by the output buffer. With the OPA551 used all headphones that I know of can be driven.

The frequency response is pretty flat. LF response is limited by the coupling caps, both at the input (in the case of high impedance headphones) and at the output (for lower impedance headphones). In any case the LF response is -3dB well below 20Hz, and the HF response drops well over 40kHz:

You can see a 0.5dB difference in level between L and R channels. This is due to gain mismatch between the two halves of the Nutube. I didn't provide a way to trim this, because so far the channel matching has been within 1dB, which is better than the matching of the channels in the volume control pot, and for most people inaudible.

An FFT of the output shows typical single-ended triode harmonic characteristics:

One of the cool things about this amp is that, by tweaking the bias, you can alter whet the harmonic makeup is. You can easily take the line output and feed it into a sound card input, and use a program like Audiotester to look at an FFT of the output. Then you can tweak the bias pots to tune the distortion. This FFT was taken with the bias set to give 11V at the opamp output, which is close to the minimum overall THD.

Speaking of which...

This plot shows THD+N vs. output level. At 1V RMS out (often the point we specify headphone amps), THD is about 0.6%. No, this is NOT a low distortion amplifier - it is very much like a triode amplifier with no NFB (which, in fact, it is). Clipping (5% THD) - if you can call it that, since it is more like gain compression - occurs at about 6V RMS out. Distortion shows a nice gradual rise with output voltage, with the typical noise "hook" at very low levels.

In the frequency domain, the THD is pretty flat. The rise aat high frequency is likely slew rate limiting. But look at the scale - even at 20kHz, the THD only rises form 0.63% to 0.73%.

The Sound

I always hate to try and answer the question, "Yeah, I see the measurements, but what does it sound like?"

The engineer in me will simply say that it sounds like the measurements look!

OK... it sounds like what it is - a single-ended triode amplifier. The characteristics of the Nutube dominate the sound of the amplifier. The solid state parts have such low distortion that they really do not contribute much. Along the same lines, I would say that it sounds a lot like the original "Millett Hybrid" - perhaps slightly more "tubey", especially at high volumes. Using the OPA551 removes a little of the high-order distortion products that were caused by the BUF634 in the original hybrid.

Or... I think it sounds pretty good! I've been sitting here listening to it the entire time I've been writing this web page, through some Sennheiser HD600's. Very pleasing.
BACK UP YOUR SAVE!

So, this is basically my favorite game on the vita!I made this save editor today.(It's in C#, I have never used that before, I'll put the source up on github later when it is cleaner and updated a bit more, don't worry.)Windows only, never thought I would do this, sorry!I want to add inventory/storage editing.I can already do simple stuff, like changing amounts, good for the dlc exp boosts(I will see if I can inject the dlc exp boosts to the save without needing to buy them)We can do cool stuff like having 255 scapedolls (I guess more, it's 16bit), instead of the normal max of 5.When I set scapedolls to FFFF, it didn't get used upon death, so that wasn't good.But stuff like monomates, if you set to FFFF, you can still use them (and the value won't even go down to FFFE)If anyone can have a look at items, how they are stored in the save, please shareI think items are stored in 16 bytes, but I might be wrong.I assumed monomates, dimates, trimates would be together in memory, but no they are spread out... strange.I can edit stuff like gran arts/technique levels, but I will add this stuff to the editor later.Any bugs etc, please tell me.Enjoy
TOKYO — He was celebrated as a prolific musical genius whose compositions appeared in popular video games and the competition routine of a top figure skater in the coming Sochi Olympics. His deafness won him praise as Japan’s modern-day Beethoven.

It turns out his magnum opus was his own masquerade.

On Thursday, Japan learned that one of its most popular musical figures, Mamoru Samuragochi, 50, had staged an elaborate hoax in which someone else had secretly written his most famous compositions, and that he had perhaps even faked his hearing disability.

Across a nation long captivated by Western classical music, people reacted with remorse, outrage and even the rare threat of a lawsuit after Mr. Samuragochi’s revelations that he had hired a ghostwriter since the 1990s to compose most of his music. The anger turned to disbelief when the ghostwriter himself came forward to accuse Mr. Samuragochi of faking his deafness, apparently to win public sympathy and shape the Beethoven persona.

The scandal began on Wednesday, when Mr. Samuragochi publicly confessed that someone else had written his most famous works. These include Symphony No. 1 “Hiroshima,” about the 1945 atomic bombing of his home city, which became a classical music hit in Japan; the theme music for the video games Resident Evil and Onimusha; and Sonatina for Violin, which the Japanese Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi is scheduled to use in his performance in Sochi.
Technology firms have turned several industries on their head. The way people buy books, hail a ride home from the bar or find a room for the night while on vacation have all changed.

And now financial technology or fintech firms are turning their sights on the banking industry, but Canada's big banks aren't going to give up their dominant position without a fight.

Joanna Rotenberg, head of personal wealth management at BMO Financial Group, says the needs of customers are shifting and clients are seeking out digital tools to access and manage their money.

In response, earlier this year the Bank of Montreal launched its SmartFolio investment service, which offers a professionally managed portfolio online for a low fee.

"It's for clients who want support from human professionals," Rotenberg said. "It's not a robot behind the scenes, but people who want to be able to access that digitally versus needing the hand-holding and face-to-face support."

The BMO offering comes as companies like Wealthsimple, Nest Wealth and ModernAdvisor look to take a bite out of the big players by making easy-to-open accounts online and cheaper by using exchange-traded funds.

Rotenberg says it has been more than just digital-savvy millennials opening accounts with the new BMO service, adding that it has attracted the attention of a wide range of clients in both age and amount of savings they have to invest.

"You can't stereotype people in terms of who is interested. It really is about people who are looking for something that they can use on their smartphone, but they are going to get the money management support that they need," she said.

And it isn't just investing where the big banks are fighting off new competitors. Retail banking, long the bedrock of the big banks, is seeing new challengers offering basic banking services to Canadians who have long complained about the fees they pay.

Online banks like EQ Bank, which is backed by Equitable Bank, and Zag Bank, which is supported by Desjardins Group, have launched with promises of lower fees and high interest rates on deposits as well as apps to help people manage their money.

Among the big banks, Scotiabank and its Tangerine brand is the largest player in the online banking business. The former ING Bank of Canada operations, which Scotiabank acquired in 2012, was one of the first online banks in the country.

But the other big banks have also been upping their game in a bid to remain competitive by cutting fees and making it easier to open accounts and manage money online.

The Royal Bank has started offering unlimited free Interac e-transfer payments for personal chequing accounts, while CIBC is offering an account with a flexible fee that varies depending on how many transactions customers make. TD Bank has launched a real-time money management app to track spending habits from eligible TD accounts and credit cards.

Linda Mantia, executive vice-president, digital, payments and cards at RBC, said mobile applications have been a key focus.

"There's very few things that allow you to be more relevant to the client, more convenient to the client, more secure than other channels and obviously incredibly cost-effective," she said.

Royal Bank has recently launched a new version of its RBC Mobile and RBC Wallet apps and revamped the look of its online banking website. A redesign of its online brokerage site is on the way.

Mantia said RBC both works with and competes against fintech companies.

"We're pretty lucky in a lot of ways that we're able to work with some of the smaller players," she said.

"It is a bit win-win for us — to be scared of them, to meet with them, to visit them — because the last thing you want is for people who have always been in banking trying to reimagine banking. You need the stimulus of outsiders."
VRFocus catch up with Justin Ng from Gattai Game, a Singapore based company who have taken their award-winning student videogame previously known as Lurking into virtual reality (VR). This is a first-person mic-enabled sound-based stealth thriller. This narrative single player game uses sound to enable you to see but also allow enemies to hear you. VRFocus has covered this extensively in this preview here.

Inspired by an animation of a young blind girl who taps around her to see they locked down the art style and decided to make a VR game. With two to five hours of gameplay the game will be available for the PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Gattai Game is composed of fresh grad students who have a few more ideas in the pipeline which are both VR and non-VR. VRFocus will keep you up to date of their endeavours. Watch the video below to find out more.
‘Faculty rights and the sufficiency of law students’ education’ at risk

One of the worrisome trends in law-school education is students seeking to avoid uncomfortable areas of the law, particularly sexual assault.

But it was a law professor’s exam question on an uncomfortable area of the body that got him in trouble with his university. As in, 504 days of trouble, and potentially many more.

Howard University is hanging the Sword of Damocles over the head of Reginald Robinson if he ever offends a student again by the content of his legal pedagogy.

The historically black school in Washington, D.C., has yet to respond six months later to a warning letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education about its year-plus Title IX investigation of Robinson (left) for an exam question on groping and drugging involving a Brazilian wax.

Though Robinson’s lawyer said this summer that they “believe we have reached a mutually satisfactory solution” in discussions with the university,” that resolution fell through, FIRE told Howard President Wayne Frederick in a Tuesday letter:

Robinson has now informed us that no agreement was finalized. Accordingly, as he plans to return to teaching next semester, his and other Howard professors’ free speech rights remain threatened. To our knowledge, the unjust sanctions against Robinson remain in place, including the threat of termination for protected expression simply because someone may find it offensive.

The letter from Susan Kruth, staff attorney for FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, is copied to the chair of Howard’s board of trustees, its general counsel, provost and law school dean, as well as the Title IX investigator who investigated Robinson and Title IX coordinator:

Howard’s finding is at odds with the plain language of several written university policies and could chill professors’ teaching of basic legal principles. As a result, it puts at risk both faculty rights and the sufficiency of law students’ education.

Though Howard is private, it has two written policies that on their face apply to Robinson’s classroom conduct. One seems explicitly designed to encompass controversial legal subjects, from the Faculty Handbook, last updated 24 years ago:

Faculty members are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects, but they should be careful not to introduce matter into their teaching that has no relation to their subjects.

Another is less than a year old, directed to the entire community from President Frederick (in response to a political vandalism incident), though it explicitly prioritizes safety over freedom of speech:

Howard University is committed to the principles of free speech, public protest, and inclusivity, even though these ideals may sometimes conflict with one another. However, our commitment to the safety, well-being, and support of the Howard University community remains our highest priority.

Read FIRE’s letter to the university.

MORE: 504-day investigation of law professor for ‘Brazilian wax’ question

MORE: Howard vandalized with ‘Trump plantation’ after DeVos visit

IMAGE: ‘The 40-Year-Old-Virgin’

Read More

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A pictorial look at the career of City's latest recruit

An Italian Under-21 International, Federico joined the Manchester United youth set-up from Lazio in 2007, going on to top the Under-18 scoring charts in his first season at Old Trafford, netting 12 goals in 21 appearances.

A man whose experience defies his tender years, Macheda burst onto the scene as a 17-year-old as he came off the bench against Aston Villa in 2009. 2-1 down at the time, Cristiano Ronaldo grabbed an equaliser for United before the Italian curled home a debut goal in stoppage time to win the match for Sir Alex Ferguson’s title challenging side.

Macheda continued to feature in the United squad that season, scoring his second goal for the club against Sunderland just 46 seconds after taking the field to replace Dimitar Berbatov before being rewarded with his first Barclays Premier League start for United against Middlesbrough that season.

It was a remarkable breakthrough campaign that saw him named the Jimmy Murphy Academy Player of the Year, an award also won by Mats Møller Dæhli, in recognition of his rise to the senior set-up at Old Trafford.

A Champions League debut against CSKA Moscow followed the next season before injury started to hinder his progress in establishing himself as a United first-team regular. He returned to score in a top-of-the-table clash against Chelsea later in that season, with his fourth goal for United coming the following year against Aston Villa.

The following few years saw him look to impress away from Old Trafford as he undertook a series of loan spells away from the club. 2011 saw him return to his native Italy for a spell with Sampdoria before 2012-13 saw him have stints at Queens Park Rangers and VfB Stuttgart.

It was 2013-14 campaign that saw ‘Kiko’ enjoy his most fruitful spell away from his parent club, first scoring three goals in two stints at Championship Doncaster Rovers before aiding Birmingham City’s push for survival with ten goals in 18 appearances for Lee Clark’s side.

WATCH AN EXCLUSIVE FIRST INTERVIEW WITH FEDERICO MACHEDA ON CARDIFF CITY PLAYER NOW. FOR A TEASER, WATCH THE YOUTUBE VIDEO BELOW.
The number of patients waiting to be admitted for operations or other treatment in June was a quarter of a million higher than in the same month last year, official figures show.

Labour claimed that overflowing accident and emergency departments and cuts to nursing jobs were to blame for the figures, which were published by NHS England on Thursday.

But the Department for Health insisted that average waiting times are remaining stable and said demand for services had increased significantly since 2010.

The figures come after a report by Monitor, the NHS regulator, which warned that some trusts were cancelling non-emergency procedures to deal with a higher load of emergency cases, resulting in longer waiting times.

The "referral to treatment" data reveals that waiting lists, which have hovered around 2.5 million patients in recent years, reached 2.88 million in June, the highest level since May 2008.

However, the figures also show that the median waiting time for treatment is currently 5.7 weeks – the same duration as in June 2012.

A&E departments have been under growing strain with ministers blaming a rapid rise in demand for emergency care, but opponents have claimed the introduction of the 111 non-emergency phone line and restructuring of the NHS have made the problem worse.

Andrew Gwynne MP, shadow health minister, said: “This year, thousands of extra patients are facing the agony of a long-awaited operation being cancelled as overflowing A&E departments need more and more hospital beds.

“David Cameron wasted £3 billion on an NHS reorganisation that took the focus off patient care. At the same time, almost five thousand nursing jobs were axed and cuts to older people's care budgets left thousands more vulnerable people arriving at A&E."

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "The NHS is performing well – it is treating over a million patients a month.

"But despite this average waiting times are low and stable and the number of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks is nearly 55,000 lower than in May 2010, and the number of people waiting for more than a year to start treatment is the lowest it has ever been."
'Maturity Is Greatly Overrated': The Conversation With Ronda Rousey

UFC Champion Ronda Rousey explains why she doesn't like calling herself a "role model." NEXT VIDEO

Ed Mullholland for ESPN Who could doubt Ronda Rousey's seriousness on press day for UFC 184?

In this signature espnW series, we sit down for a candid Q&A with a remarkable person. Our aim is to cover topics high and low, deep and less so, to present a fresh look at folks we think we know and meet some others we wish we'd known all along. Welcome to The Conversation.

Caution: Adult themes and language ahead.

***

Who: Ronda Rousey, undefeated women's UFC bantamweight champion.

Who else: Her best friend, Marina Shafir.

Where: Threadgill's Restaurant, Austin, Texas.

When: March 14, 2015.

Ronda Rousey: I think we should have a prickly pear margarita. I worked hard the last couple days. I deserve it.

Allison Glock: I wholeheartedly agree. What size?

RR: [side-eyeing] Uh, large. I'm f------ Ronda Rousey. [Laughs.] I'm officially changing my name to "F------ Ronda Rousey."

WAITRESS: Can we get your drinks?

RR: I want a prickly pear margarita! Ten ounce. And get some top-shelf tequila.

WAITRESS: It only comes one way. Can I just see your ID?

RR: Here's my bartender's license. Do you want to see that?

AG: You have to have a license to bartend?

RR: In California, yeah. As soon as I turned 21, I was bartending. I learned so much from the job, social lessons I didn't learn from judo. Especially about doing press.

AG: How's that?

RR: As a bartender, I am having pretty much the identical conversation over and over all day, but I still have to be present and genuine with every single response and try to get the other person to like me because that's what gets you tips. And really, how is that different from media? I did an appearance with fans recently, and people were like, "Are you getting tired of this?" And I'm thinking, "No, this is the same as Mother's Day at Gladstones. Instead of giving out drinks, I'm giving out signed pictures."

AG: You worked at Gladstones in Malibu?

RR: I wore the red polo and the blue hat. The khakis. And then they made me start wearing skirts. It was bulls---. I got skorts instead. I wasn't about to be working in a skirt.

AG: You've evolved from not caring about clothes at all to being somewhat into fashion.

RR: Actually, my coach started it. All the guys at my gym are Armenian and extremely well dressed. I was rolling in looking like a bum, mostly because I was wearing clothes I'd had since I was 17. I owned, like, four outfits, and they weren't in the best of shape. So my coach said, "Ronda, you have to dress up a little more. Put on makeup in the morning. Make it a habit." When I started making a bit of money, I got better clothes, and now I'm sponsored by Buffalo David Bitton. I'm wearing it right now [points to her gray, perforated T-shirt and camel-colored leather jacket].

Rod Mar for ESPN Rousey does interviews in Los Angeles ahead of her last fight, which lasted all of 14 seconds.

AG: Yours is the first fashion sponsorship anyone in MMA has ever gotten.

RR: Yes! And now that I'm into it, I look at fashion all the time. You know, "Who are you wearing?" I kinda feel bad because sometimes the worlds clash. The last fight, at the staredown on press day, I was wearing this white, leather Alexander McQueen dress, and I was going to post it, but then I worried maybe I shouldn't because people might think that I'm not serious about MMA.

AG: I don't think there is any risk of that. Besides, it would be a bit of a double standard given someone like Conor McGregor is such a dandy. No one is accusing him of not being a serious athlete.

As a bartender, I am having pretty much the identical conversation over and over all day, but I still have to be present and genuine with every single response and try to get the other person to like me because that's what gets you tips. And really, how is that different from media? Ronda Rousey

RR: No kidding, right? Ultimately, though, I didn't tag the photo. I was like, "Alexander doesn't pay me. Screw it." I do get gifted some things. I have a stylist now because I've got several trips coming and I don't have that many outfits. A lot of my best clothes I buy at photo shoots because I don't have time to shop. I actually bought that McQueen dress from the ESPN 15th anniversary photo shoot. I bought it from you guys, so thank you for making me look really hot.

AG: You're welcome. [She puts on an oversized trucker cap the restaurant just gave her, snaps a photo.] That looks pretty hot, too.

RR: [Makes a goofy face] I've got a really good hat head. But my hair is still done, so the struggle is real. Do I cover the amazing hair? Or do I show how great my head is in hats?

AG: You gotta go back and forth. You gotta mix it up.

RR: I gotta gesture with it and take it on and off. [She does just that, starts laughing.]

AG: Are you fussy about your food when you're not training?

RR: I try to keep healthy-ish, but I'm so on point when I'm in camp that having a vegetable wrap would actually only be healthy-ish because of the wrap on it.

AG: The wrap is the sin? That's a lot of sacrifice.

RR: Yeah. Like last night, I got the fried calamari and I took all the bread off before dipping it, and that was my treat. And I had one little rip of the cotton candy because I thought maybe gourmet cotton candy would be different. It wasn't. And I ate all the raspberries off the desserts. Everyone else had dessert. I ate the raspberries. And I wouldn't even do that during camp. Let me show you what my training diet looks like. [Takes out her phone, pulls up a sample menu.] Here we go. 8 a.m.: Two teaspoons oat bran, two teaspoons chia seeds, two teaspoons hemp seeds; 10 a.m.: Train; 11:45: Post-exercise smoothie; 12 p.m.: Farmer's scramble: one whole egg, plus two egg whites, two sides of turkey bacon; 4 p.m.: Snack: one apple, one-fourth cup raw almonds, one-fourth cup raw cashews; 6 p.m.: Train. Post-exercise smoothie, da, da, da. Before bed: Chamomile tea. Everything's got an hour, an amount, everything.

AG: And you follow it to the letter?

Esther Lin/Getty Images No one puts more pressure on Ronda Rousey than Ronda Rousey.

RR: Yeah. And instead of vitamins, I have this giant shake twice a day, so it's all fresh vegetables and fruits: a whole beet, a whole apple, two carrots, four strawberries, one cup of blueberries, two handfuls of red grapes, one whole lemon, one handful of spinach, one handful of kale, one-fourth handful of parsley, two stalks of celery, two tablespoons of hemp seeds, two tablespoons of chia seeds, one tablespoon of coconut oil, one chard leaf, no stem.

AG: Just the one chard leaf.

RR: [Laughs.] Just the one, yeah. Listen, after I stopped competing in judo, before I began fighting MMA, I partied hard. I felt like I'd been training my whole life and missed out on the whole good-time club scene.

AG: How long did that debauchery last?

RG: Long enough. It ended after being on the other side of the bar. Bartending took the romanticism out of drinking. Any time I saw a white chick go, "Woo!", it was not hot. There is nothing sexy about a drunk girl. You really don't know how dumb you look.

AG: Speaking of letting off steam, do you dance or sing?

RR: I'm a terrible singer, but I'm not shy about it. I'm shy about dancing.

AG: Do you do karaoke?

RR: I sang karaoke in Japan, but they didn't have the right song. I've always wanted to sing "Take Me Home Tonight," but I've never gotten the chance.

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

AG: Wow, if only we had more time. Do you prefer a shower or bath?

RR: A bath. I have a candle permanently on my Jacuzzi, because I love me some candles.

AG: Cat person or dog person?

RR: Dog. My dog, Mochi, she changed my life.

AG: In what way?

RR: Knowing I was responsible for another living thing. When I got her, I decided even if I was a loser, my dog didn't deserve to suffer for it. So though I was bartending and working three jobs, I made sure I woke up extra early in the morning to drive her to doggy day care. The first $35 of my shift went to Mochi. Even when I was eating Top Ramen noodles, I bought her top-shelf dog food because it wasn't her fault that I was broke. There were times when I lived in my car, and I was like, "I have a dog, I need to ..."

AG: You lived in your car?

RR: For a week or so once, yeah, after judo, before MMA. And I realized I couldn't let that situation ever happen again because what would my dog do? It put pressure on me to succeed when I was responsible for another living thing.

Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images Rousey attends the 2014 premiere of "The Expendables 3" in Los Angeles.

AG: You seem to put pressure on yourself regardless.

RR: Pretty much. I figure, what's the worst that could happen?

AG: You could have projectile diarrhea in front of everyone you respect.

RR: Yeah, I guess. But compared to soldiers fighting wars or families in refugee camps, that's really not a big deal, is it?

AG: What do you wish you could change about yourself?

RR: A lot of things. I wish I could cook. I wish I could speak Spanish. I want to speak Spanish and Armenian and Russian.

AG: What is your biggest vice?

RR: Buffalo wings.

AG: What is the last television show you binge-watched?

RR: [The HBO documentary series] "Vice." I watched all of the first two seasons. And I like Bill Maher a lot.

AG: Have you been on his show?

RR: No, I'm not that cool. There's a lot of pressure on that panel. Some people, they just bomb. I don't want to look dumb in front of Bill Maher. [Pauses for a beat.] Is he single?

AG: I think he is aggressively single.

I realized I couldn't let that situation ever happen again because what would my dog do? It put pressure on me to succeed when I was responsible for another living thing. Ronda Rousey, on living in her car

RR: Really? He's got that Richard Gere, grey-haired sexy look.

AG: I noticed you were killing time watching Ryan Gosling .gifs earlier.

RR: Mmm, we do love us some Ryan Gosling.

AG: Why?

RR: I don't know. Why is a margarita delicious? What can I say? It just f------ is, man.

AG: Tell me a bit about your romantic history.

RR: Any guy that I've ever really been into, I never liked him at first. I grow into liking people. And I'm not into guys from afar. People are always asking me about my celebrity crush, and I'm like, I don't know. I can say people are cute. Brad Pitt is a sculpture of a man, but I'm not squealing "Oh my God!" because I don't know him. I have to know somebody to have a crush on him.

AG: What about other relationships? What kind of friend are you?

RR: I don't know. [She turns to her best friend, sitting nearby.] Chime in, Marina. What kind of friend am I?

Marina Shafir: Very loyal.

RR: Ferociously loyal, almost to a fault. Do I have makeup all over my face?

MS: No.

AG: Are you a birthday rememberer?

RR: No. To be honest, I don't know some of my family members' birthdays.

MS: The only reason she knows my birthday is because it's her lucky number.

AG: What's your lucky number?

RR: Fourteen.

AG: How did you guys meet?

RR: Judo.

MS: You didn't like me.

RR: I liked you.

MS: No, you didn't. I complimented you on your Sponge Bob laces, on all sorts of things. Every time I tried to speak with you, you were a b----.

RR: I just had a b----- demeanor. Listen, the first time she tried to talk to me, I was listening to my music, and I'm really into my music. And she taps me and says, "That's Rage Against the Machine." And I'm like, "You made me stop listening to Rage Against the Machine so you could tell me that I was listening to Rage Against the Machine?"

MS: Such a b----.

Josh Hedges/Getty Images Rousey had an image epiphany at age 22.

AG: How old were you? How many years ago?

RR: We were both 13.

AG: How did you get past that rocky beginning?

RR: It was at a judo tournament. Everybody left to go eat after we all made weight, and I don't know why, we were on a sugar high and I was like, "Hey Marina, you want to see something I've never shown anybody before?" And I twerked for her, before twerking was a thing. Way back in 2005.

MS: We've been like sisters ever since.

AG: Is your friendship the kind that you give advice to each other?

MS: Only about boys. We're like, "No, no, no! He should not be doing that to you. No, no, no!"

RR: "Girrrl, you can do a whole lot better than that!" I've definitely had worse boyfriends than her.

AG: Do you have bad taste in men?

RR: Well, I'm single, so ...

AG: Would you rather date a bald guy or a short guy?

RR: I would rather date bald and tall.

It's how I was raised, to have a place and a purpose and know everything happens for a reason. I have faith that even missed opportunities are a blessing in disguise, and the very worst things that have happened in my life have resulted in the best things that have ever happened in my life. Ronda Rousey, on faith

AG: What movie have you watched more than any other movie?

RR: I think it's a four-way tie between "Fight Club," "The Fifth Element," "Pulp Fiction" and "When Harry Met Sally."

AG: What's the worst advice you've ever been given?

RR: Don't do MMA? [Laughs.] Thanks, Mom!

AG: How important is faith in your life?

RR: Every single good thing in my life happened because I had faith that there was goodness coming for me. It's how I was raised, to have a place and a purpose and know everything happens for a reason. I have faith that even missed opportunities are a blessing in disguise, and the very worst things that have happened in my life have resulted in the best things that have ever happened in my life.

AG: Does nature play a part in your outlook?

RR: Yes. I'm a big Southern California beach girl.

AG: What is it about the ocean that speaks to you?

RR: Being able to feel small.

AG: How do you imagine your old age?

RR: I never want to put a perfect body into the ground, so I'm going to wear my body out. What do I need two perfect knees at age 60 for? I picture myself as one of those floating heads in a tank like in "Futurama" because my body quit.

AG: Are you an organ donor?

RR: Yes.

AG: What virtue do you think is overrated?

RR: Maturity. Maturity is greatly overrated. That's one of my mom's favorite lines.

AG: When did she start telling you that?

RR: As a kid, so I wouldn't take myself too seriously. What is that Dr. Seuss quote? "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." I think that's what she wanted me to take away from that.

Ed Mulholland for ESPN Did we mention her last fight lasted 14 seconds?

AG: And did you?

RR: As I got older I learned to be comfortable enough to act like myself. It took awhile to gain the confidence in every setting. I was extremely introverted and shy growing up. A lot of people are surprised to hear that since I'm so over the top now.

AG: Were you the kind of kid that would sit back and observe?

RR: I didn't talk coherently until was 6, so I was forced to be an observer. Not having that many words, I learned a lot of patience.

AG: How important is patience in your career? I would imagine it's pretty critical.

RR: One of my problems fighting is I am sometimes too impatient, and that's something I've had to really train. One day my coach made me hit the bag for 30 rounds so that I would learn patience.

AG: What is your idea of perfection?

RR: I like having a day where I can balance everything. My idea of paradise is to wake up in the morning, have coffee, go surfing or skimboarding, get in the ocean somehow. Then eat breakfast and go train, come home, chill with my dog and my friends and a big plate of buffalo wings and some sort of dessert a la mode. It's got to be hot and cold. I need two temperatures in my dessert.

AG: Do you think it's a good time or a tough time to be a woman in this culture?

RR: I think it's the best time yet, because it's always improving.

AG: How do you feel about how women are treated on social media?

I'm an ovarian goldmine. I can't waste these genes. Ronda Rousey, on wanting to have kids

RR: It can be creepy and weird. Personally, I wasn't allowed to have a cellphone until I was 16. I think having a cellphone becomes a social crutch, especially during those uncomfortable puberty years. If I had a kid, I would try to keep them out of social media until they were at least in their teens.

AG: Do you want to have kids some day?

RR: Definitely. I'm an ovarian goldmine. I can't waste these genes.

AG: Would you rather lose an arm or a leg?

RR: Arm.

AG: Would you rather be stronger than you are now or smarter than you are now?

RR: Smarter. I'm strong enough.

AG: Who do you want most to make proud?

RR: My mother. She lives on the border of Santa Monica and Venice. My sister and their family live nearby, too. We have the most entertaining family dinners. There is no topic off the table, and no one ever gets offended. It's a wit competition every time.

AG: Is everything a competition for you?

RR: Yes. Notice that I finished my drink first. Not an accident. Worse is, if I feel like I'm in a competition that I'm not going to win, I'm not playing. If people want to play Monopoly and I don't think I'm taking the victory, I'm like, "F--- it." I'm either in it to win or I'm not in it at all.

AG: What's the biggest lie you've ever told yourself?

RR: That I would be happy bartending for the rest of my life. I really tried to convince myself of that. That it would be great for me. But it just wasn't. I was meant for something else. And now I see why I felt that way.

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill Rousey, not one for team sports, is a big fan of Serena Williams.

AG: Did you ever have body image issues?

RR: Huge body image issues growing up. Big time! I absolutely loathed how I looked until I was around 22 years old.

AG: What happened at 22 that changed that trajectory?

RR: I stopped caring. I stopped looking at the scale. After the Olympics I didn't weigh myself. I ate as much as I wanted all the time. The feeling of having my belly full was something I was compelled to do, and once I got that out of my system, I felt like I was able to break my emotional dependency on food.

AG: Conflating food with feelings is a complicated struggle for many women.

If the best thing about your day is what you eat, there's something wrong with your f------ day. Ronda Rousey, on body image

RR: Listen, there's nothing wrong with your discipline or you just because you ate whatever. But if the best thing about your day is what you eat, there's something wrong with your f------ day. What changed for me is I was always thinking I wanted to make my body look a certain way so I would be happy. But when I made myself happy first, then the body came after. It was a journey of self-discovery and trial and error.

AG: When you say you wanted your body to look "a certain way," what was the image in your head?

RR: The image in my head was the Maxim cover girl. In the end, instead of making my body resemble one of those chicks, I decided to try to change the idea of what a Maxim chick could look like.

AG: And then, in September 2013, you were on the cover.

RR: I wasn't conventional, but apparently, I was acceptable. [Laughs.]

AG: Do you have a soundtrack for your life?

RR: Right now, my song is "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. That's my walk-out song. When I was going to the 2004 Olympics I was constantly playing to "Waiting" by Green Day. I was 17 and I was listening to that song and picturing myself surprising everyone by winning the gold. Didn't pan out that way. The most-played song on my iPod is "Strangers In The Night," a cover by Cake.

AG: Really?

RR: Yeah. It's a good driving song. No one would think that would be my song.

AG: It's pretty emo. Does anything scare you outside of your career? Spiders? Heights?

RR: My only fear is failure. I like spiders. I used to collect bugs when I was a kid. I love heights. I've been bungee jumping a bunch of times. I would love to go parachuting. I'm cool with snakes. I can hook a rattlesnake. I've done it before.

AG: What makes you feel out of control?

RR: Drinking too much, which is why I barely do it now. It's like a once-a-year event, and I always regret it. I'll start to feel like, "Ahhhh, let's go dancing tonight, yes, woo!" I'll do the "white-girl woo," and it's not good. Alcohol is bad, kids. Stop at buzzed. "Stop at buzzed" is my mantra.

AG: What about feelings? Do your feelings ever make you feel out of control?

RR: Not out of control, but I won't say I'm a control freak, either. I'm an extremely emotional person and kind of impulsive. I'm calculated in business, impulsive in my life.

Allison Glock/espnW Ronda Rousey, with the self-proclaimed "really good hat head," signs photos for fans at South by Southwest.

AG: What sports do you watch?

RR: Boxing, MMA and tennis. I like individual sports the most. I feel like team sports dilute pressure, and I don't really understand why everyone likes them so much.

AG: What other women do you admire?

RR: Serena Williams, and, of course, my mother. But I love watching Serena. I think she's awesome.

AG: Do you play tennis?

RR: I'm really bad with ball sports. I have been hit in the face with every type of ball.

AG: Are you sure you want to say that?

RR: [Laughs.] I'm serious. Basketball, football, softball, baseball, foosball, pinball, ping-pong ball, rugby ball, cricket ball. They have all hit me in the face.

AG: Why?

RR: I have tiny hands. I can't catch things. I have the smallest hands in the UFC. My hands are smaller than 115-pound girls'. I have the strongest chin and the most tiny, fragile hands.

AG: The bantamweight champion of the world has elf hands?

RR: [Holds up her palms, wrinkles her nose.] Carnie hands.

I was a muscular girl. I never wore make up a single day. I always had my hair up, dressed in baggy clothes because I was embarrassed about how my body looked. Ronda Rousey, on high school

AG: How was high school for you?

RR: I dropped out sophomore year. It was not cool for me. I was far from popular. I got teased a lot.

AG: Teased for what?

RR: I was a muscular girl. I never wore makeup a single day. I always had my hair up, dressed in baggy clothes because I was embarrassed about how my body looked. I was shy. Having cauliflower ears and ringworm are another sure way to get teased.

AG: So you said goodbye to all that and pursued athletics?

RR: I decided to go to the Olympics instead.

AG: Do you believe in destiny?

RR: Definitely.

AG: When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

RR: It depends on the day. Usually, I look in the mirror and ask, "What have you gotten yourself into now?" I will literally ask myself that question. Right before a fight, for example. Or I'll be on a photo shoot, tanned up in a swimsuit. Or say I'm in a trailer on a movie set and I'm in costume. Or a week after a fight, when I've gained a few pounds and can't see the bones in my feet anymore. Then, as I always do, I will stare at the reflection of my marshmallowy face and ask, "What have you gotten yourself into now?"

AG: And what's your answer?

RR: I just shrug and say, "I don't know, but you're here, so you better f------ deal with it, girl."
Overview

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Each module pair has been tested on various motherboards to run at rated speed at timing of 12-15-15-35 2T at 1.65V.

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The New York Islanders will welcome captain John Tavares back to the lineup for their contest against the Montreal Canadiens, head coach Jack Capuano confirmed.

The 25-year-old has missed the Islanders' last three games with what the team deemed "flu-like symptoms," but after taking an optional skate Thursday, he was inserted into the lineup.

Tavares explained the severity of his illness Thursday, saying it rendered him unable to eat until Monday, when he was then forced to try to put on the weight he lost, according to NHL.com's Arpon Basu.

With Tavares returning to the lineup, forward Steve Bernier will draw out.

Bernier comes out with Tavares back in. Capuano very pleased with Bernier's play. — Arthur Staple (@StapeNewsday) November 5, 2015

Despite missing three games, Tavares leads the club in scoring with five goals and 11 points in 10 games.
By Ray Charlston

Several weeks ago, Margaret O’Reilly began seeing a local psychiatrist in her city of Seattle Washington. Dr. Ahmed Abdullah Rahman is a licensed psychiatrist who originally practiced in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He has been practicing psychiatric medicine in the US for more than 10 years. After one session, according to Mrs. O’Reilly, Dr. Rahman stunned her by suggesting that she was suffering from “Disobedient Wife Disorder.”

The treatment for “Disobedient Wife Disorder” (or DWD), which is even more controversial, involves light beatings using a stick called a “miswak.” The punishment is administered by the woman’s husband, along with verbal admonitions from him for his wife to be obedient, or to end her rebellion. The practice is designed, allegedly, not to injure a woman or to harm her, but to shame and humiliate her into compliance. The controversial treatment is allegedly about “Bringing the woman back to her senses and back to reality” according to one booklet on the topic.

“Disobedient Wife Disorder” remains a controversial diagnosis, sparking strong feelings among those on both sides of the issue. Most of the psychiatrists in the West who do accept the existence of DWD are Muslim, and this fact is often cited by Islamophobes and reactionaries. The American Psychiatric Association, as well as the American Psychological Association, both reject the diagnosis. When I began writing this article, Margaret O’Reilly was suing Dr. Rahman for medical malpractice.

According to Mrs. O’Reilly “I have always been progressive and strongly anti-racist. I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my entire body! When I learned that Dr. Ahmed was a devout Saudi Muslim, that he had a special room just for praying in his office, and that the government of Saudi Arabia expelled him from their country for alleged ‘extremist’ activities and associations, I didn’t judge. This has nothing to do with Dr. Ahmed’s religion; this is about discrimination against women and medical malpractice. For a male doctor to tell me that I have “Disobedient Wife Disorder”, and that I require beatings from my husband, is outrageous and intolerable. This isn’t about Islam at all; it’s about male-chauvinism. Islam is a beautiful religion of peace and moderation practiced by millions of people around the world.”

When I asked Dr. Rahman for his comment, responding to Mrs. O’Reilly’s quote, he stated that “I am a devout Muslim. I strongly object and take exception to Mrs. O’Reilly’s statement that my treatment has nothing to do with Islam. Islam fully informs my practice as a doctor, and inshallah (God-Willing), I hope it informs everything I do in this life. I was trying to help her and her husband and family in sincerity as a Muslim psychiatrist. I never had any malicious intent. I believe in the Hippocratic Oath; I will not do any harm. If I failed to warn Mrs. O’Reilly as to her mental sickness, I would be negligent in my responsibilities! She is a very sickly disobedient woman. She needs help very badly. I hope her husband helps her soon.”

When I pointed out that many reputable psychiatrists reject the existence of DWD, Dr. Rahman responded, “Some in the West reject my treatments and advice. As a matter of fact I think most do. The fact is, while most American psychiatrists deny the existence of Disobedient Wife Disorder, they now label homophobia a mental illness! If you think homosexuality is wrong, they say you are mentally ill and need treatment! They say, if you don’t want to ‘experiment’ with homosexual activity, you cannot know that you wouldn’t enjoy it! These people are sick and evil, not me as a Muslim psychiatrist or my practice! They should be sued, not me, by Allah, I swear it!”

I tried very patiently and calmly to explain to Dr. Rahman that homosexuals are born that way, and that it is just as valid, moral and healthy to be homosexual as it is to be heterosexual or any other sexual orientation. Dr. Rahman became enraged, and told me that “Homosexuals will dwell in the fires of hell, so too will all their advocates! There is only one God, Allah, and Muhammed is His Prophet! Get out now, you deviancy defending degenerate! Get out! I won’t let you infect my patients with your satanic mental diseases.” Dr. Rahman then opened the door demanding again that I leave his office. I complied and walked outside.

Reflecting on the day’s events, I wanted to believe that some kind of misunderstanding occurred. Could this all be some sort of cultural or religious misunderstanding or snafu? Is it possible that some Muslims actually believe a husband should command his wife, rather than marriage being an equal partnership, and that if she disobeys, it is ok to hit her? I refused to believe it. No, it has to be a mistranslation or a miscommunication. Islam is a religion of peace and not violence. I vowed to investigate the matter further.

I contacted King Saud University, in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. I spoke with Professor Tariq Aziz at length on the phone. Prof. Aziz explained to me that I had not misunderstood. Disobedient Wife Disorder is an accurate translation of the Arabic name for the condition in question. Beating a rebellious wife with a miswak a small stick, and demanding that she cease her rebellion, is the prescribed treatment. I was stunned. I asked Prof. Aziz how he could possibly consider this practicing medicine. He told me that this treatment has its source in the Hadith, an old collection of alleged sayings of the Prophet Muhammed, handed down orally and then codified into written form.

I read several booklets about Disobedient Wife Disorder before I reached the obvious conclusion. Actually DWD was fairly new. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that DWD was officially classified as a mental disorder by psychiatrists in the Middle East. No doubt, it was under chauvinistic white-colonialist influence. While the idea of punishing a disobedient wife may have some basis in obscure Islamic writings, the idea of treating this as a mental illness was something new. It was clearly the result of western influence! I discovered through my research that originally, Middle Eastern psychiatrists relied heavily on associations from abroad, including the American Psychiatric Association, for their information and knowledge!

The next day, I contacted Margaret O’Reilly and explained my research to her. She cordially agreed to drop all charges against Dr. Rahman, and instead to sue the real culprit. Margaret O’Reilly is now suing the American Psychiatric Association. We both agreed that obviously the AMA failed to adequately explain the discipline of psychiatry to Middle Eastern psychiatrists now practicing in the US. It was, in reality, their fault that Disobedient Wife Disorder was being propagated as a diagnosis. Fortunately, a great injustice against a Muslim-American was averted through some investigative journalism.

Margaret O’Reilly personally called Dr. Rahman to apologize for initially attempting to sue him. Dr. Rahman, understandably still stinging from the threatened lawsuit, hung up on her, after calling her a “lowly kafir sharmootah” before adding “I feel very sorry for your unfortunate husband.” Of course, the doctor’s anger is perfectly understandable given the misunderstanding that transpired.

Mrs. O’Reilly, realizes that she almost brought about a major injustice against an innocent immigrant doctor. Wishing to cleanse herself of her misdeed, she has decided to donate a large sum of money to an Islamic charity. Fortunately, in a world where so much has gone wrong, some stories still have happy endings. It is events like these that make me especially proud to be a writer for Diversity Chronicle, knowing that we are making a real difference in the world.

Copyright © 2014 Diversity Chronicle All Rights Reserved.

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1893 New York hurricane Category 3 major hurricane (SSHWS/NWS) Map of the hurricane on August 24 over New York City Formed August 15, 1893 Dissipated August 25, 1893 Highest winds 1-minute sustained: 115 mph (185 km/h)

Lowest pressure 952 mbar (hPa); 28.11 inHg Fatalities At least 34 Areas affected Eastern United States Part of the 1893 Atlantic hurricane season

The 1893 New York hurricane, also known as the Midnight Storm,[1] was a powerful and destructive tropical cyclone that struck the New York City area in August 1893. First identified as a tropical storm on August 15, over the central Atlantic Ocean, the hurricane moved northwestward for most of its course, ultimately peaking with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 km/h) and a minimum barometric pressure reading of 952 mbar (hPa; 28.11 inHg). It turned due northward as it approached the U.S. East Coast and struck western Long Island on August 24. It moved inland and quickly deteriorated, degenerating the next day.

The storm inflicted severe damage with storm tides as high as 30 ft (9 m). Trees were brought down, houses were demolished, and Hog Island was largely washed away by the cyclone. Several areas suffered extensive effects from the hurricane, and at least 34 sailors lost their lives. The storm is regarded as one of the most severe hurricanes to strike the city.

Meteorological history [ edit ]

The system was first classified as a tropical storm while situated in the central Atlantic Ocean on August 15, 1893. It steadily intensified as it tracked generally toward the west and attained hurricane force. Gradually curving northwestward, the storm continued to gain power and, on August 18, it achieved wind speeds corresponding to Category 2 intensity on the modern-day Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.[2] This scale was devised in 1971 to categorize tropical cyclones based on their maximum sustained winds.[3] The storm is estimated to have maintained winds of approximately 100 mph (155 km/h) for several days as it passed well to the north of the Lesser Antilles. As the hurricane turned more northerly still, approaching the United States, it strengthened to major hurricane intensity, Category 3, on August 22. At this point, it peaked in intensity with winds of 115 mph (185 km/h). The lowest known barometric pressure in relation to the storm was 952 mbar (hPa; 28.11 inHg).[2]

Less than a day later, the storm deteriorated to Category 2 strength.[2] Cape Hatteras, North Carolina experienced the hurricane on the morning of August 23 while its center passed less than 100 mi (160 km) offshore. Heading nearly due northward, the cyclone skimmed the New Jersey coastline, passing just east of Atlantic City,[4] and weakened further to Category 1 status.[2] On August 23 the storm was one of four hurricanes occurring simultaneously within the Atlantic Ocean.[5] On August 24 the storm moved ashore on western Long Island, in the New York City area. At 1200 UTC that day, while centered just inland, its maximum winds were estimated to have been 85 mph (140 km/h). It progressed northward through New England, quickly weakening. It was briefly downgraded to a tropical storm before becoming extratropical.[2] It dissipated fully on August 25, near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River.[4]

Impact [ edit ]

Winds from the storm exceeded 50 mph (80 km/h) at Atlantic City and New York, initially blowing from the northeast before shifting southwesterly.[4] The hurricane wrought severe destruction,[6] described by The New York Times on August 25 as "a mighty war of winds and a great tumbling of chimneys" and 3.82 inches (97 mm) of rain falling from 8:00 PM Wednesday to 8:00 AM Thursday.[7] A 30 ft (10 m) storm surge impacted the shore, demolishing structures as large as an elevated railway.[6] The storm has been cited as an example of a noteworthy New York City tropical cyclone.[8] The cyclone is known for largely destroying Hog Island, a developed resort island along the southern Long Island coast, which had been as long as about 1 mi (1.6 km) in the 1870s.[9]

The worst of the damage was reportedly confined to a 50 mi (80 km) area surrounding New York City. In a 12-hour period, 3.82 in (97 mm) of precipitation fell, breaking the daily rainfall record. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses accompanied the severe impact. Low-lying areas of the city, particularly those near the coast, were flooded. Roofs and chimneys were ripped off buildings and windows were broken in many homes and businesses. In Central Park, "More than a hundred noble trees were torn up by the roots, and branches were twisted off everywhere."[7] The park was devastated and thousands of dead birds fell to the ground after being washed out of, or drowned in, their nests. Groups of children gathered the birds and picked them up, with the apparent intention of selling them to restaurants.[7] The storm took the lives of 34 sailors as vessels were blown ashore and men swept overboard. The tugboat Panther, towing two coal barges, was wrecked; 17 crew members perished and three lived.[7]

High winds brought down telegraph wires and left the city almost entirely cut off from communication with outside locations. At Coney Island, the storm completely destroyed many buildings, walkways, piers, and beach resorts. Brighton Beach was hit particularly hard. The raging seas swept inland, washing out tracks of the Marine Railway.[7] Bathing houses were moved a great distance by the cyclone. Near the Sheepshead Bay, Emmons Avenue was heavily damaged. Further to the east, at Greenport, numerous yachts were wrecked and scattered. Corn crops on land were ruined and fruit trees lost their fruits.[7]

At Brooklyn, still an independent city from New York, houses were dismantled and uprooted trees blocked streets. Damage was widespread throughout the area and flood waters reached waist-high levels. The storm was the most severe in years at Jersey City, New Jersey, despite the fact that its damage was moderate. Trees were blown down and cellars filled with water there and in nearby areas, such as Hoboken.[7]

See also [ edit ]
Forty years ago, NASA landed a spacecraft on the surface of Mars, giving us our first close-up view of the so-called Red Planet. And, in what seems to be standard protocol for NASA missions, the 90-day operation stretched into a six-year mission, paving the way for later Mars rovers like Opportunity and Curiosity.

The Viking 1 spacecraft touched down on the Martian surface on July 20, 1976, seven years after Apollo 11 astronauts stepped out onto the moon. The landing was originally scheduled for America’s Independence Day, July 4. But once in orbit around Mars, the satellite carrying Viking revealed that the landing site was incredibly rocky, notes Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian. So mission controllers adjusted the date so the spacecraft could find a smoother place to land.

The Viking mission was a huge success from an engineering perspective, an 11-month journey through space to a perfect landing on another planet. The heat shield and parachute design were updated and used in subsequent missions to Mars. And Viking’s measurements of the Martian atmosphere and surface are being used and analyzed to this day.

But scientists were really anticipating the results from the life sciences payload carried by the lander. This apparatus housed four different tests in a space the size of a soccer ball, according to Glenn Bugos, historian for the NASA Ames Research Center.

A week after landing, soil samples were put through this barrage of tests to look for evidence of life: mainly carbon molecules and gases released by organisms metabolizing a variety of nutrients that had been added to the soil. Three tests came up negative.

But the fourth one had a promising result… at least initially. In this test, water, nutrients and a radioactive form of carbon were added to the Martian soil. If any organisms ate the radioactive nutrients, they would emit a specific gas. The lander detected this gas spewing out of the soil during the first time it ran the test. But during the next two trials, there was nothing.

This has puzzled scientists for decades. Some researchers have tried to recreate the tests here on Earth and their results have led some scientists to say the tests were “inconclusive” instead of “negative.”

At a panel discussion on the history of the Viking 1 mission, Bugos said that the lack of definitive results killed the desire to search for life on Mars.

Erik Conway, a historian for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, added that a change in political focus towards NASA’s shuttle program and the failed 1984 Mars Observer mission also contributed to the 17-year gap before another lander was sent to Mars.

Opportunity and Curiosity, two of the new rovers, focused more on studying the ancient conditions of Mars to see if it was once suitable for life. They each found evidence of water on Mars in the past. Curiosity also noticed that methane periodically increases, which is most likely because of chemical reactions between the Martian rocks and water. But there is a small chance it could be released by living organisms.

So, 40 years after we reached it, humanity is still holding onto hope that life exists - or once existed - on the Red Planet.
One of the best parts of Wear OS is the ability to customize your watch face. It’s a small thing, but making it look how you want it to look adds a uniqueness that can make your watch truly yours and distinguishable from everyone else’s. There are a ton of great selections, but here are a few Android Wear watch faces that we think shine above the rest. As of the time of this writing, these watch faces should work on most Wear OS and Android Wear smartwatches.

Check out more excellent Android Wear apps and games! 10 best Android Wear apps (Wear OS apps) 5 best Wear OS games (Android Wear games)

AccuWeather Price: Free / $2.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY AccuWeather is a decent weather app. On top of all of its mobile features, it also has support for the newer Wear OS features. It's not a watch face on its own. It's a fully usable Android Wear app. It just so happens to also have Android Wear watch faces. To be honest, they aren't the most amazing watch faces ever. However, they're clean, they show you the weather, and they're Wear OS compatible. Since it can cover your phone, watch, and watch face, you can kill several birds with one stone using this app. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Black Metal HD Watch Face Price: Free / $2.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Black Metal HD is an ideal middle-of-the-road watch face. It features a black, brushed metal style look. The watch face itself has customizable elements as part of the Wear OS Complications feature. It can show things like battery status (for phone and watch), Google Fit, current weather conditions, and more. The watch face does virtually everything you'd want a watch face to do. It has a few bugs, but otherwise it works well. It's definitely one of the simpler, but better Android Wear watch faces. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Bubble Widget and Wear Launcher Price: Free / $3.95 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Bubble Widget and Wear Launcher bills itself as a widget and launcher for Android Wear. As it turns out, it also has an interactive watch face. Essentially, the launcher becomes the watch face. You'll see the time, of course. The watch face will also have a variety of shortcuts to quickly open the apps you use most frequently. It's one of the most unique Wear OS watch faces available. Make sure to take a look at the device compatibility list on the Google Play page to make sure your watch will work with it. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Facer Price: Free with in-app purchases DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Facer is the original app that lets you make your own Wear OS watch faces. The app gives you a template, some instructions, and then you go nuts from there. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it's nothing bad. You can always download watch faces that other people make if the task proves too daunting. It boasts a selection of over 15,000 watch faces. Some of them are free and some of them will require a small fee to buy. It should work pretty well with newer versions of Wear OS as well. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Material Style Watchface Price: $0.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Material Style Watchface is a simple, but functional Wear OS watch face. It boasts over 625 total configurations across three styles, 15 accent colors, and 15 background colors. The watch face can show a variety of stuff, including alarms, battery life, calendar events, and other data from basically any other app on your watch. It won't turn any heads like some others on this list. However, those looking for something very clean, simple, and functional have a great option with this one. It's also relatively cheap, supports four languages, and the developer seems amicable to feedback. This one only works with round watch faces, but that's about its only potential issue. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

You're halfway there! Here are some more excellent apps and games! 10 best Google Daydream apps! 15 best Google Daydream games

thema watch faces Price: Varies DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY thema is a developer of Wear OS watch faces on Google Play. They have dozens of options. Most of them are individually themed, but they all mostly have the same features. You'll get a variety of features in the free version of the watch face. You can then pay for the pro version to get all of the features. They all look relatively nice, even if some (like the Jack Daniels themed one) can be a bit tacky. There are even themed ones for stuff like Halloween. They're all free to install if you want to see them for yourself. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Twelveish Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Twelveish is a quirky and free Wear OS watch face. It does the basics like display the time in a variety of colors. However, this one adds a bit of comedy. Along with the full time, it also gives you estimations in large words in the middle of the display. Thus, it may tell you what it's a quarter to ten or so or twelveish. Sometimes it's okay to just have fun with this stuff, right? Some other features include an app data slot (via Complications) on the bottom and two on either side of the display for a total of three configurable slots. It worked just fine in our testing. This one is also totally free with no ads or in-app purchases. We'll take it! The developer has an optional Support Development app for $1.49 if you want to toss them some money. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Ultimate Watch 2 Price: $0.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Ultimate Watch 2 is one of the most powerful Wear OS watch faces available. Its feature list reads like a grocery list and it is exceptionally long. Basically, it comes with 21 watch faces or you can build your own. It comes with support for IFTTT, Tasker, and IoT stuff for automation purposes. You also get Wear OS Complications for support for almost any app on your watch right on the watch face. Some other features include full Google Fit support along with direct support for plenty of other apps. This thing is a functional all-star and it took us a long time to sift through its various functions. The price isn't half bad either. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Watch Face Price: $1.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY As you might imagine, this watch face bills itself as being minimal and elegant. It also has choices. The developers boast over 20,000 total watch faces that you can use. Of course, it also has Android Wear 2.0. It also has a variety of other options, including the usual stuff like interactive features, Google Fit integration, and other customizations. It also has support for specific apps like Spotify, Pocket Casts, and other apps. It's cheap and has a ton of features. It's one of the better Android Wear watch faces. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

WatchMaker Watch Faces Price: Free / Up to $9.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY WatchMaker is a DIY watch face. It competes directly with similar apps like Facer. You'll have plenty of tools to make your own Android Wear Watch Faces. Additionally, you can fork out for the pro version and get access to over 20,000 community-made watch faces. You can nab even more for free on the app's Google+ page. It's not as in-depth as some watch face makers, but you can still get creative and have some fun. You'll get some of it for free and the rest when you fork out $3.99. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY

Thank you for reading! Here are a couple final lists to check out! 15 best Android apps of 2019! 10 best Android themes

If we missed any of the best Android Wear watch faces, tell us about them in the comments! Thanks for reading!
Invested interests: the UK's Overseas Territories' hidden role in developing countries

Konstantinos Todoulos Added 18 Jun 2013

Eurodad member Christian Aid and the IF campaign released a new report entitled “Invested interests: the UK's Overseas Territories' hidden role in developing countries.” It reveals that UK-linked tax havens are at the centre of a global financial system that encourages crime, corruption and aggressive tax avoidance in developing countries.

The report also reveals that the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar, Anguilla and Turks and Caicos - all British Overseas Territories - together with the Crown Dependencies of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey are now the largest source of Foreign Direct Investment in developing countries. The amount totalled US$556bn by 2011, the most recent year for which we have figures, and accounted for one in every ten US dollars of foreign direct investment made there.

This figure is concerning because investment is often structured through such jurisdictions specifically to enable tax dodging in poor countries. Other abuses they facilitate include the laundering of crime money, and ‘round tripping’, in which money originating in the developing country where it is to be invested is sent offshore and then returned disguised as foreign funds to qualify for major tax breaks.

Finally among the report findings are that the British Virgin Islands alone was the fourth largest investor to developing countries in 2011, with the amount involved US$388bn. It provides globally investment more than 860 times the size of its own GDP. That same year it was revealed that 45 newly incorporated companies in the BVI had acquired mining assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo at a loss, it was claimed, to the DRC’s economy of US$5.5bn. The identity of those behind the companies remains secret.

Download full report here.
Anyone who has ever been near a dairy knows that cows can be smelly beasts: they fart and poop constantly, filling the air for miles with the acrid scent of their bowels. For anyone who may find that aroma repulsive, California is on the case.

California Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed into law a bill that would place limitations on emissions of greenhouse gasses like methane and black carbon. Those types of gasses, known collectively as super pollutants, have some of the biggest impacts on global warming but remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter period of time than carbon-dioxide (CO2).

The new California law requires the state to approve and begin implementing a strategy to cut super pollutant emissions from dairy, livestock, organic waste and landfills. They must reach a goal that includes a cut of methane emissions by 40 percent, hydrofluorocarbon gases by 40 percent and anthropogenic black carbon by 50 percent below 2013 levels by 2020.

Cow farts, for their part, are rich in methane.

“Cutting black carbon and other super pollutants is the critical next step in our program to combat climate change,” Brown said Monday in a statement after signing the law. “This bill curbs these dangerous pollutants and thereby protects public health and slows climate change.”

Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are used in refrigeration and air conditioning and began being used to replace ozone destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Black carbon is created when fossil fuels aren’t burnt completely — it's basically soot. Methane comes from a variety of organic sources, including living animals and landfills.

The three gasses have varying levels of potency and lifespans. Methane is roughly 30 times better at trapping heat than CO2 and stays in the atmosphere for an average of roughly 20 years. HFCs are 3,830 times more potent than CO2 and have a 14 year lifetime. Black carbon stays in the atmosphere for just weeks and is very potent, though it has a variable potency.

Removing just one ton of diesel black carbon from the atmosphere, Brown’s office said, is equivalent to taking out 1,000 to 2,000 tons of CO2.

“The policies that California is implementing, if achieved worldwide, would cut the expected rate of global warming in half by 2050, save millions of lives, avoid millions of tons of crop losses per year and slow dangerous climate feedbacks such as melting ice caps and rising sea levels," Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a distinguished professor at the San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement accompanying Browns’ comments.

The potential to eliminating greenhouse gasses is an obvious goal for California. The state, which is in its fifth year of a blistering drought, is already being impacted by the effects from a warming climate which exacerbates conditions that may extend that drought, new research this week showed. If those effects aren’t mitigated, the state could potentially be looking at prolonged drought for decades or centuries to come, that report suggested.
Donald Trump. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

This story has been updated.

In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made what appeared to be some of his most extensive comments yet about international climate change negotiations.

In particular, Trump said he didn’t like the Paris climate agreement, recently signed by 175 countries, including the United States, and would either renegotiate it or do something more than that.

“I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else,” Trump told Reuters. “But those agreements are one-sided agreements and they are bad for the United States.”

[U.S. and 170 other nations sign historic climate agreement]

The main reason given, in the Reuters story about the interview, was that Trump didn’t believe other countries would comply with what Paris requires. “Not a big fan because other countries don’t adhere to it, and China doesn’t adhere to it, and China’s spewing into the atmosphere,” he said.

While the White House press secretary Josh Earnest dismissed the remarks Wednesday — “I don’t know if there’s anyone losing sleep here at the White House,” he said at a press briefing regarding Trump’s plans — environmental groups quickly denounced the statements. However, Trump’s words in many ways appear less a rehash of Trump’s overall climate change skepticism and more just baffling.

Consider some of the things that don’t make much sense about what Trump appears to be saying, in light of what the Paris agreement actually is and how it works.

[Trump: ‘I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change’]

Trump suggests the agreement is “one-sided” or “bad” for the United States. It’s not entirely clear why he thinks that, but if the implication is that it imposes something on us from outside, that isn’t how the agreement works. Under Paris, each country makes its own individual commitments to reduce emissions. The United States sets its own targets, in pledges made to the United Nations, and like every other country, it is supposed to increase them over time. Thus, in the end, the United States does as much as it can or wants to under Paris.

In fairness, the agreement certainly does assume that all countries are earnestly committed to cutting emissions. The current U.S. pledge, to reduce emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, is fairly ambitious, and without such a pledge by the world’s second largest emitter, the Paris agreement would have been harder to reach.

Equally surprising is Trump’s assertion that China “doesn’t adhere” to the Paris agreement.

[As the planet flashes warning signs, U.S. and China pledge hasty signing of climate accord]

China’s commitments, too, are self-generated under the agreement, but no less significant for that reason. Getting on the same page with the world’s top emitter, as President Obama did in late 2014, was key to setting the world on the road to achieving Paris. And if China did balk at those commitments — a commitment, principally, to have its greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2030 and to “make best efforts to peak early” — that would pose a problem just like any balking by the United States would.

For the agreement to work, countries individually must live up to what they say they’re going to do — which then gives the entire agreement credibility in the eyes of its many parties. That’s the nature of the Paris game. And there will be many tests ahead to see whether this all works as intended.

But we don’t really have any reason to think China isn’t serious about the Paris accord. If anything, there is evidence suggesting that China could have its emissions peak, and start reducing them, well before 2030. The country is striving to burn less coal and increase the production of renewable electricity, and also to electrify transportation.

[Apple’s big bet on China is also a bet on driverless cars]

It is, in fact, leading the world in both areas. Last year China invested more than any other country — and twice as much as the United States — in clean energy, at $ 110.5 billion, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And more plug-in electric vehicles were sold in China last year than in any other country.

Most of all, though, the problem with Trump’s statement it that it isn’t clear what renegotiating the Paris agreement would even mean, or look like. The agreement is the result of a multi-year process under the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, and one that 195 countries already agreed to after assembling their negotiators in Paris in an enormous, long-planned event. You don’t just suddenly pull them all back into a room and require changes.

Indeed, if ongoing ratification efforts move fast enough, it’s possible that the agreement could come into force this year, binding a future hypothetical president Trump to comply with it. Even if he wanted to, Trump then couldn’t completely withdraw, once the agreement is in force, for four years.

[Obama’s rapid move to join the Paris climate agreement could tie up the next president]

“Countries gave considerable thought in Paris to creating a durable agreement that would outlive occasional lapses in political will,” Nigel Purvis, the president and chief executive of Climate Advisers, said in an April interview with The Washington Post.

Among all these hurdles to renegotiating the Paris agreement, there’s also this: Trump would be negotiating with, among others, Patricia Espinosa, the new executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. Espinosa was previously the minister of foreign affairs for Mexico under then-President Felipe Calderón, who has slammed Trump for his pledge to build a “huge” wall on the Mexican border and make the Mexican government pay for it.

Calderón said of Trump: “We won’t pay a single cent for that stupid wall. It’s pathetic. . . . Trump is completely demagogical.”
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As in the past, Seattle police anticipated the actions of self-proclaimed anarchists on May Day. But the Seattle Police Department’s incident commander for the protests said this year was notably different.

“I was surprised at the numbers of people at Seattle Central (Community College) that wanted to get into a confrontation,” Captain Chris Fowler told

KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz. “I have not seen that many black bloc anarchists — people dressed up in that vein — that wanted to cause problems that early.”

Related: Mayor, chief praise police response to violent May Day protest in Seattle

“I would say that it was a substantial difference between the small groups of people that wanted to commit violence from years past, or the small groups that we’ve seen glom onto peaceful protest,” Fowler said. “This was a group of people in a large group — 75, 100, 200 mixed into a crowd of much larger size — that facilitated that violence and destruction.”

What is to blame for the uptick, Rantz asked.

“I don’t know if it’s just levels of frustration or there was a need to make some sort of statement,” Fowler said. “Clearly, they were out to commit violence and crime. So it’s hard for me to relate to people that want to do that. It’s hard to say.”

Officers confiscated a hammer, wrenches, batteries, and a machete with “death” written on it. A total of 17 arrests were made Friday night. Three officers went to the hospital for injuries. Rioters smashed over 20 cars, including a KIRO Radio truck.

Photos from May Day protests

As in years past, the Seattle Police Department is expected to release photos and ask people to help identify rioters for further arrest.

Fowler said the department still has a lot of video and photos to look through, and that the investigation is underway.

He noted that just because they arrest someone, it doesn’t mean that they will eventually be charged. That is up to prosecutors, he said. In the meantime, police are making arrests for a range of crimes from felony assault to obstructing.

After the protest-turned-riot, Fowler said that he knew those crimes were likely coming as he watched the anarchist crowd gather.

“When they left Seattle Central Community College and moved down Broadway, it was relatively peaceful, but we knew before they left that there were going to be issues,” Fowler said. “You could hear the crowd talk about what they were going to do as you were standing there. You saw the sticks, you could see them putting wrenches into their sleeves. It was unlike anything I had seen before.”

The Seattle Police Department is expected to brief the Seattle City Council Wednesday afternoon about the actions officers took on May 1.
'Give It To Your Woman, It's Her Job' Laundry Tag Doesn't Wash With Many

When Emma Barnett saw the laundry tag in her boyfriend's pants she was shocked.

"Give It To Your Woman," it read. "It's Her Job."

So Barnett did what you would expect the digital media editor of The Telegraph would do. She posted the photo online and started tweeting.

One day later, the twitterverse was in a tizzy and she had turned up the name of the company responsible.

"The beige pair of chinos in question were purchased in London at Madhouse's flagship Oxford Street store last month," Barnett reported Tuesday. And a company spokesman told her "the care instructions on this product were not proofed by our buyers who normally concern themselves with quality, style and price of the products they order. ... The wording is clearly meant as a joke but now it has been pointed out to us it is something we will need to be more careful about in the future."

If you're interested in following the Twitter debate, which continues, the proper search term is #sexisttrousers.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton believes women’s health, child marriage, and climate change are “interconnected.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVWDgz23Ino

“Just listening to the concerns around education and climate change, women’s health, child marriage, access to technology, all of those are of course interconnected,” Clinton said while participating on a panel at the CARE National Conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. She added, “We have to focus on each of them in their interconnectedness, as well as individual outrages that do demand our attention.”

The event was broadcast live on C-SPAN.

The event host introduced Clinton as an “activist, thought leader, and change agent.”

Clinton did not elaborate or explain why she believes climate change and child marriage are “interconnected.”

Child marriage has existed for thousands of years.

Clinton appeared on the panel with fellow former first daughter Barbara Bush. Also on the panel was Global Fund for Women President and CEO Musimni Kanyoro and founder and Editor-in-Chief of Muslimgirl.com Amani al-Khatahtbeh.

In March, Bush delivered the keynote address at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in North Texas.

“I am proud to stand with Planned Parenthood not only because women, regardless of where they are from, deserve to live dignified, healthy lives,” she said, “because it’s a really good investment. We know that when women are healthy, their families and their children are healthier too.”

Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
‘Notorious B.I.G.’ Name and Likeness Rights Sold to Marketing Company

Written by Tyler Hakes. Published: the_date('l, F j, Y'); ?>.

Biggie’s name gets hocked. Expected outcome: Huge number of products bearing his name and image.

According to a report from Undercover.fm, the rights to the name and likeness of the late Biggie Smalls has been handed over to a specialty marketing company and will be turned into a range of new products.

The estate of Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.) have apparently struck a deal with a large marketing company which allows them to create products with Christopher’s name and likeness. Although there isn’t any information on who was involved in the decision, it is reported that trustees for the estate include Biggie’s former wife, Faith Evans, and his mother, Voletta Wallace.

Brand Sense Partners, the company names in the report, boasts relationships with past and present celebrities such as Chuck Norris, Brittney Spears, Jimi Hendrix and Halle Berry. The explain their relationship with these “brands”, by saying that they have the, “ability to consistently identify and unlock hidden value, allowing clients to maximize brand equity and growth.”

Undercover.fm reports that the line of Biggie products will be managed by Teresa Brown, who currently manages products from Albert Einstein and Steve McQueen.

Wayne Barrow, who formerly served as Notorious B.I.G.’s manager and now works as an advisor to Voletta Wallace is quoted as saying, “The family and I are excited to move forward with the exceptional team at [Brand Sense Partners]. Their understanding of Christopher’s cultural impact, as well as their vision for our brand mission made them the best partner possible for the task. We look forward to working hand in hand with them to build on Christopher’s unique legacy.”

It’s unclear at this time when and what products should be expected to come from the deal.

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By Ralph Nader

The editor of The Hill, a newspaper exclusively covering Congress, said that Congress was not going to do very much in 2012, except for “the big bill” which is extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment compensation, which expire in late February. That two month extension will likely reignite the fight between Democrats and Republicans that flared last month.

In 2012, Congress, the editor implied, would be busy electioneering. That is, the Senators and Representatives will be busy raising money from commercial interests so they can keep their jobs. There won’t be much time to change anything about misallocated public budgets, unfair tax rules, undeclared costly wars, and job-depleting trade policies that, if fixed, would increase employment and public investment.

So this year, Congress will spend well over $3 billion on its own expenses to do nothing of significance other than shift more debt to individual taxpayers by depleting the social security payroll tax by over $100 billion so both parties can say they enacted a tax cut! That is what the Democrats in Congress and the President call a significant accomplishment.

Will someone call a psychiatrist? This is a Congress that is beyond dysfunctional. It is an obstacle to progress in America, a graveyard for both democracy and justice. No wonder a new Washington Post-ABC news poll found an all time high of 84 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

Both Republicans and Democrats say they want to reduce the deficit. But they are avoiding, in varying degrees, doing this in any way that would discomfort the rich and powerful. One would think that, especially in an election year, the following legislative agenda would be very popular with the voters.

First, restore the taxes on the rich that George W. Bush cut ten years ago which expanded the deficit. So clueless are the Democrats that they have not learned to use the word “restore” instead of the Republican word “increase” when talking about taxes that were previously cut for the millionaires and billionaires.

Second, collect unpaid taxes. The IRS estimates that $385 billion of tax revenues are not collected yearly. If the IRS budget increased and more people were hired, every dollar it spent would return $200 from tax evaders, including corporations and the wealthy. When taxes are not collected, the large majority of honest taxpayers are left with the unfair consequences. Imagine that money being applied to jobs that repair our crumbling public works.

Third, end the outrageous corporate loopholes that allow profitable large corporations to pay just half of the statutory tax rate of thirty-five percent. More than a few pay less than five percent and many pay zero on major profits. During a recent three year period, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice, a dozen major corporations such as Verizon and Honeywell paid no taxes on many billions of profits, and the legendary tax escapee, General Electric, managed to pay zero and even receive billions in benefits from the U.S. Treasury.

Fourth, do what most U.S. soldiers in the field have believed should have been done years ago–get out of Afghanistan and Iraq and nearby countries like Kuwait where thousands of U.S. soldiers based in Iraq have moved.

Fifth, to increase consumer demand, which creates jobs, raise the federal minimum wage from the present level of $7.25–which is $2.75 less than it was way back in 1968, adjusted for inflation–to $10 per hour. Businesses who keep raising prices and executive salaries (eg. Walmart and McDonalds) since 1968 should be reminded of their windfall in that period.

In addition, President Obama can urge mutual and pension funds and individual shareholders to demand higher dividends from companies like EMC, Google, Apple, Cisco, Oracle and others firms hoarding two trillion dollars in cash as if this money was the corporate bosses’, not the owner-shareholders. More dividends, more consumer demand, more jobs.

Want to know why Congress doesn’t make such popular and prudent decisions for the American people? Because the people are not objecting to all the power that their Congressional representatives and their corporate allies have sucked away from them. Because the people are not putting teeth and time into the “sovereignty of the people” expressed in the preamble to our Constitution which begins with “We the people,” not “We the corporation.”

So citizens, it’s your choice. If you don’t demand a say day after day, you’ll continue to pay day after day.

By the way, the Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
Putting all that aside, if you like politics— if you like America, dammit—it'll be tremendously fun to watch for several reasons.

For starters, it's going to be awkward. Christie and Booker are friends, as close as two politicians with identical aspirations can be. They don’t attack each other, they text all the time, and they shot an amusing parody video together. Over the summer they cut away from a party at the gubernatorial Jersey Shore house and took a stroll on the beach, just the two of them. They're even Facebook friends, having sat on Oprah Winfrey's couch last year and collected a $100 million investment from Mark Zuckerberg for Newark's schools. From education reform to a property tax cap, they have supported each other in a bipartisan way that is unfathomable in the nation’s capital.

Second, this will be Campaign 2.0. They may love a good TV interview, but Booker and Christie have drawn much of their popularity by circumventing traditional news and developing their own social-media channels for disseminating information. Booker has the second-most Twitter followers of any politician who hasn’t run for president and he recently cofounded a video-based social media company called Waywire. Christie, meanwhile, has amassed an online following from countless video clips, posted by his staff, of his dressing down journalists, constituents, Democrats, academic researchers and the New Jersey Supreme Court. YouTube against Twitter: Which is more effective?

And finally, perhaps most importantly, the race represents a stark contrast in style. The mayor who meditates and quotes poetry versus the governor who…what's the opposite of meditation and poetry?

Booker is a chameleon, able to give any audience what it needs. To the Florida delegation at the Democratic convention, for example, he dropped “Jesus Loves You” and the Hebrew equivalent, “Baruch Hashem,” in the same sentence, bringing black women and Jewish grandmothers to their feet. Christie, on the other hand, keeps his finger on the trigger—choosing respect, as he always says, before love. While Christie is a married father of four and the fattest national politician since the dawn of television, Booker is a fit, single man often dubbed “America’s sexiest mayor.” His sex life is of more than a little interest in political circles, and his name was appropriated for an erotic novel, “Cory’s Salvation.” He is crushed on by 20-something female progressives across the country, as evidenced by the question recently asked about him on Jezebel: “Is it hot in here or is that just the rising temperature of a million vaginas?”

Booker, a vegetarian, often points to the contrast: “The governor is a Republican, I’m a Democrat. The governor likes steak, I like tofu. The governor is bold, I am bald. But we both recognize that we have common ground between us.”

When the Klieg lights are turned on at the must-see debates next fall, though, don't expect the candidates to tread on such common ground. Christie will look to smash what one Republican operative described as Booker's “glass jaw” by attacking him for being the same kind of tax-and-spend Democrat that brought New Jersey the highest property taxes in the nation. He will say that Booker followed the playbook of his tarnished ally, former governor and bank boss Jon Corzine, by failing to address Newark’s structural deficit and continued reliance on suburban taxes. Like Democrats in Congress who ignore the cost of entitlements, Christie will argue, Booker failed to do the “big things.”

Christie’s been to war before as a federal prosecutor, challenger to Corzine, and chief surrogate for Romney. Booker won his mayorship in a nasty race against a longtime state senator, but he's the relative newbie on the national scene. So he will first try to deflect Christie's shots with some of the platitudes he peddles on Twitter. Failing that, he will follow the advice of the focus groups and attempt to exploit Christie's gender gap by repeatedly bringing up the governor's opposition to abortion and gay marriage. He will frame these as civil rights matters, then go for the gut by questioning Christie's blue-collar-hero status—that the governor reduced a tax credit for the working poor, while vetoing taxes for millionaires.

Most of all, Booker will wait for the inevitable insult, some word that Christie lets slip that a few thousand independent voters think goes too far. This isn't a state where we want our leaders calling lawmakers “numbnuts” and Navy SEALs “idiots,” as Christie has done. Booker will wait for that gaffe, and then let it simmer. The message: Christie's tough talk, his Insult the Comic Dog routine, is growing too old, New Jersey. You've done bold; now is the time to go bald.

Matt Katz covers Christie for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Photo Ballots were stacked up as a statewide presidential election recount began Thursday, in Milwaukee. Credit Morry Gash/Associated Press

LANSING, Mich. — Supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have filed legal challenges in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan in a suddenly robust effort to stop the presidential election recount efforts there.

Bill Schuette, the attorney general of Michigan, said that the recount, initiated by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, put Michigan voters at risk of “paying millions and potentially losing their voice in the Electoral College in the process.”

“This court cannot allow a dilatory and frivolous request for a recount by an aggrieved party to silence all Michigan votes for president,” Mr. Schuette, a Republican, said in a court filing.

A lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission filed in Federal District Court by the Great America PAC, the Stop Hillary PAC and Ronald R. Johnson, a Wisconsin resident, argued that the recount could “unjustifiably cast doubt” on Mr. Trump’s victory in that state.

The plaintiffs argued that the recount, which began across the state’s 72 counties on Thursday morning, should be halted immediately, in part because there is a substantial chance that it cannot be accurately completed by the deadline of Dec. 12. In 2011, a statewide recount took close to a month.

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In Michigan on Friday, where the recount is still pending, the Board of State Canvassers met to consider an objection to the recount by Mr. Trump.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump told the canvassing board, which is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, that it should not allow a recount to proceed, describing it as needless, too expensive and not required by Michigan law. Besides, Ms. Stein came nowhere near winning the state.

“This recount petition is absolutely unprecedented in the history of Michigan election law,” said Gary Gordon, a lawyer for Mr. Trump and his campaign.

A lawyer for Ms. Stein, Mark Brewer, said Mr. Trump’s campaign was making a “desperate attempt” to avoid a recount. “I would remind everybody that the original source of the allegation that this election was rigged was Mr. Trump,” Mr. Brewer told the board.

The Michigan board split, 2-2, along party lines, meaning the recount objection failed.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his allies are also seeking to halt legal proceedings by Ms. Stein to contest the statewide election results in Pennsylvania.

Lawrence J. Tabas, general counsel of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, said in an interview on Friday that Ms. Stein’s lawyers had fallen short of demonstrating that there was fraud or illegal action in the Nov. 8 election. “They know they have no claim,” he said.

“This action by Jill Stein and her supporters — I couldn’t even call it a Hail Mary pass, because that would be insulting to the Hail Mary pass,” said Mr. Tabas, who along with other lawyers, submitted a lengthy brief filed in Pennsylvania court on Thursday.

The recounts bids are widely viewed as having little chance of making a difference. But Ms Stein, in a statement, said the challenges to them were an effort to put “party politics above country.”

“In an election already tainted by suspicion, previously expressed by Donald Trump himself,” she said, “verifying the vote is a common-sense procedure that would put all concerns around voter disenfranchisement to rest. Trump’s desperate attempts to silence voter demands for recounts raise a simple question: why is Donald Trump afraid of these recounts?”

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Ms. Stein has raised millions of dollars for an effort to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, states that have recently voted Democratic and where Mr. Trump won by relatively thin margins.
Museum hopping is a favourite Vancouver past time during the rainy winter months … but it isn’t necessarily cheap. Full-price admission to the city’s top museums and galleries can run from $15 to $25 and up.

Except, that is, for one magical day of the year when you can visit five of the city’s cultural attractions for $5. Winter Wander returns this Jan. 23, transforming waterfront Vanier Park, home to a bumper crop of museums, into a moving cultural feast.

Located in Kitsilano, at the edge of English Bay, Vanier Park is a favourite with sun worshippers, dog walkers and kite flyers in the summer months. But tucked away in this idyllic setting are some of the city’s largest museums and cultural attractions.

In the space of a short walk, you can: learn about downtown’s neon era at the Museum of Vancouver; explore the first ship to circumnavigate North America at the Vancouver Maritime Museum; stare deep into the night sky at the planetarium inside the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre; and browse through endless stockpiles of old photos at the City of Vancouver Archives.

This year’s Winter Wander takes place from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 23. Apart from the bargain museum access, there will be live entertainment, plus plenty of street eat options from the city’s top local food trucks. The $5 admission price gets you access to all five cultural attractions, and kids 5 and under are free. Tickets are available at any of the participating venues.

Here are some more detail on each of the five offerings:

Museum of Vancouver: Vancouver-focused exhibits show what the city was, is, and can be. Permanent exhibitions tell the city’s stories from the early 1900s to the late 1970s and are complemented by contemporary, groundbreaking feature exhibits.

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre: This non-profit community resource brings the wonders of space to Earth. See real rocket engines and space suits or sit back and zip off to outer space inside the Planetarium Star Theatre.

Vancouver Maritime Museum: Explore exhibits on pirates, shipwrecks, lighthouses and more in this seafaring museum. The highlight is the restored RCMP Arctic schooner St. Roch, which in 1944 made a voyage through the treacherous Northwest Passage.

City of Vancouver Archives: Step into the city’s official archives, where records documenting the Vancouver’s public and private history are preserved. Browse through more than 1 million old photographs or pore over maps, architectural plans, news clippings and heritage artwork.
The other day, FedEx showed up at my door with a little surprise. I spotted my username on the shipping label and knew right away how it got here. I was so excited and opened it up as quickly as possible. The first thing I saw was a little note saying:

"Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy your gifts! We tried to get all the items based on what you said. The LEDs for running, the sign for your guinea pigs, the minecraft keychain, and of course a lava lamp! Enjoy!!!"

I jumped with so much joy because my gift last year was not even CLOSE and personal to this one. It took a few business days for all FOUR gifts to arrive.

The first two gifts I received were the lava lamp and the LED light. They both constantly switched to different colors in time. The lamp is super neat and entertaining! The LED light will DEFINITELY come in handy when running in the night when no one can see you. Thank you for taking this into consideration!

The last two gifts were the "BEWARE OF GUINEA PIG" sign and Minecraft pickaxe keychain. The sign is so perfect for my guinea pigs' cage! I've already had a few people giggle from reading it. The last gift was a Minecraft keychain. Man, you have no idea how long I've been wanting one of these! It's a perfect addition to my dorky keychain collection!

I was looking all over for a username so I could thank them. All I have is the Secret Santa's full name. James, whoever you are, I can guarantee you that you made my Christmas a whole lot more hopeful this year. THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING!

Merry Christmas, Reddit!
SAN ANTONIO - A man is dead and woman has been taken to the hospital in a shooting on the city's far North Side, San Antonio police said Friday.

The shooting was reported just before 7:30 a.m. in the 3600 block of Ivory Creek. That's in a neighborhood found near Loop 1604 and Rodgers Ranch.

Police said when they arrived on scene they found a man and a woman both in their 40s with gunshot wounds in separate rooms, on the ground floor of a two-story home.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene. The woman in the home was taken to an area hospital. Her condition is not presently known.

Officials tell KSAT 12 that they are not searching for anyone else in regards to the shooting. However they would not confirm who shot who.

A next-door neighbor said she was told that the husband did the shooting. Two other neighbors said the couple who lived in the home had not been married long.

Additional neighbors said the children who live in the home were not present at the time of the shooting and had likely gone to school.

KSAT 12 will continue to follow this story and have more information as it develops.

Copyright 2016 by KSAT - All rights reserved.
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is locking up the baby formula, because he wants newborns to drink breast milk instead.

He’s using his mayoral power to direct maternity-ward nurses to hide baby-milk formula after Sept. 2 so that new moms feel pressured to provide breast milk to their newborns.

Bloomberg’s mammary-mandate is supported by white-coated public-health officials, who say the scientific data shows that mothers’ milk aids infants’ digestive systems and shields them from some diseases.

His wishes are law because he controls much of the city’s health network in a city-wide version of Obamacare.

But Bloomberg’s lactate-dictate is likely to get him a slap in the face from women who prefer to choose how they will raise their children, and how they juggle child-rearing and work in a city where unemployment has reached at least 14 percent in the Bronx.

The “reality is that some women may not want to breastfeed their baby and it is simply their choice,” said Cherlyn Harley LeBon, a lawyer, mom and member of the libertarian-minded Project 21’s advisory board.

“I completely support breastfeeding our babies… [but] the government should not force them to do it,” she said in a July 29 statement.

“Mayor Bloomberg is now playing the role of pediatrician and neonatal specialist… [who has declared that] a mother is now forced to breastfeed unless she has a medical reason for not doing so.”

The story was broken by The New York Post, where commentators were merciless.

“I’m another former member of La Leche League who nursed all my kids,” said Rosemarie Scott, at Marymount Manhattan College. “I’m all for encouraging women to breastfeed but agree that this is NOT the way to do it. Leave it to Bloomberg to be so heavy-handed as to turn off even a breastfeeding advocate like myself.”

The mayor’s formula-fatwa follows his earlier effort to stop moms — or any one else — from buying cups of soda larger than 16 ounces.

Babies, however, will be pushed to drink from cups sizes A to DDD under the new rules, dubbed “Latch On NYC.”

Women who refuse to nurse their infants face no penalty, because there’s no requirement that they discharge milk before they’re discharged from the hospital.

Twenty seven of the city’s 40 hospitals are complying with Bloomberg’s nursery rules.

The breast-behest is the newest feature of Bloomberg’s big-government, nanny-state, experts-first-citizens-second, progressive outlook.

He’s a social liberal, but is eager to impose rules when allied professionals say they’re good for city government.

He’s a self-declared feminist and outspoken supporter of unrestricted abortion-choice who opposes any limit on women’s ability to buy abortion services. But once the infant escapes from the womb, they’re now under the rule of Bloomberg’s nanny-state rules.

Bloomberg’s personal involvement in the private lives of citizens extends far beyond cup sizes.

He’s an outspoken critic of protests against the now-moribund effort to build a mosque alongside the Twin Towers’ ground-zero, where Islamists killed almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

He’s been in the news recently because of his — quickly recanted — call for cops to go on illegal strikes until Americans lose their constitutional right to guns, and because of his applause for President Barack Obama’s decision in June to offer a campaign-trail de-facto amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens, despite a record national unemployment rate.

New York’s unemployment rate is at least 10 percent, and half of African-American adults in the city lack jobs.

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I got lots of wonderful things, and they were all wrapped -so fun! I got:

a big sketch book (how did my match know I was on the last page of my old one? awesome timing)

a pack of Micron pens for drawing. My old ones had dried out, so also awesome!

A National Audubon Society Guide to Nature Photography (digital). Perfect! I love doing nature photography and I'm a beginner. I've been trying to figure out how to get better and this is exactly what I needed.

A Falcon Guide to the Best Easy Day Hikes near my Oklahoma City. I love hiking and I just moved here, so this will be great for helping me explore the area and find good hiking spots!

Thank you so much Legotech! These were all very thoughtful gifts, you are awesome!
NEA KAVALA, Greece — As her young children played near heaps of garbage, picking through burned corn cobs and crushed plastic bottles to fashion new toys, Shiraz Madran, a 28-year-old mother of four, turned with tear-rimmed eyes to survey the desolate encampment that has become her home.

This year, her family fled Syria, only to get stuck at Greece’s northern border with Macedonia in Idomeni, a town that had been the gateway to northern Europe for more than one million migrants from the Middle East and Africa seeking a haven from conflict. After Europe sealed the border in February to curb the unceasing stream, the Greek authorities relocated many of those massed in Idomeni to a camp on this wind-beaten agricultural plain in northern Greece, with promises to process their asylum bids quickly.

But weeks have turned into months, and Mrs. Madran’s life has spiraled into a despondent daily routine of scrounging for food for her dust-covered children and begging the authorities for any news about their asylum application. “No one tells us anything — we have no idea what our future is going to be,” she said.
Untangling Evented Code with Ruby Fibers

Event-driven programming requires a mind-shift in how you architect the program, and oftentimes directly affects the choice of language, drivers, and even frameworks you can use. Most commonly found in highly interactive applications (GUI, network servers, etc), it usually implements the reactor pattern to handle concurrency in favor of threads: the “reactor” is a main loop which is responsible for receiving all inbound events (network IO, filesystem, IPC, etc) and demultiplexing them to appropriate handlers or callbacks.

Turns out, the reactor pattern performs extremely well under heavy loads (C10K challenge), hence the continuous rise in adoption (Nginx, Beanstalkd, EventMachine, Twisted, Node.js), but it does have its downsides: it requires reactor-aware libraries, still relies on background processing capabilities for long running computations, and last but not least, once you have nested several callbacks, it results in much more complicated code. Functional purists will disagree with the last statement – after all, we all love JavaScript, and node.js is the new hot thing on the block – but what if we could write event driven code without the added complexity imposed by hundreds of nested callbacks?

Accidental Complexity of Event-Driven Code

Anyone who has written a non-trivial event driven application will be familiar with the following pattern: you often start reading your code bottom-up and then navigate your way up the callback chain. In addition, since there is no single execution context, each callback requires its own nested exception handling, which adds to the complexity - debugging is non-trivial, to say the least. Of course, this is usually not too bad in a context of a simple demo, but it also quickly spirals out of control.

EventMachine . run { page = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( 'http://google.ca/' ) . get page . errback { p "Google is down! terminate?" } page . callback { about = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( 'http://google.ca/search?q=eventmachine' ) . get about . callback { # callback nesting, ad infinitum } about . errback { # error-handling code } } }

Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer the if-then-else control flow, with top-down execution and code I can actually read without callback gymnastics. And as luck would have it, turns out these are not inconsistent requirements in Ruby 1.9. With the introduction of Fibers, our applications can do fully-cooperative scheduling (worth a re-read to make sense of the rest), which with a little extra work also means that we can abstract much of the complexity of event driven programming while maintaining all of its benefits!

Fibers & EventMachine: under the hood

Ruby 1.9 Fibers are a means of creating code blocks which can be paused and resumed by our application (think lightweight threads, minus the thread scheduler and less overhead). Each fiber comes with a small 4KB stack, which makes them cheap to spin up, pause and resume. Best of all, a fiber can yield the control and wait until someone else resumes it. I bet you see where we're going: start an async operation, yield the fiber, and then make the callback resume the fiber once the operation is complete. Let's wrap our async em-http client as an example:

def http_get ( url ) f = Fiber . current http = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( url ) . get # resume fiber once http call is done http . callback { f . resume ( http ) } http . errback { f . resume ( http ) } return Fiber . yield end EventMachine . run do Fiber . new { page = http_get ( 'http://www.google.com/' ) puts "Fetched page: #{ page . response_header . status } " if page page = http_get ( 'http://www.google.com/search?q=eventmachine' ) puts "Fetched page 2: #{ page . response_header . status } " end } . resume end

First thing to notice is that we are now executing our asynchronous code within a fiber (Fiber.new{}.resume), and our http_get method sets up the call, assigns the callbacks and then immediately yields control as it tries to return from the function. From there, EventMachine takes over, fetches the data in the background, and then calls the callback method, which in turn resumes our fiber, passing it the actual response. A little bit of fiber gymnastics, but it means that our original code with nested callbacks can now be unwound into a regular top-down execution context with if-then-else control flow. Not bad!

EM-Synchrony: Evented Code With Less Pain

Of course, we wouldn't gain much if the net effect of introducing fibers into our event driven code was swapping callbacks for fiber gymnastics. Thankfully, we can do better because much of the underlying implementation can be easily abstracted at the level of the driver. Let's take a look at our new helper library, em-synchrony:

EventMachine . synchrony do page = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( "http://www.google.com" ) . get p "No callbacks! Fetched page: #{ page } " EventMachine . stop end

Instead of invoking the default EM.run block, we call EM.synchrony, which in turn wraps our execution into a Ruby fiber behind the scenes. From there, the library also provides ready-made, fiber aware classes for some of the most common use cases (http: em-http-request, mysql: em-mysqlplus, and memcached: remcached), as well as, a fiber aware connection pool, iterator for concurrency control, and a multi-request interface. Let's take a look at an example which flexes all of the above:

EM . synchrony do # open 4 concurrent MySQL connections db = EventMachine :: Synchrony :: ConnectionPool . new ( size : 4 ) do EventMachine :: MySQL . new ( host : "localhost" ) end # perform 4 http requests in parallel, and collect responses multi = EventMachine :: Synchrony :: Multi . new multi . add :page1 , EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( "http://service.com/page1" ) . aget multi . add :page2 , EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( "http://service.com/page2" ) . aget multi . add :page3 , EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( "http://service.com/page3" ) . aget multi . add :page4 , EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( "http://service.com/page4" ) . aget data = multi . perform . responses [ :callback ]. values # insert fetched HTTP data into a mysql database, using at most 2 connections at a time # - note that we're writing async code within the iterator! EM :: Synchrony :: Iterator . new ( data , 2 ) . each do | page , iter | db . aquery ( "INSERT INTO table (data) VALUES( #{ page } );" ) db . callback { iter . return ( db ) } end puts "All done! Stopping event loop." EventMachine . stop end

Synchrony implements a common pattern: original asynchronous methods which return a deferrable object are aliased with "a" prefix (.get becomes .aget, .query becomes .aquery) to indicate that they are asynchronous, and the fiber aware methods take their place as the defaults. This way, you can still mix sync and async code all in the same context (within an iterator, for example). For more examples of em-synchrony in action, take a look at the specs provided within the library itself.

Towards Scalable & Manageable Event-Driven Code

Event driven programming does not have to be complicated. With a little help from Ruby 1.9 much of the complexity is easily abstracted, which means that we can have all the benefits of event-driven IO, without any of the overhead of a thread scheduler or complicated code. Node.js, Twisted, and other reactor frameworks have a lot going for them, but the combination of EventMachine and Ruby 1.9, to me, is a clear winner.

We should also mention that fibers have been ported to Ruby 1.8, but due to their implementation on top of green threads they incur much larger overhead - in other words, this is your reason to switch to Ruby 1.9! And last but not least, fibers or not, don't forget that Ruby 1.9 still has a GIL which means that only one CPU core will be used. Until we see MVM (multi-VM) support, the solution is simply to run multiple reactors (one or more for each core).
OAKLAND, Calif. — One message on the web forum asked neighbors to be on the lookout for “two young African-Americans, slim, baggy pants, early 20s.” Another warned of a “light-skinned black female” walking her dog and talking on her cellphone.

“I don’t recognize her,” the post read. “Has anyone described any suspect of crime like her?”

These postings appeared on the Oakland forums of Nextdoor.com, a website intended to be a virtual neighborhood hangout for the tens of thousands of neighborhoods and hundreds of local police departments that use it to communicate with residents. The site’s chief executive and co-founder, Nirav Tolia, describes it as a place to find a babysitter, a plumber or a missing cat, and to have a “kind of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ chatter.”

But people also use it to report suspected crimes. And as Nextdoor has grown, users have complained that it has become a magnet for racial profiling, leading African-American and Latino residents to be seen as suspects in their own neighborhoods.

In response to the complaints, the company has begun testing ways to prevent these kinds of postings.
Before I get started, I want to point out that this article is aimed at pre-field graduate students and undergraduates, and that the context is working with American funding agencies. YMMV.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, my dissertation research is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSFGRFP) and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (FHDDRA). The former provides three years of funding that must be used in five years of graduate school. I can use it in place of a TA stipend while I’m on campus or I can use it during fieldwork. In my case, I’ve opted to defer it while I’m in the field so that I can use the Fulbright-Hays, and then I’ll use it when I get back so that I don’t have to TA while I write-up. The proposal that I wrote for the NSFGRFP was submitted during my senior year in college, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t recall a particular process that I used to write it. For those looking for information on how to write a proposal for the NSFGRFP, there are some useful websites, guides, and resources on the internet, and you can read my dreadful proposal here. The FHDDRA is another – much longer – story.

Start Early and Construct a Prototype

The sociocultural curriculum at Washington University is designed with very specific goals in mind, perhaps none more important than “get your research funded.” So, while I would like to say that the Proposal Writing course that we are privileged to have at WashU was the most influential to my ability to win money, the process started before that. First, I consider the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSFDDRIG) as a prototype, as it may be the longest and most comprehensive form of a dissertation research grant for sociocultural anthropologists. My proposal for the NSFDDRIG was ten pages, single-spaced, Times New Roman, 11pt font, justified, with one-inch margins on all sides. (Additionally, there was a four-page section of References Cited in the same format. I used the Chicago Manual of Style author-date citation.) That gives me an enormous amount of room to explain my project, and that’s important because proposal writing (for me) amounts to the spectre of my mentors watching as I write while incessantly asking, “Why is that important?” and “How do you know that?” The headers of the NSFDDRIG are up to the author, so I took some winning proposals which were generously donated by more senior graduate students and constructed my own in this order:

Problem Statement: What is the problem? Why is it important? Foreshadow every major point you’re going to make in the rest of the proposal. This section is constantly being retooled as new things are being added later in the proposal because you don’t want readers to find something out half-way through. At the same time, you’ve got to keep it brief.

Research Objectives (1, 2, and 3): Once I’ve explained the problem, I’ve got to explain what my objectives are to figuring out an answer to the problem. Here, you should foreshadow what kinds of data counts as satisfying these objectives and what kinds of methods are most appropriate for collecting that data.

Literature Review (with subsections): Backup a second. Your work is a response to other scholars’ work – you’re having a conversation – so you need to catch the reader up on what has been said so far and how your project proposes something new and different.

Research Methods (includes Timeline, Sampling Design, Data Collection, and Data Analysis)

Research Timeline: A broad overview of your plan. I put mine into a table that took up half-a-page and basically said, in “Months 1-2” (first column), I’ll be “Hiring research assistants; conducting focus group interviews with community stakeholders and gatekeepers; recruiting interview participants” and so forth.

Sampling Design: Who do you need to talk to and why? What methods will you use with them and what kind of data do you expect to get from them? How will those data answer objectives 1 or 2 or 3? (Tie it back to the rest of the proposal.)

Data Collection Methods: What are the methods you will use, what data do you expect to get from them, why are those data important to helping you make your argument, and how do those data relate to your objectives?

Data Analysis: Once you collect your data, what will you do to confirm that they address your objectives and how will you recognize that they do?

Broader Impacts: “encompasses the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes” (from NSF 15-556). For me, this meant giving back to the community and participants with which I work, giving back to the academic community in Dakar, and (lastly) engaging my home public though social media.

Research Experience: Who are you and why are you the right person for the job?

This is an important first consideration because it serves as a kind of checklist. One of the first things that I needed to do as a graduate student at WashU was prepare my “Second Year Paper,” a sort of part lit review, part non-thesis made up of three parts: two theoretical (I chose Postcolonial Theory and Masculinity) and one Area Studies (i.e. Senegal for me). This paper needed to be submitted to my committee by early-January of my second year. Just before that, in the fall semester of the second year, we’re taking a Research Methods in Anthropology course. Therefore, by the time we begin our Proposal Writing course in the spring of our second year, we’ve already got our literature review and our methods roughly done – which were a full seven pages of my ten-page proposal. The biggest challenge for me in the Proposal Writing course was not designing the research (much of that had already been cooking for a couple years), but stringing it all together in a cogent, deliberate, and airtight argument. While we spent weeks writing and re-writing and re-writing the Problem Statement and Objectives in a class dedicated to fine-tuning the argument, I was also taking a course in Argumentation through Ethnography which was teaching me – by deep-reading newly published ethnographic monographs – how to piece together arguments and turn data into evidence. That semester completely changed the way I thought about writing and the most significant lessons I learned were simple: Say what you’re going to do and don’t leave loose ends.

Cut, cut, cut.

The reason, I think, that it’s important to begin with the NSFDDRIG is that it is easier (for me) to trim and cut material than it is to add. It is true that some agencies are asking different kinds of questions. The Social Science Research Council, for example, wants Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship proposals to draw heavily on interdisciplinarity, so I wrote about feminist geography, urban studies, global health, and the sociology of space. The Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant Application asks the dreaded Question 5: “What contribution does your project make to anthropological theory and to the discipline?” – an overwhelming question that one must answer in half of the space allotted to the other four questions! NSF and SSRC do care about your answer to this question, but they aren’t asking so explicitly, and having seen previous NSF and SSRC dissertation award proposals, I’m fairly certain that someone could skate by with barely a consideration to their contributions to anthropological theory and still be awarded money. Indeed, they have.

Aside from these differences in questions, the major components remain the same: What is the problem? What is the context of the problem? How are you going to figure it out? The most significant difference between the NSFDDRIG and the rest of my proposals is the page count. While the NSFDDRIG is up to ten pages, single-spaced, the Wenner-Gren is essentially four and a half pages, single-spaced; SSRC was ten pages, double-spaced; Fulbright U.S. includes a two-page, single-space “Grant Purpose” and a one-page, single-spaced personal statement; my Fulbright-Hays was eight pages, double-spaced. I think that completing the NSFDDRIG first, if possible, will allow you to get the fullest view of your research plan.

Find a community!

Lastly, I recommend joining a writing group, either on campus or online, where members are committed to regularly reading and commenting on each other’s writing. It, of course, helps if those members are either at the same level of proposal writing or are experienced and winning proposal winners in anthropology. Importantly: A winning proposal does not make it a model for future writers. First, sometimes people win because the problem statement is just that irresistible and compelling, despite their dreadful methodologies and incomplete literature reviews. (I know! I’ve seen them!) Second, as long as judges, entry rules, annual budgets, and trends in anthropology are changing from year to year, the target will always be moving. Do not take winning examples and attempt to replicate their formulas. It won’t work.

So, in the end, between April 2016 and June 2017, I wrote and submitted two FHDDRA proposals, I wrote three NSF-DDRIG proposals and submitted two, I wrote two Wenner-Gren proposals and submitted one, and I wrote and submitted one proposal to SSRC and one for the Fulbright U.S. That’s nine written proposals, seven submitted, and one awarded. But let’s be honest – they’re all basically the same.

To recap:

Develop a prototype. I recommend the NSFDDRIG.

Be recursive. Tie everything you write into something else you’ve already written. Justify every word and sentence.

Find a community of writers to work with.

Write a lot and submit a lot, but also don’t write too much because you already have a prototype. (That doesn’t make sense. I know.)

Next up: Ethical review or writing the interview instruments?

Dick Powis is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include men and childbirth, prenatal screening technologies, and reproductive health in urban settings in Senegal. Read more at dickpowis.com. http://www.dickpowis.com
Silence on human rights encourages despots, discourages activists.

President Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on April 3, 2017. (Photo11: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images)

To the extent that the Trump administration's foreign policy has started to take shape — and it seems to be a work in progress — advocacy of human rights and democracy doesn't seem to be very high on the agenda.

If anything, Trump's "America First" foreign policy is looking more like a sort of realpolitik, where ethical and moral considerations are shed in favor of achieving transactional "wins" on jobs and security.

The president seems drawn to autocrats and cynical about promoting cherished American ideals. Asked in February about Russian President Vladimir Putin's reputation for ordering political killings, Trump didn't miss a beat: "Do you think our country is so innocent?"

Last month, the administration lifted human rights conditions on the sale of F-16 fighters to Bahrain, where political dissidents are locked up without due process. And the annual State Department report on global human rights was issued without fanfare or the usual news conference.

This week, Trump gushed about Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi when the two met at the White House. Sisi overthrew his democratically elected predecessor in 2013 and has brutally cracked down on political dissent, a sure route to fomenting more violent extremism. "He's done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation," Trump said, vigorously shaking Sisi's hand, something he didn't do with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch ally, two weeks earlier.

It's true, as the foreign policy realists like to point out, that America can't right every wrong in the world. Trump needn't go as far as President George W. Bush, whose grandiose vision of bringing democracy to the Middle East, by military invasion if necessary, led to the fiasco in Iraq. Or even as far as President Carter, who made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

But there’s nothing wrong with private nudges, public rhetoric and material incentives to make clear America stands for basic freedoms. There’s no reason to cede the moral high ground and every reason to try to hold it.

Silence on human rights discourages the pro-democracy activists who put their lives on the line for the rights Americans take for granted — and encourages the bad actors such as Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

As Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Wednesday, it's probably no coincidence that a horrific chemical weapons attack occurred in Syria soon after U.S. officials suggested that Assad could stay in power. (Later in the day, Trump condemned the attack but didn't say what he'd do about it.)

Which brings us to the meetings between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping planned for Thursday and Friday at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. The White House has said that human rights will be raised discreetly, if at all.

Xi's regime imprisons peaceful critics, detains people accused of violating Communist Party rules, holds hundreds of activists for years without trial, and engages in widespread Internet censorship. For all this, Xi avoids accountability to the Chinese people.

Shouldn't America at least advocate — for a moment during the discussion of trade imbalances, currency rates and North Korea — doctrines of freedom for the leader of the world's largest, repressive regime? Would it do any harm if Trump diplomatically pressed Xi to release Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, whose "crime," for which he's serving an 11-year prison sentence, was to circulate a petition for placing human rights, democracy and the rule of law at the core of the Chinese political system?

As much as Trump might disdain moralizing, part of his job is to send the message that America cares about its values.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

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Image copyright Austin Police Department

Hollywood star Shia LaBeouf has been arrested and charged with public drunkenness, police in Texas say.

Police arrested the actor on Friday night on Sixth Street in Austin's entertainment district.

The actor has had numerous brushes with the law throughout his career.

Witnesses said LaBeouf initially caused a disturbance on Friday after being refused a drink at a bar, and later jaywalked in front of police.

Officers are reported to have subdued him and put him in handcuffs before arresting him, the TMZ website reported.

Jail records quoted by the AP news agency say that he spent Friday night in the Travis County Jail and has now been released.

In September 2014, he pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct over his disruption of a Broadway performance of Cabaret.

He was also arrested after a fight in a bar in Los Angeles in 2011, although he was later released without charge.

Image copyright EPA Image caption The actor has had numerous brushes with the law

Shortly before that arrest, a publicist for the actor said that he was receiving treatment for alcoholism.

There have also been a series of instances where LaBeouf is said to have behaved erratically in public - on one occasion appearing on the red carpet with a paper bag on his head, on which was written: "I am not famous anymore."

LaBeouf - who also writes screenplays - found fame at age 14 as the star of the Disney series Even Stevens and has also starred in three Transformers films.

The star's movies include Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
I’ve recommended it to many people over the years, mostly elders who hadn’t considered the internet being that useful, and usually they’re like, “aw? A website? No thanks, it’s not necessary”. Which is fine even if internally I was like “plsssss no it’s so good”.

A lot of gen-z are getting into fiber crafting and that is exciting.

So, here’s a little intro

This is the homepage, after making an account

Up on the top right is your notebook, which you’ll probably visit the most because it contains all of the tools for organizing your projects.

That’s your notebook, on the left bar are your various tools. Projects are lined up neatly on the rest of the screen. There’s a Handspun tab for spinners, Stash is where you organize your yarns, uQeue is where you list upcoming projects, Favorites is where you can save and organize your favorite projects/patterns, Needles & Hooks gives you a chart that you can fill in with what you already own, Library is a digital library of patterns and even representations of the physical books that you own.

Each of these can be customized, for example in favorites in there is a place to bundle them, so that if you wanted to say make a bundle of everything you want to knit as Christmas presents throughout the year, you can do that. In Queue you can link the called for yarn and the yarn you are going to use, linked from stash or otherwise, you can make notes on each entry. I will often note whether I need needles and what kind, so that if I drop by the store, the info I need is just a couple of clicks away. There is even a place in the stash to note where you got your yarn and how much it cost.

I’m not going much more deeper into that, but if ya’ll want me to do a post about specific tools let me know.

The most attractive part of Ravelry for me is easily searchable database of patterns.

If you click on the Patterns button at the top left of the homepage, it takes you here.

I typically go straight to pattern browser & advanced search through the link under the search bar.

The great part of this are the filters on the left. You can filter by category of clothing, if and how it’s in your notebook, by craft type, by it’s availability (like whether it’s free, downloadable, or purchased elsewhere), whether or not it has photos (because there are many self-published designers), by attributes such as shape, techniques, texture, and types of colorwork, by age, size, ease, fit, and gender, by weight of the yarn called for, by yardage required, by number of colors used, by pattern source, by needle size, by star rating, by difficulty, by origin of crochet terminology, and by language. There are many more search options after the main filters.

So for example if I had exactly 700 yards of worsted eight yarn in two colors, and I knew I wanted to make a scarf, using bobbles and colorwork, I could search that.

Not only that, but you can customize the filters to combine traits:

I could make my selections and hit advanced where I’ve circled in red and,

specify that I want merino, and cashmere, or silk, but not nylon. I still got 27 matches from that search, but that’s how big the database is.

And the same goes for the yarn tab at the top left of the homepage next to patterns. You can search through pretty much every yarn available, from red heart to indie fiber artists, using similar characteristics to narrow it down.

I hope someone found this useful and if you’re a knitter or crocheter, it’s seriously worth a look. I’m not very active lately, but It’s where I go for inspiration if nothing else.
Alan McConnell is the new coach of the Giants' AFLW team

ALAN McConnell will replace Tim Schmidt as coach of Greater Western Sydney’s NAB AFL Women’s team.

McConnell, the Giants' director of coaching, will continue working with the AFL team.

The club said Schmidt, who coached the NSW/ACT team in the NAB AFLW Under-18 Championships, had stepped down to focus on his expanded role with AFL NSW/ACT’s talent programs. He also operates a kicking academy business.

"When the opportunity arose, it made sense to look internally to continue to build the relationship between our AFL and AFLW teams," Giants CEO David Matthews said.

"Alan had already assisted our AFLW players and coaches across the inaugural AFLW season and to secure him in this role is a real win.

"Importantly, he will continue to be across the men’s program during the women’s season, and return to the men’s program during the AFLW off-season."

Matthews thanked Schmidt for his contribution to the club’s inaugural AFLW season.

"Many of the values and processes he implemented will continue into 2018 and beyond," he said.

"Pleasingly Tim’s role at AFL NSW/ACT will ensure he continues to work with the Giants' AFLW program as the key person identifying and developing young female talent in New South Wales and the ACT."

McConnell played 37 games for Footscray and was the last coach of Fitzroy before it merged with the Brisbane Bears at the end of 1996. He was previously an assistant coach at Geelong and the AIS-AFL Academy’s high-performance coach. He has been with the Giants since 2009.
Image copyright AP Image caption The Greek coastguard said it had tried to save the migrants

The UN has called for an inquiry after a boat carrying migrants capsized while being towed by a Greek coastguard vessel, leaving up to twelve dead.

Two bodies were found but a further 10 people were missing after the incident near the island of Farmakonisi on Monday. Sixteen people were rescued.

The coastguard says it judged it safer to keep migrants on their own boat than to take them aboard in bad weather.

Greek officials say panicking migrants caused the boat to capsize themselves.

According to reports, two migrants fell or dived overboard and others rushed to one side of the boat to rescue them, causing the boat to tip.

The deaths of a woman and a child have been confirmed.

One non-government organisation, Pro Asyl, accused the Greek authorities of trying illegally to prevent the migrants, believed to be 26 Afghans and two Syrians, landing in Greece.

"It is highly likely that this action by the Greek coastguard was an illegal push-back operation rather than a rescue at sea," said Karl Kopp, the NGO's director of European affairs.

Another NGO, Ecre, said: "Survivors tell that they were crying out for help, given that a large number of children and babies were on board."

Greece is one of the main destinations for clandestine migrants and refugees seeking to enter the EU, through its land or sea borders.

Correspondents say there has been a sharp increase in sea-borne refugee traffic over the past year because of stricter controls on the Greek-Turkish land border to the north and the ongoing war in Syria.

'More bodies'

In a statement on Tuesday, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said it was "dismayed" at the events off Farmakonisi.

It quoted survivors on the island of Leros as saying the Greek coastguard had tried to tow the boat towards the Turkish coast at high speed when it capsized.

"UNHCR is urging the authorities to investigate this incident and how lives were lost on a boat that was under tow," said Laurens Jolles, its southern Europe regional representative.

"In addition survivors need to be quickly moved to the mainland so that their needs can be better looked after."

Responding to the UN on Wednesday, the Greek coastguard insisted it had been trying to tow the boat, which had broken down, to Farmakonisi - and not to Turkey - after receiving a distress signal.

It put out a fire on the stricken boat and rescued 16 people from the water, it said.

Following the disaster, a Greek helicopter searched the area, which is near the Turkish coast, for survivors.

According to a report in Greek newspaper Kathimerini, two more bodies have been found by the Turkish authorities - those of an 11-year-old child and a 38-year-old woman.

There have been persistent reports of Greek officials forcing migrants back into Turkish waters.

Pro Asyl and Ecre called for an "independent and effective investigation of the circumstances that caused such loss of life".

"The NGOs reiterate that push-backs are illegal, endanger people's lives and have to end immediately," they said in a press release.
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Right-wing radio: Romney loses, GOP dies

Leading conservative talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are both arguing that the Republican party will or should be shut down if Mitt Romney loses in November -- an idea that, however hard to believe, gives you an indication of the right wing's dissatisfaction with the Republican party.

"If you can't beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party. Shut it down, start new, with new people. Because this is a gimme election, or at least it should be," Ingraham said on her radio program yesterday. "Election after election, we hire people who have lost previous campaigns, who have run campaigns that have failed, who have messaged campaigns where the message fell flat, and they keep getting re-hired."

Where Ingraham made an argument, Limbaugh made a prediction: The Republicans would fall, but not before blaming the conservative base for their woes and opening a window for a third, more conservative party to take their place.

"If Obama wins, let me tell you what it's the end of: The Republican Party. There's gonna be a third party that's gonna be oriented toward conservatism. I know Rand Paul thinks libertarianism. And I know if Obama wins, the Republican Party is gonna try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed," he said.

"The only problem is, right now Romney's not running a conservative campaign. But they're gonna set it up to say, 'Well, the right sat home,' or, 'The right made Romney be other than who he is.' They'll try to deflect the blame, but they got who they want."
In a bid to keep the city streets cleaner, the Maharashtra government on Tuesday approved an anti-spitting law. If you now decide to spit on the streets, you will be fined Rs 1,000 and will have to spend a day performing community service at a public office or a government office, reported The Times of India.

However, this is for first-time offenders, and the punishment and fine is higher for repeat offenders. For a second-time offender, the fine will be Rs 3,000 plus three-day community service, and for repeat offenders the fine will be Rs 5,000 plus five-day community service.

Maharashtra will become becomes the first state in India to get an anti-spitting law if cleared by the Assembly. The state government has been planning to have a proper law in place for quite some time now.

Deepak Sawant, state Public Health Minister told The Indian Express,"We had to bring in a punishment that would shame the offenders and hurt their ego. Simply paying a penalty is not enough deterrent. Offenders pay the paltry amount, and often don’t think twice before repeating the act. So, we decided to bring in compulsory community service."

The report said that offenders will be given a broom and asked to sweep a state government office or hospitals or a school.

The law has been in the making for a few months now and Sawant said that the law will be in force in the next six months.

"A law against spitting in public places is already in existence and in Mumbai, the BMC acts against people who spit in public. But it is not that effective," Sawant had said in January 2015, pointing to a rise in the number of cases of tuberculosis.

"We will also check if we can suspend driving licence of a taxi or auto driver who spits in public places like roads. We will make the legislation effective so that there will be a deterrent for people who indulge in such activity," the minister had said.

The new law is a precursor to banning chewing tobacco in public. Experts said an effective anti-spitting law will bring down incidences of airborne diseases.

"It will also affect the tobacco-chewing habit as people will be restrained from spitting out tobacco. This is a move towards a healthy lifestyle," said Dr A Bamne, executive health officer of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

Even if this is the first attempt by the state government to make Mumbai a spit-free zone, earlier efforts by the BMC and the Maharashtra government have not been too fruitful.

As early in 2007, the BMC had deployed 'cleaning marshals' to keep spitters, those who litter, tobacco chewers in check. But the scheme came under a lot of flak over its implementation. Soon, complaints started pouring in against the 'clean-up marshals.' Political interference, high-handedness of the marshals and corruption rendered the the entire system useless, an article in Firstpost said.

Dr Sawant, however, reassured that there would be no political intervention with the anti-spitting law.

"The committee will suggest who will be the implementing authority at various places and how to collect the fines. For instance, in Mumbai city, BMC commissioner will be the in-charge, but traffic police or police could be authorized to collect fine on the roads," The Times of India quoted the health minister as saying.

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45% of video gamers, and 46% of game purchasers, are women. More complex storylines, more personalized characters, more acceptance of ‘geekiness’ as something to be proud of and a wider variety of games available are just a few of the reasons why gaming is no longer being seen as a boys-only club. Women are finding their place in the gaming world. , a YouTuber and gamer with 60,000 subscribers, is excited about the change. “More and more I feel like it is normal for a woman to play video games too. It's no longer "a guy thing". Growing up I often heard "What, you play video games?! That's so awesome, girls never play video games!", but now when you tell someone you play video games you'd sooner get the question what kind of games you're into, which is really nice.” GirlGamerGaB , a YouTuber and gamer with 60,000 subscribers, is excited about the change. “More and more I feel like it is normal for a woman to play video games too. It's no longer "a guy thing". Growing up I often heard "What, you play video games?! That's so awesome, girls never play video games!", but now when you tell someone you play video games you'd sooner get the question what kind of games you're into, which is really nice.”

And yet, even the fantasy world still isn’t equal. But from gamers, to game developers, to women in games, we still have a long way to go before gaming becomes an gender-equal world. ...for women who play games: On paper, a female gamer’s customer experience should be no different to that of a man’s. In practice, the communal nature of gaming means that male gamers can make life pretty unpleasant for a female gamer… a ‘side effect’ of the product she didn’t sign up for. Women face roughly three times more harassment than men when playing online. Gamer and YouTuber Yasmin Uddin (known as Yammy xox) said she experienced sexism first hand, “mostly during games like Call of Duty and Gears of War. I was ashamed to speak in online game chat as I felt as if I’d be ridiculed for my voice.... I’d be told to ‘get back into the kitchen.”

It’s not always that aggressive – but unwanted attention is still a distraction to women just looking to play the game. “A lot of people try to make flirty conversation whenever they find out I’m a female gamer, and ask for my personal details, like Facebook or Skype,” says Hayley W, an avid gamer. And sometimes, men will be unnecessarily forgiving towards a woman – skewing her results in the game. “They’re a lot more forgiving to me if I make mistakes. They assume I’m not as good as them and sometimes give me game money in an attempt to flirt.” ...for women in games: In a make-believe universe where anything is possible, is it really so hard to picture female characters without pinched waists, hourglass curves, and tiny, tiny skirts? Despite managing to come up with a seemingly endless amount of alternate worlds and fantastical societies, games often fall back on the same old tropes of women wearing clothes which, if you think about it, are highly impractical for the things they’re expected to do within the game.

Still, things are improving: a recent survey pointed to a decrease in the sexualization of female protagonists in games over the last eight years. More and more women are being given three dimensional roles and complex personalities. Just give them some clothes, too? ...for women in the gaming industry: Most games are created by men, for men. Governments around the world are talking about the lack of women in STEM (science, tech, engineering, maths) – for the gaming world, the problem manifests itself in fewer female coders and developers to create games. Those who do make it into the industry, face lower salaries for doing – you guessed it – exactly the same job – women in gaming in the US, for example, make 86 cents for every dollar made by a man in the industry. Women working in gaming have also been known to face vicious and sexist abuse from gamers – you need only to look at the #GamerGate controversy, where several women working in the industry faced an orchestrated online campaign of misogynistic harassment and threats, to see that the cost of working in gaming for women is higher than just the pay gap.
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In a recent interview, Angela Merkel made a statement that may be considered the signal for the implementation of the brutal Greek experiment inside Germany itself:

I am concerned with trying to provide jobs for as many people as possible. We have improved in the last years and have managed to halve unemployment since 2006, but we have also made sure that minimum earning capacity has improved through the minimum wage. This means that people who work the full day should not be reliant on welfare.

Economist Heiner Flassbeck explained to Sharmini Peries and The Real News how much the German chancellor and her party is devoted to the 'ideology' of lowering wages in the name of job creation.

As he said:

What Angela Merkel says is an ideology. It's an ideology of her party, but also it's affecting the Social Democrats, that says if you go for a policy that reduces unemployment, this is the best kind of social policy that you can have. Even if people suffer or if wages fall, this is then absolutely necessary and is justified because falling wages do a good thing, produce a good thing, namely more jobs, which is not true.

Unemployment is falling very slowly, but it's falling quite steadily, but it is not, so to say, the immediate result of the reduction of the social contributions to the poorer people or the reduction of the wages. It's mainly the result of Germany's huge export surplus, which cannot be copied by other countries.

Germany has now a very low minimum wage. It's eight euros and a little bit, which is much too low given the productivity of Germany. If Madam Merkel would really be realistic and would not have her ideology of low wages producing jobs, she would increase the minimum wage. There would be no problem at all given the very high German productivity.

The Social Democrats and the Green Party were those in the beginning of the century who reduced the social contributions, who said we have to lower the contributions dramatically to make the people search for work and that will reduce unemployment. The Social Democrats have never distanced from their own mistakes and so there is no difference between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats on this.

The most probable outcome will be a continuation of the Grand Coalition, so we will go on for the next four years. And the poor people will not change the outcome of the election because they are four or five million people and many of them will not even go to the election, so that will not change anything.

Flassbeck's remarks show that current German leadership actually continues to lower wages, not because this is a policy that helps towards the creation of jobs, but, essentially, because of its ideological devotion to the destructive neoliberalism.

Furthermore, check out again Merkel's last sentence: "This means that people who work the full day should not be reliant on welfare." Actually, Merkel is showing the policy that her party, or coalition, is about to implement in case she will get elected for another term. Next step according to the Greek experiment: the destruction of the welfare state, which has a long tradition in Germany.

As already described , German oligarchs promote another "haircut" of multiple dimensions across Europe. They proceed into a violent cut of salaries and pensions, trying to equalize them in a first phase with those of countries of the former Eastern bloc, and disolving the welfare state. Federalism means however, that the same policies will be applied totally, definately and very soon, also against German citizens and workers.

As Flassbeck rightly pointed out, the Social Democrats in power, or as leaders in a coalition with Cristian Democrats will not make much difference. Both these two parties in Germany, and more or less in Europe, have been occupied completely by the neoliberal doctrine. Their single mission will be to federalize Europe with the Greek experiment as a pattern.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) – mythologised in popular imagination as ‘Veer Savarkar’ – not only refrained from participating in the freedom struggle after the British released him from prison on account of his relentless pleas for mercy, but also actively collaborated with the English rulers to whom he had declared his loyalty.

At the time when Subhas Chandra Bose was raising his Indian National Army to confront the British in India, Savarkar helped the colonial government recruit lakhs of Indians into its armed forces. He further destabilised the freedom movement by pushing his Hindutva ideology, which deepened the communal divide at a time when a united front against colonial rule was needed. Post independence, Savarkar was also implicated in Mahatma Gandhi’s murder.

Such is the man who was declared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be “the true son of Mother India and inspiration for many people”, in his Twitter salutation to Savarkar on his birth anniversary on May 28 last year. In 2015, commemorating Savarkar on his 132nd birth anniversary, the prime minister bowed before a portrait of the Hindutva icon in remembrance of “his indomitable spirit and invaluable contribution to India’s history”.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley was quick to follow up on the act. “Today, on birth anniversary of Veer Savarkar, let us remember & pay tribute to this great freedom fighter & social-political philosopher,” he tweeted. And somewhere in the stream of Twitter accolades from numerous BJP ministers that followed, the TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai joined the chorus, albeit with a caveat. While he disagreed “with his ideology”, Sardesai said he honoured Savarkar’s “spirit as freedom fighter”.

A freedom fighter he definitely was, for a certain period in the first decade of the previous century, long before he’d begun articulating the notion of Hindutva. Savarkar was then an atheist and a rationalist, who had started out on a revolutionary road to rid India of her colonial yoke, asserting:

“whenever the natural process of national and political evolution is violently suppressed by the force of wrong, the revolution must step in as a natural reaction and therefore ought to be welcomed as the only effective instrument to re-throne Truth and Right.”

On sailing to England to study law in 1906, Savarkar founded the Free India Society to organise Indian students studying in England to fight for independence. In a famous declaration before the society, he said:

“We must stop complaining about this British officer or that officer, this law or that law. There would be no end to that. Our movement must not be limited to being against any particular law, but it must be for acquiring the authority to make laws itself. In other words, we want absolute independence.”

However, when the time came to pay the price for being a revolutionary under an oppressive colonial government, Savarkar found himself converted and transformed into “the staunchest advocate of loyalty to the English government”, to use his own words. This was after he was arrested and sentenced to serve 50 years in the infamous Cellular Jail on the Andaman islands after he was found guilty of supplying the pistol that a member of the Abhinav Bharat Society used to assassinate the then collector of Nasik, A.M.T. Jackson, in 1909.

‘Veer’ Savarkar pleading with the British for mercy

Barely a month into the hardships of prison, Savarkar wrote his first mercy petition, which was rejected in 1911. The second mercy petition, which he wrote in 1913, starts with bitter complaints about other convicts from his party receiving better treatment than him:

“When I came here in 1911 June, I was along with the rest of the convicts of my party taken to the office of the Chief Commissioner. There I was classed as “D” meaning dangerous prisoner; the rest of the convicts were not classed as “D”. Then I had to pass full 6 months in solitary confinement. The other convicts had not… Although my conduct during all the time was exceptionally good still at the end of these six months I was not sent out of the jail; though the other convicts who came with me were. …For those who are term convicts the thing is different, but Sir, I have 50 years staring me in the face! How can I pull up moral energy enough to pass them in close confinement when even those concessions which the vilest of convicts can claim to smoothen their life are denied to me?”

Then, after confessing that he was misguided into taking the revolutionary road because of the “excited and hopeless situation of India in 1906-1907”, he concluded his November 14, 1913 petition by assuring the British of his conscientious conversion. “[I]f the government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me,” he wrote, “I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of… loyalty to the English government (emphasis added)”.

“Moreover,” he went on to say, making an offer which few freedom fighters could even think of making, “my conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious..The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the paternal doors of the Government?”

In his fourth mercy petition, dated March 30, 1920, Savarkar told the British that under the threat of an invasion from the north by the “fanatic hordes of Asia” who were posing as “friends”, he was convinced that “every intelligent lover of India would heartily and loyally co-operate with the British people in the interests of India herself.”

After reassuring the colonial government that he was trying his “humble best to render the hands of the British dominion a bond of love and respect,” Savarkar went on to exalt the English empire: “Such an Empire as is foreshadowed in the Proclamation, wins my hearty adherence”. “But”, he added:

“if the Government wants a further security from me then I and my brother are perfectly willing to give a pledge of not participating in politics for a definite and reasonable period that the Government would indicate… This or any pledge, e.g., of remaining in a particular province or reporting our movements to the police for a definite period after our release – any such reasonable conditions meant genuinely to ensure the safety of the State would be gladly accepted by me and my brother.”

Finally, after spending ten years in the cellular jail and writing many mercy petitions, Savarkar, along with his brother, was shifted to a prison in Ratnagiri in 1921, before his subsequent release in 1924 on the condition of the confinement of his movements to the Ratnagiri district and his non participation in political activities. These restrictions were lifted only in 1937.

Self-glorification of a defeated man

One might have argued in 1924 that the promises he made about his love and loyalty to the British, about his readiness to serve the government in any capacity required and so on were a part of a tactical ploy – perhaps one inspired by Shivaji – employed to make his way out of prison so that he could continue his freedom struggle. However, history has proven him to be a man of ‘honour’, who stood by the promise he made to the colonial government. How then, one might wonder, did Savarkar acquire the title ‘Veer’?

A book titled Life of Barrister Savarkar authored by Chitragupta was the first biography of Savarkar, published in 1926. Savarkar was glorified in this book for his courage and deemed a hero. And two decades after Savarkar’s death, when the second edition of this book was released in 1987 by the Veer Savarkar Prakashan, the official publisher of Savarkar’s writings, Ravindra Ramdas revealed in its preface that “Chitragupta is none other than Veer Savarkar”.

In this autobiography masquerading as a biography written by a different author, Savarkar assures the reader that:

“Savarkar is born hero, he could almost despise those who shirked duty for fear of consequences. If once he rightly or wrongly believed that a certain system of Government was iniquitous, he felt no scruples in devising means to eradicate the evil.”

Without mincing words in the name of modesty or moderating the use of adjectives in the name of literary minimalism, Savarkar wrote that Savarkar “seemed to posses no few distinctive marks of character, such as an amazing presence of mind, indomitable courage, unconquerable confidence in his capability to achieve great things”. “Who,” he asked about himself, “could help admiring his courage and presence of mind?”

Perhaps in polite society, we ought to quietly look the other way with an embarrassed smile when an ex-revolutionist, after breaking down in prison, indulges in self-glorification under the cover of a pen name after his release. And, indeed, no one who did not suffer the conditions the inmates of that infamous prison on the Andaman islands had to endure, can claim the right to castigate Savarkar for refusing to contribute to the freedom movement after he was released from jail.

But his purporting of an ideology which destabilised the freedom movement by deepening the divisions along sectarian lines and his active rendering of support to the British government – which was determined to subdue the anti-colonial struggle – was a betrayal that must be hard to forgive, especially for a ‘patriot’ and a ‘nationalist’.

Derailing the freedom movement with his Hindutva ideology

The sectarian mindset, which eventually culminated into the articulation of Hindutva ideology, was evident – as Jyotirmaya Sharma has demonstrated in Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism – in the early Savarkar, that too from a tender age. Only a boy of 12, Savarkar, leading a pack of his schoolmates, attacked a mosque in the aftermath of the Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay and Pune in 1894-95. Holding back the Muslim boys of the village using “knives, pins and foot rulers”, Savarkar and his friends mounted their attack, “showering stones on the mosque, shattering its windows and tiles”. Recollecting the incident, he later wrote, “We vandalised the mosque to our heart’s content and raised the flag of our bravery on it.” When the news of Hindus killing Muslims in the riots and its aftermath reached him, little Savarkar and his friends “would dance with joy”.

The sectarian nature of Savarkar’s social and political thinking not only bred in him a deep-rooted resentment against Muslims but also clouded his understanding of historical events, leading him to perceive the 1857 War of Indian Independence as a retaliation by Hindus and Muslims against Christianity, in response to Britain’s efforts to Christianise India. In his 1909 book, The War of Independence of 1857, published during his revolutionary days, years before he had declared his loyalty to the British government, Savarkar wrote, quoting Justin McCarthy, “The Mahomedan and the Hindu forgot their old religious antipathies to join against the Christian.”

What was to stop the British government, which had passed a law against the practice of Sati (widow burning), from meddling further with Hindu customs by passing a law against idolatry, he asked. After all, “[t]he English hated idolatry as much as they did suttee.” Describing a process he perceived to be the destruction of Hinduism and Islam in India, Savarkar wrote in his book::

“The Sirkar (government) had already begun to pass one law after another to destroy the foundations of the Hindu and Mahomedan religions. Railways had already been constructed, and carriages had been built in such a way as to offend the caste prejudices of the Hindus. The larger mission schools were being helped with huge grants from the Sirkar. Lord Canning himself distributed thousands of Rupees to every mission, and from this fact it is clear that the wish was strong in the heart of Lord Canning that all India should be Christian.”

The sepoys, according to Savarkar, were the primary targets in this mission to spread Christianity in India. “[I]f any Sepoy accepted the Christian religion he was praised loudly and treated honourably; and this Sepoy was promoted in the ranks and his salary increased, in the face of the superior merits of the other Sepoys!”

“Everywhere”, he argued, “there was a strong conviction that the Government had determined to destroy the religions of the country and make Christianity the paramount religion of the land”. By thus giving religion an unwarranted centrality in his analysis of the causes of the rebellion, Savarkar, says Jyotirmaya Sharma, expressed jubilation in his accounts of the rebellion “at every instance of a church being felled, a cross being smashed and every Christian being ‘sliced’.”

While the seeds of communalism had been sown in his mind at a very young age, the poison fruit of Hindutva ideology was to blossom only in his late 20s, after Savarkar’s will to fight the British (or the Christians, as he often referred to them in his book on the 1857 uprising) had been defeated during his imprisonment. It was during his last few years of imprisonment that Savarkar first articulated the concept of Hindutva in his book, Essentials of Hindutva, which was published in 1923 and reprinted as “Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?” in 1928. This ideology was a deeply divisive one which had the potential to distract attention from the British and cast it on Muslims instead.

While he was careful to specify that Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, was different from Hinduism and encompassed a wide range of cultures including, among others, the “Sanatanists, Satnamis, Sikhs, Aryas, Anaryas, Marathas and Madrasis, Brahmins and Panchamas”, he nonetheless made it a point to warn that it “would be straining the usage of words too much – we fear, to the point of breaking – if we call a Mohammedan a Hindu because of his being a resident of India.”

“Mohammedan or Christian communities”, he argued, “possess all the essential qualifications of Hindutva but one and that is that they do not look upon India as their Holyland”. A cohesive nation, according to Savarkar, can ideally be built only by those people who inhabit a country which is not only the land of their forefathers, but “also the land of their Gods and Angels, of Seers and Prophets; the scenes of whose history are also the scenes of their mythology.”

The love and loyalty of Muslims, he warned, “is, and must necessarily be divided between the land of their birth and the land of their Prophets… Mohammedans would naturally set the interests of their Holyland above those of their Motherland”. One might wonder whether this line of reasoning implies that Muslims cannot be nationals of Pakistan or Afghanistan either, because they would place the interests of Saudi Arabia, wherein lie Mecca and Madina, above the interests of their own country.

Back in the 1920s, the damage that could be done to the freedom movement by his ideology did not fail to come to the notice of the colonial government. Even though Savarkar was released on condition that he should not participate in political activities, he was allowed by the British to organise the Ratnagiri Mahasabha, which undertook what is in today’s lingo called “Ghar Wapsi” and played music in front of mosques while prayers were on.

He was also allowed to meet K.B. Hedgewar, a disillusioned Congressman, who, inspired by his ideology of Hindutva, intended to discuss with him a strategy for creating a Hindu Rashtra. A few months after this meeting, in September 1925, Hedgewar founded the RSS, a communal organisation which, like Savarkar, remained subservient to the British.

In spite of the blanket ban on political participation, Shamsul Islam pointed out:

“The British rulers naturally overlooked these political activities as the future of colonial rule in India rested on the communal divide and Savarkar was leaving no stone unturned in aggravating the Hindu-Muslim divide.”

Collaboration with the colonial government

Savarkar was elected as the president of Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, the year when the Indian National Congress won what we today call a landslide victory in the provincial elections, decimating both the Hindu Mahasabha and that other communal party, the Muslim League, which failed to form a government even in Muslim-majority regions. But just two years later, the Congress relinquished power in protest when, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India to be at war with Germany without any consultation.

In September 1939, the working committee of the Congress declared that it would render support to Britain’s war efforts in her time of crisis only if the colonial government recognised India’s independence and “the right of her people to frame their constitution through a constituent assembly”. When dominion status was the last concession Linlithgow was willing to grant to India, the ministers of the Congress resigned in protest.

Quick to grab the opportunity, the very next month, Savarkar, in his capacity as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, met Linlithgow. In the report about the meeting sent to secretary of state, Linlithgow wrote:

“The situation, he [Savarkar] said, was that His Majesty’s government must now turn to the Hindus and work with their support…. Our interests were now the same and we must therefore work together… Our interests are so closely bound together, the essential thing is for Hinduism and Great Britain to be friends and the old antagonism was no longer necessary. The Hindu Mahasabha he went on to say favoured an unambiguous undertaking of Dominion status at the end of the war.”

Two months later, addressing the Mahasabha’s Calcutta session, Savarkar urged all universities, colleges and schools to “secure entry into military forces for youths in any and every way.” When Gandhi had launched his individual satyagraha the following year, Savarkar, at the Mahasabha session held in December 1940 in Madura, encouraged Hindu men to enlist in “various branches of British armed forces en masse.”

In 1941, taking advantage of the World War, Bose had begun raising an army to fight the British by recruiting Indian prisoners of war from the British army held by the Axis powers – efforts which eventually culminated in his invasion of British India with the help of the Japanese military. During this period, addressing the Hindu Mahasabha session at Bhagalpur in 1941, Savarkar told his followers:

“..it must be noted that Japan’s entry into the war has exposed us directly and immediately to the attack by Britain’s enemies…Hindu Mahasabhaites must, therefore, rouse Hindus especially in the provinces of Bengal and Assam as effectively as possible to enter the military forces of all arms without losing a single minute.”

In reciprocation, the British commander-in-chief, “expressed his grateful appreciation of the lead given by Barrister Savarkar in exhorting the Hindus to join the forces of the land with a view to defend India from enemy attacks,” according to Hindu Mahasabha archives perused by Shamsul Islam.

In response to the Quit India Movement launched in August 1942, Savarkar instructed Hindu Sabhaites who were “members of municipalities, local bodies, legislatures or those serving in the army… to stick to their posts,” across the country. At that time, when Japan had conquered many Southeast Asian countries in India’s vicinity, Bose was making arrangements to go from Germany to Japan – from whose occupied territories the INA’s assault on British forces was launched in October the following year.

It was under these circumstances that Savarkar not only instructed those serving in the British army to ‘stick to their posts’, but had also been involved for years in “organising recruitment camps for the British armed forces which were to slaughter the cadres of INA in different parts of North-East later.” In one year alone, Savarkar had boasted in Madura, one lakh Hindus were recruited into the British armed forces as a result of the Mahasabha’s efforts.

Even though the British Army, with which Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha were collaborating, managed to defeat Bose’s INA, the subsequent public trials of INA officers at the Red Fort roused in the Indian soldiers of the British armed forces a political conscience, which played a crucial role in triggering the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny in 1946, after which the decision was made by the British to leave India.

In coalition with the Muslim League when Pakistan resolution was passed

That Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha actively collaborated with the British may not be difficult to comprehend, since it is widely known that the Hindutva groups regarded Muslims, and not the British, as their primary enemies. What is likely to raise more eyebrows today is the collaboration of the Hindu Mahasabha with the Muslim League.

When the Congress leaders were arrested during the Quit India movement, the Hindu Mahasabha, still presided over by Savarkar, entered into a coalition with the Muslim League to run the governments in Sindh and Bengal – a move Savarkar justified as “practical politics” which calls for “advance through reasonable compromises”.

After all, in spite of the deeply-held conviction by Savarkar and his party that the Muslims – whose holy land lies in a foreign country – cannot be regarded as Indian nationals, the Hindu Mahasabha nevertheless had a great deal in common with the Muslim League. Both parties made no contribution to the struggle for independence from the colonising empire and both were communal parties whose ideologies antagonised the prospects of India remaining undivided after independence.

Even after the Sindh assembly passed a resolution in 1943 demanding that Pakistan be carved out of India as a separate state for the Muslims, the Mahasabha ministers continued to hold their positions in the coalition government. Not entirely surprising, given that Savarkar had put forth his two-nation theory “a clear sixteen years before the Muslim League embraced the idea of the Hindus and the Muslims as two distinctive nations and demanded the division of India.” And when India was eventually partitioned, Savarkar blamed Gandhi for allowing Pakistan to break away from India, an accusation that stoked the fires of hatred against Gandhi among many of his close devotees, including his ‘lieutenant’ – Nathuram Godse.

The second part of this series will focus on Savarkar’s role in Gandhi’s assassination.

Pavan Kulkarni is a freelance journalist.
T.J. Rivera’s transition to third base is a work in progress the Mets are willing to withstand.

Since moving to the position on a regular basis three weeks ago, Rivera has struggled with his fielding and throws, but is earning praise for his approach to the experiment.

“He knows he doesn’t have to be Nolan Arenado at third base to be a big league player,” infield coach Dick Scott said, referring to the Rockies’ Gold Glove third baseman. “[Rivera] looks at video and he’s out here doing the work and it might take time, but it’s going to happen. I have a lot of confidence in him.”

Rivera has six errors in 28 games at third base, but the Mets want to find out if he’s a viable option at the position for this season and beyond.

The Mets continue to like Rivera’s bat: He entered Friday’s game against Oakland with a .289/.333/.437 slash line with five homers and 25 RBIs. He then delivered two singles and drove in two runs for the Mets in their 7-5 victory over the Athletics.

“Honestly, I think [third base] is going to happen for him,” Scott said. “It might take some time. The worst thing we all can do on anything is say, ‘Next spring training we’re really going to get after this.’ Then three wasted months go by. I give him all the credit: He wants to do all the work. Every day he is finding me and we come out. That is all we can do.”

Neil Walker is expected to begin a rehab assignment Saturday for Triple-A Las Vegas in his comeback from a partially torn left hamstring. The veteran second baseman played a simulated game Friday at Citi Field.

The Mets’ .523 winning percentage in interleague play, is the best among National League teams. After this three-game series against Oakland, the Mets have interleague series remaining this season against the Mariners, Rangers and Astros.

Amed Rosario missed his fourth straight start for Triple-A Las Vegas because of a bruised finger he sustained earlier in the week.

Lucas Duda has one less error after an MLB scoring change from last Sunday against Colorado: Trevor Story was awarded a hit on a play in the eighth inning in which Duda originally received an error.
It’s already hard enough to part with a quarter-of-a-million dollars to buy a Ferrari 458 Italia, but can you imagine the rationale behind the man who would fork over that much money to buy a book?

Yeah, neither can we.

Now if you’re wondering if such a book even exists, then prepare to be introduced to the “Official Ferrari Opus”.

The book’s publisher, Opus Media Group, is calling it the “most exclusive book in the world”, and with the most expensive version retailing at $275,000, we find it hard to believe that there’s another book that’s being sold for that much.

Ridiculous as the price tag of this book may be – believe us, there’s nothing justifiable about a book that costs more than an actual car – those interested in it do have options to choose from.

The 852-page book weighs in at 82 lbs and is printed using heavy-duty paper. It’s got over 2,000 photos of every Ferrari vehicle that Maranello has ever produced, be it a road car or a race car. On top of that, the book contains over 200,000 words detailing literally everything and anything you need to know about the Italian automaker.

Check out how much each version of the Official Ferrari Opus book costs after the jump.
Arctic Methane Emissions ‘Certain to Trigger Warming’

As climate change melts Arctic permafrost and releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, it is creating a feedback loop that is “certain to trigger additional warming,” according to the lead scientist of a new study investigating Arctic methane emissions.

The study released this week examined 71 wetlands across the globe and found that melting permafrost is creating wetlands known as fens, which are unexpectedly emitting large quantities of methane. Over a 100-year timeframe, methane is about 35 times as potent as a climate change-driving greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and over 20 years, it's 84 times more potent.

Permafrost terraces in Alaska.

Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildife Service Alaska/flickr

Methane emissions come from agriculture, fossil fuel production and microbes in wetland soils, among other sources. The study says scientists have assumed that methane emissions from wetlands are high in the tropics, but not necessarily in the Arctic because of the cold temperatures there.

But a spike in global methane concentrations in the atmosphere seen since 2007 can be partly traced back to the formation of fens in areas where permafrost once existed, according to the study, led by University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) biology professor Merritt Turetsky.

The methane emissions stemming from melting permafrost could be critical to determining how fast the climate will change in the future.

“Methane emissions are one example of a positive feedback between ecosystems and the climate system,” Turetsky said. “The permafrost carbon feedback is one of the important and likely consequences of climate change, and it is certain to trigger additional warming.”

Warming and thawing permafrost stimulate methane release, which enhances the greenhouse effect, creating a feedback loop, she said.

“Even if we ceased all human emissions, permafrost would continue to thaw and release carbon into the atmosphere,” Turetsky said. “Instead of reducing emissions, we currently are on track with the most dire scenario considered by the IPCC. There is no way to capture emissions from thawing permafrost as this carbon is released from soils across large regions of land in very remote spaces.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected in its fifth assessment on climate change report that the earth’s average temperatures could warm by as much as 8.64°F above 1986-2005 temperatures if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Coastal erosion reveals the ice-rich permafrost underlying the Arctic Coastal Plain in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

Credit: USGS

Turetsky’s study shows that fens in the northern latitudes created when permafrost thaws can have emissions similar to wetlands in the tropics. Emissions from fens are generally higher than bogs and some other wetland types because fens, fed by groundwater, have higher nutrient levels and more grasses than bogs, leading to more methane production.

“Our study highlights that northern wetlands without permafrost emit more methane than wetlands with permafrost,” U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist and study co-author Kimberly Wickland said.

“When permafrost is absent, wetlands can be more connected to groundwater, allowing for wetter conditions — the main ingredient for methane production,” she said. “It is possible that methane emissions from wetlands will continue to increase with continued permafrost thaw, but that will depend primarily on whether wetlands stay wet. If they dry, then methane emissions will decline.”

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goodard Institute for Space Studies in New York and not part of the study, said it's too soon to draw conclusions about how much wetland methane emissions will impact global warming, though scientists widely agree that the amplified feedback is generally going to increase.

The paleo record shows that the Arctic was several degrees warmer during the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago, and there is no evidence of increased levels of methane in the atmosphere during that period, he said.

“It's not to say at some point it won't become an issue,” Schmidt said, adding that there is evidence of many “methane burps” across the globe in the very distant past.

“The planet is very capable of surprising us,” he said.

By surveying many wetland sites across the globe as Turetsky and her team have, scientists can gain a much broader understanding of the source of methane emissions from melting permafrost and their role in the feedback loop, Schmidt said. Many previous studies have examined just a single site whereas Turetsky's team examined numerous sites across the globe.

“The work these people are doing in terms of trying to synthesize that information and bring it all together, I think it's certainly going in the right direction,” he said.

Turetsky's study, “A synthesis of methane emissions from 71 northern, temperate, and subtropical wetlands,” was published this week in the journal Global Change Biology.

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Looks like the TARDIS fell out of the Time Vortex and landed in an strange new dimension.Honestly, I can't believe I haven't seen something like this before. Now I'm not saying one doesn't exist, just that I haven't seen it.Anyway, I think it turned out well. Took me forever to find a TARDIS picture from a good angle to get the desired result.I especially like Ditzy Doo's expression here.---FIRST EDIT, Nov. 27, 2011:Changed the color of the TARDIS light to better match the show. For some reason, I thought it blue. I also added a faint green glow to the Doctor and Ditzy, emanating from the TARDIS interior.--Doctor Whooves vector made by * Zork-787 Ditzy Doo/Derpy Hooves vector made by ~ solusjbj TARDIS photo belongs to the BBC [link]
BY: Follow @FBillMcMorris

General Motors has shied away from promoting the Chevrolet Volt in 2013 as the federal government begins selling off its final shares of company stock, a move one expert said may have been made to avoid reminding the public of the federal bailout.

GM press releases have avoided discussing the plug-in hybrid that was once hailed as the "halo car" and a "moon shot" that could increase GM’s market share in green technology.

GM’s public press releases mentioned the Chevrolet Volt roughly 111 times per month when it launched in 2010 and 92 times the following year.

However, the company began drawing less attention to the vehicle in November 2011 when the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration launched an investigation into claims that the vehicle’s fire hazards.

From December 2011 to December 2012, the company mentioned the Volt just 31 times per month. The acceleration of the federal government’s withdrawal from the company has also coincided with decreasing attention drawn to the Volt. GM press releases have mentioned the vehicle just 11 times per month on average through September 2013.

Despite record-breaking sales in August, GM mentioned the Volt only once, as part of a press release focused on overall company performance.

"The Chevrolet Volt had its best month ever, as did the Chevrolet Spark, Chevrolet Sonic, Cadillac XTS and Buick Verano," the release said.

Auto analyst Ed Niedermeyer said that GM has every reason to distance itself from the car because it served as a reminder of the company’s ties to Washington and the $50 billion taxpayer bailout, which he says tarnished the brand.

"More than turning a profit, Volt was supposed to give GM a ‘green halo’ like the one the Prius bestows on the Toyota brand," he said. "Because the Volt is so closely associated with the bailout, it has turned out to be a net negative in terms of public relations."

The Treasury Department sold $3.4 billion worth of stock between January and August of 2013, before announcing in September that it would sell off the remaining 101.3 million shares in taxpayer holdings.

GM did not respond to request for comment.

Company executives have been doing their best to turn the page on the bailout in recent years, especially as it attempts to unveil a new line of pick-up trucks, SUVs, and a revamped Corvette. GM North America President Mark Reuss said in October that the company must overcome the "Government Motors" moniker it acquired during the bailout.

"We … know that the government ownership influence is highest among truck buyers," Reuss said. "Being owned by the government is problematic for now."

Dave Sullivan, a car expert with AutoPacific, said that the company’s lack of attention for the Volt reflects the "natural" market cycles for vehicles, rather than any relation to government ownership.

"The car came out three years ago now," he said. "They’re introducing their bread and butter pick-up trucks; they’re now turning to SUVs, so the Volt is going to get passed by right now."

The reason the Volt received so much attention when it was first introduced had more to do with GM’s "stale line-up—there wasn’t a whole lot to get excited about," according to Sullivan.

"Now they have very good product," he said. "They’re probably turning out the best vehicles they’ve ever engineered—they’ve come a long way in a very short time."

Niedermeyer agreed that the new car excitement "tapers off" the longer it is around, but said the Volt stands out as a special case of silence.

"GM doesn’t want the Volt out there reminding traditional truck buyers that it’s a bailed-out company, as that message clashes with the values of patriotism and self-reliance that truck marketing depends on," he said.

Taxpayers are expected to lose $10 billion on the GM bailout.
A woman described in court as an animal lover has admitted cutting a rabbit’s ears off.

Tereska Al-Rawi, of Dirkhill Road, claimed she amputated the ears by accident.

Bradford and Keighley Magistrates’ Court yesterday heard that Al-Rawi, 55, initially lied to the RSPCA and claimed she had found the rabbit in a park and that it was already injured.

The RSPCA released pictures of the injured animal in an appeal to help track down those responsible for its injuries, which also included a broken leg that Al-Rawi claimed was nothing to do with her.

Nigel Monaghan, prosecuting for the RSPCA, said the white Angora rabbit – which are known for their long and soft wool – was taken to a vet on October 12 last year after Al-Rawi claimed to have found it.

He said despite treatment the animal had to be put down.

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Mr Monaghan said Al-Rawi eventually confessed to buying the rabbit on October 11 last year from a second-hand shop, before cutting off what she believed was matted fur.

“She was adamant in interview that she did not know she had cut the ears off,” said Mr Monaghan.

The court heard, in mitigation, that Al-Rawi bought the rabbit after taking pity on it. The animal was already not in a good condition at the time, the court was told.

Her solicitor said: “She took the rabbit in with her heart in the right place. She is an animal lover with three dogs and two cats.

“She was reckless and should have been a bit more careful in what she was doing.”

Magistrates adjourned the case for probation reports to be prepared, and chairman Nadine Tidswell said: “She has no previous convictions, but it is a very serious offence and very upsetting for everyone, including the lady.”

Al-Rawi, who admitted a charge of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal, was released on bail to be sentenced on April 28.
Sometimes Séverine Mehault climbs the stairs to the second floor for no reason at all. She walks along the hallway, past her son's room and into her daughter's bedroom. Then the 40-year-old lies down on the bed, next to a white stuffed bunny, and closes her eyes for a moment, trying to understand why only one of her two daughters, 15-year-old Kenza, is still there -- and why Sahra has abandoned her.

Not much of Sahra is left in the room: her stuffed rabbit, a Koran in translation, a prayer book and a guide to the correct methods of bathing for Islamic women. The guide is a worn, pink brochure with small illustrations. Chapter 3 is titled: Instructions for Cleaning Your Ears.

There's a dish containing red nail polish, mascara and lip gloss, but Sahra hasn't worn makeup in almost two years. After turning 15 at the time, she converted to Islam.

She left France on March 11, 2014 to joint the jihadists in Syria. The family doesn't know where she is exactly, or which terrorist group she has joined.

Her father drove her to the train station in Narbonne on that March day, as he did every day, when she would take the train to school in the nearby city of Carcassonne in southwestern France. A surveillance camera image shows Sahra, 17, standing on the platform in Narbonne, at 7:44 a.m. She is wearing white jeans, white sneakers and a black headscarf, and she is carrying two shoulder bags. The last image of Sahra on French soil, also taken with a surveillance camera, shows her at the airport in Marseille. She took an afternoon flight to Istanbul, and the next day she continued to Antakya on the Turkish-Syrian border.

Séverine Mehault has spread out photocopies of the surveillance camera images on the dining room table, next to the last photo she took of Sahra. It depicts her daughter dressed entirely in black, in a jilbab, a floor-length robe with baggy sleeves, and a hijab, or headscarf. She is smiling, with a soft, roundish face.

A Faraway Country

"Before she left, I didn't even know what was happening in Syria. It was a faraway country for me," says Mehault, running her fingers across the photo. Her fingernails gnawed to the quick. These days, she anxiously follows the news, trying to discern where exactly the group known as the Islamic State is fighting and where the West is bombing the terrorists. The TV set in the living room is constantly switched on. Sometimes she even leaves the radio on at night.

On that Tuesday in March, Sahra didn't come home in the evening. The family called the police. When officers came to the house the next day, they brought along the surveillance photos and retraced the route Sahra had taken. They asked a few questions, and when they left they took along the family's computer and tablet device.

Séverine Mehault received a call on her mobile phone two days later, with an unknown number appearing on the screen. She was so excited that she passed the phone to her eldest son, Jonathan. It was Sahra. She was calling to tell her parents not to worry, and that she was doing well. "I married Farid, a fighter," she told them. "He's 25 and comes from Tunisia."

"Where are you?" Jonathan asked.

"In Syria," his sister replied.

She also said that she would protect her family, even though they were all infidels. Then she hung up.

Her mother describes herself as an atheist, while her father, Kamal Mehenni, is a Muslim. He was born in France, the son of a French woman and an Algerian man.

But Mehenni never goes to the mosque, and he doesn't strictly abide by Ramadan fasting rules. Sitting next to his wife at the table, he says: "We raised our children without any religion. Togetherness was important to us, not faith."

'We Should Have Noticed Something'

Sahra's father is a tall, gentle man with powerful hands. In a region with high unemployment, he has been supporting his family with odd jobs for the last few years. "We should have noticed something," says Mehenni. His wife repeatedly says the same thing.

Mehault and Mehenni live with their children in a yellow, two-story house, in a town of 8,000 inhabitants near Narbonne, which we will not name, surrounded by the vineyards of the Languedoc region. Wild grapevines are entwined around the front door, and there is a plastic pool in the yard. There are many framed family photos on the walls.

There is nothing to suggest a reason for a 17-year-old girl to run away from this life. Nevertheless, Sahra spent a long time preparing her escape, as she gradually became radicalized, in full view of her family.

Extremism is infecting young French people like a slow but steadily progressing disease. And like a disease, its course varies slightly among individuals, and yet in each case it passes through similar stages.

Targeting French Youth

There are believed to be about 1,000 French citizens in Iraq and Syria, or en route to those countries, more than from any other European nation. Entire families have joined jihadist movements, including about 100 young French women. Many have already been married off to fighters in the Turkish-Syrian border region. Once a girl is married and pregnant, it becomes more difficult for her to flee. The terrorist groups that are targeting France in their recruitment efforts include Islamic State and Syria's Al-Nusra Front.

"Young people are being deliberately targeted, boys and girls, each for different purposes," says Dounia Bouzar, who has been studying the radicalization of French youth for 15 years. Bouzar, 50, an anthropologist specializing in religion, had already analyzed the phenomenon of self-proclaimed holy warriors when officials at the French Interior Ministry were still dealing with isolated cases. She wrote a book on the subject in 2006, a sort of guide for parents. Bouzar says that she saw this wave of radicalization of French youth coming, but that she would have preferred to be wrong.

On a sunny fall day, Bouzar is sitting in a Paris brasserie, ignoring a constant stream of calls on her mobile phone. Today she is part of a small team of advisers to the interior minister. In the spring, when cases of minors who had secretly left the country were mounting, Bouzar set up a hotline for family members seeking advice. About five new families call the hotline every week. But Bouzar also receives calls from young girls wanting to know what to do about female friends who have stopped wearing makeup and no longer want to go to the movies. Instead, they say, the girls are now covering their entire bodies with loose-fitting robes.

Radicalization

Sahra's radicalization began the same way. Then she converted to Islam. When she told her parents about it, Mehault thought that her daughter was simply becoming interested in her father's religion. Then Sahra began praying regularly, first twice and eventually five times a day. She traded her jeans for long dresses, wouldn't leave the house without a headscarf, and stopped plucking her eyebrows. One day, when Mehault caught her daughter trying on a face veil, she said: "Sahra, religion is something you carry in your heart. You don't have to show it to everyone."

Sahra told her mother that she was an "infidel," that she was "impure," and that she had no right to judge what her daughter was doing.

Arguments became more frequent, and there were long discussions over meals. The parents, afraid that Islamophobes might attack their daughter, forbade her from leaving the house in a full veil. Instead, she stayed at home and spent hours in front of the computer.

"We should have stopped it," her mother says.

"We didn't notice how bad things were with her," says her father.

Kenza, who is two years younger than her sister, once eavesdropped on Sahra when she was Skyping with one of her "sisters" while looking at a series of images of dead children. "You shouldn't see this," said Sahra, quickly closing the window on the screen.
Closing Europe’s Borders Becomes Big Business

This is the first of a two-part report on extraordinary measures the EU is taking to keep unwanted migrants out of the EU.

ATHENS/WARSAW, Jan 9 2013 (IPS) - The European Union is implementing a new border management system with tougher migration control the core aim. Major security and weapons companies are already reaping the benefits.

Frontex, the EU border agency, has financed major weapons and security equipment producers to present their equipment in demonstrations. European national border guards have participated in these demonstrations as potential customers, IPS learns.

Frontex confirmed to IPS that the agency has been paying weapons and security equipment manufacturers to participate in demonstrations of equipment which national agencies attended as potential customers.

“In the case of companies Lockheed Martin, FAST Protect AG, L-3 Communications, FLIR Systems, SCOTTY Group Austria, Diamond Airborne Sensing and Inmarsat, it (the reimbursement) was 30,000 euros,” the agency told IPS in an emailed response.

The companies participated in demonstration of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (Drones) in Aktio in Greece in October 2011. Thirteen companies and consortiums (Israel Aerospace Industries, Lockheed Martin, FAST Protect AG, L-3 Communications, FLIR Systems, SCOTTY Group Austria, Diamond Airborne Sensing, Inmarsat, Thales, AeroVision, AeroVironment, Altus, BlueBird) demonstrated technological solutions for maritime surveillance.

“The payments made to the companies to cover the costs incurred by them to participate in the demonstration in Aktio varied from 10,000 euros to 198,000 euros,” said Frontex.

U.S.-based Lockheed Martin, French Thales and Israeli IAI are among the biggest weapons and security equipment producers in the world.

The demonstrations are part of the preparation for the launch of EUROSUR, the European External Border Surveillance System meant to enhance cooperation between border control agencies of EU member states and to promote surveillance of EU’s external borders by Frontex, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean and North Africa, in view of controlling migration to Europe.

Surveillance plans envisage the possibility of using drones to spot migrant boats trying to cross the Mediterranean.

EUROSUR is one of the two main elements of Europe’s new border management regime along with ‘Smart Borders’ which will put in place an ‘Entry-Exit System’ (EES) to identify visa overstayers, and establish a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP) to enable pre-vetted individuals to cross borders faster. The system would rely heavily on use of biometrics and on the collection of a huge database of passenger personal information.

A legislative package setting up EUROSUR was approved in mid-November this year by the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee and is expected to receive a final go-ahead soon from the entire Parliament and by the European Council, the EU’s executive. Meanwhile, preparations for EUROSUR are advancing away from public scrutiny.

The demonstrations of market ready equipment are a significant measure in the steady construction of a new EU border management system. Through 2014-2020 member states will be encouraged to buy such equipment with support from the EU budget.

The Commission estimates that the creation of EUROSUR could cost up to 338 million euros. ‘Borderline’, a study of the EU’s new border surveillance and control system published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, claims the costs could “easily” end up as high as 874 million euros. The Commission refutes the higher estimates.

The ‘Smart Gates’ initiative is estimated by the Commission to cost 400 million euros for setting up plus an additional 190 million euros annually in operating costs.

According to the Borderline study, “despite the absence of any draft legislation, or even an agreement in principle on introducing smart borders in the EU, the Commission has already allocated 1.1 billion euros to the development of an EES (EU Entry Exit System) and RTP (EU Registered Traveller Programme) from the proposed EU Internal Security Fund (2014-2020).”

The Internal Security Fund is meant to be a new component of the future EU budget (2014-2020), replacing the existing External Border Fund. According to a Commission proposal, the Internal Fund would be 4.648 billion euros annually, and among its strategic priorities will be “to finance the setting up of the EES and the RTP as well as the introduction and operation of the EUROSUR, notably through “the purchase of equipment, infrastructure and systems in member states.”

It would also “boost the operational potential of the Frontex Agency by inviting member states to earmark additional resources under their programmes for specialised equipment which can be put at the disposal of the Agency for its joint operations.”

In early December, the European Parliament gave a green light to the Internal Security Fund. Now only Council approval is needed for it to become operational – member states are expected to make a final decision on the next EU Budget in February 2013.

“The European border security policy is going in the wrong direction,” Green euro-parliamentarian Ska Keller told IPS. “Against the background of pervasive budget cuts and austerity measures, it is unbelievable that the EU is spending millions of euros for ‘smart gates’, UAVs, and other surveillance technologies.

“And it is even more shameful that those who profit most from EUROSUR and ‘smart borders’ are the big European defence contractors.”
By George Will, Washington Post - November 1, 2012

Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate. His long campaign’s bilious tone — scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference; adolescent japes about “Romnesia” — is discordant coming from someone who has favorably compared his achievements to those of “any president” since Lincoln, with the “possible” exceptions of Lincoln, LBJ and FDR. Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.

Speaking of apologies, Syracuse University’s law school should issue one for having graduated Joe Biden. In the 2008 vice presidential debate, he condescendingly lectured Sarah Palin that Article I of the Constitution defines the executive branch. Actually, Article II does. In this year’s debate, he said that overturning Roe v. Wade would “outlaw” abortion. Actually, this would just restore abortion as a subject for states to regulate as they choose. Biden, whose legal education ended well before he was full to the brim, was nominated for his current high office because Democrats believe compassion should temper the severities of meritocracy. It is, however, remarkable, and evidence of voters’ dangerous frivolity regarding the vice presidency, that Biden’s proximity to the presidency has not stirred more unease. To forestall that, Biden should heed Alexis de Tocqueville: “To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.”
Read story transcript

Since Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe first launched his controversial land reform policies in 2000, some 4,000 white farmers have had their lands seized.

And the few remaining white farmers are being driven out — like the McKinnon family.

Danielle and Mark McKinnon, with their three kids, fled their farm just outside of Harare as the local sheriff, a court official and a group of men sought their eviction.

"That day just felt so uncertain. They were just in your face. They were coming into the house," Danielle tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.

"They wanted us out, then and there," says Mark McKinnon.

Danielle McKinnon recalls leaving in the truck with their animals in the back as they were being laughed at and videotaped.

"It was actually quite a shock because we've never given in before. That feeling of defeat... It was unfair."

Since president Robert Mugabe first launched his controversial land reform policies in the year 2000, some 4,000 white farmers have had their lands seized (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

The McKinnons say they had a great relationship with their surrounding community. They were helping schools and orphanages and there was no one unhappy with them.

"It had nothing to do with happiness or race or colour or anything, it was money," Mark tells Tremonti.

In 2013, Mark said he was kidnapped by a group with very high connections to ministers and government. They were promised land and told to help themselves to farm plots close to Harare, according to McKinnon.

He was violently attacked for hours, says McKinnon.

"They wouldn't let me go… they wanted me to sign over a piece of paper saying that I allowed them to have a piece of the farm."

"I kept assuring them that I wasn't the person to give land. [It] wasn't my land anyway. It was state responsibility to give land."

Eventually Mark was released when police came but says confrontations like this happened all the time.

Now the McKinnon family lives in Stouffville, Ont. — just outside of Toronto but Danielle and Mark both agree that Zimbabwe is home.

"It's just bad politics. It will come right."

Listen to the full conversation at the top of this web post.

This segment was produced by The Current's Idella Sturnio.
According to the Express, Arsenal are close to striking a deal for West Ham defender Winston Reid, with a fee supposedly agreed with just personal terms left to discuss.

West Ham manager Sam Allardyce seems desperate to keep the talented defender who's solid performances have seen West Ham soar to 4th in the Premier League, their best start to a season in over 30 years.

Arsenal however are in desperate need of defensive cover following several injuries to first team players Laurent Koscielny and Mathieu Debuchy leaving the side worryingly short at the back.

After another defensive slip that saw the Gunners throw away a 1-0 lead to lose 2-1 to Swansea in the Premier League, it seems the fans are either calling for Wenger's head or reinforcements in the January window.

Despite Arsene Wenger's stubbornness to spend following a string of embarrassing performances defensively the Gunner's manager might just be persuaded to reach into his pocket to bolster his side's faltering defence.

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Reid would certainly add a different dimension to Arsenal's back line, as a very physical defender it would be hard to see Arsenal beaten in the air with Winston Reid and Per Mertesacker controlling the back line.

Much-Needed Bolstering

With vice-captain Mertesacker in poor form it would be a breath of fresh air to see a new defender at the club to replace the gaping hole left by ex-skipper Thomas Vermaelen, who left the club in the summer to join Spanish giants Barcelona.

Are we to see new signings for Arsenal in the January transfer window? Or are Arsenal fans set to be disappointed again by Wenger's refusal to spend?
On April 18th the Arizona Coyotes received disappointing news as they received the third overall pick in this year’s draft from the results of the 2015 NHL Draft Lottery. Finishing 29th in the entire league behind the Buffalo Sabres, the Coyotes had a good chance at landing a first or second overall selection. Unfortunately the Edmonton Oilers came out on top, pushing Buffalo to second and Arizona to third.

The Arizona Coyotes will miss out on Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel this year but all is not lost. This team will receive a young skilled player with their pick but the question on everyone’s mind is who that is going to be. After McDavid and Eichel are selected there will be a handful of players that could easily fill that number three slot.

Do the Coyotes fill the defensive hole left after the departure of Keith Yandle? Do they tackle their lackluster scoring problem that haunted them this season? Do they trade their pick? There are many questions that can be answered with their pick on June 26th so we will have to wait and see.

The three main names left on the draft board will be Noah Hanifin, Dylan Strome, and Mitch Marner after Edmonton and Buffalo make their selections. Each of these players have a different skill set that could benefit the Arizona Coyotes in many different ways and will help in the overall goal of bringing the Stanley Cup to the desert.

With that being said, Howlin’ Hockey wants to hear from YOU! With the third overall selection in the 2015 NHL Draft, who would YOU select to join the Arizona Coyotes?

Here’s the rundown:

Position: Defenseman Games Played: 37 Goals: 5 Assists: 18 Points: 23

Noah Hanifin is regarded as the number one defensive player coming into the 2015 NHL Draft and projected to be taken third overall. Hanifin is a unique combination of physicality and mentality as he puts his body and mind to the test with each shift. He has a natural skating ability that compliments both his offensive and defensive style of play. Not only can his 6’3″ and 203 pound body eliminate players from the puck, he can also set his teammates up in a position to score.

As a freshman at Boston College, Noah Hanifin was a prominent member on the Eagles’ power-play and penalty kill. Scouts praise his ability to run the point and protect the blue line every time he steps on the ice. Noah describes his style as that of an offensive defenseman and models his skills by studying the playing styles of Duncan Keith and Drew Doughty.

Boston College coach Jerry York praised Hanifin on NHL.com by stating:

“We’re extremely pleased that not only is he a very good hockey player but he’s an outstanding teammate. He’s respected in the locker room because of his work habits and humble nature. He’s got a lot of qualities going for him besides his ability to play hockey and that makes it more enjoyable to have him around every day. Clearly his skating ability is at the NHL level right now and his puck handling and skills are excellent. He just needs to be little more assertive in the defensive zone but that will come with time.”

The biggest question with Noah Hanifin is whether or not the Arizona Coyotes feel the need to tackle their defensive problems with another young player. While an Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Noah Hanifin pairing could take the league by storm in a few seasons, it may not be essential with larger problems at hand.

The Arizona Coyotes tallied only 170 goals this season which places them 29th in the league in that category. Offense seems to be an issue for Arizona so passing on Hanifin may be an option on June 26th.

Position: Center Games Played: 68 Goals: 45 Assists: 84 Points:129

Dylan Strome is a pure playmaker that is ready to step up and play at the next level. Strome lead the entire Ontario Hockey League with 129 points this season, proving that he can light up the score sheet. Dylan has a strong knowledge of the ice and an alert vision which ultimately led him to the lead the league in assists with 84. His offensive awareness is top notch and he enjoys having the puck on his stick.

When asked about who he looks up to, Strome mentions Joe Thornton due to his soft hands and physicality. Dylan is very beneficial to his team in the faceoff circle as he wins a vast majority of draws. Dylan comes from a hockey family as well with his brother Ryan Strome currently playing for the New York Islanders. Strome’s knowledge is a key component in his high draft stock.

There are a few criticisms pertaining to the OHL’s leading scorer. Playing alongside Connor McDavid can easily make someone better and that has definitely been the case for Dylan Strome. With that being said, critics are wondering how Strome will perform without McDavid on his line. Well, without McDavid in the lineup Strome put up 35 points in 21 games. Playing without McDavid does not seem to be a problem.

Steve Kournianos of The Draft Analyst had this to say about Dylan:

“Strome’s elite play with the puck and the way he protects it can make attempts at slowing him down both futile and nightmarish. He’s a hard match up who can carve up any game plan with precision puck movement. He’s excellent at creating plays off the rush, but he also excels when the game is tightly checked and every lane is seemingly clogged. It is in the offensive zone where he uses his size, reach and elite vision to his advantage. He’s is a precise passer and gifted playmaker who epitomizes opportunistic; make a bad decision with him on the ice, and there’s a good chance you’re going pay for it.”

Is Dylan Strome the answer to Arizona’s scoring problem? Having the leading scorer of the OHL would certainly be a great starting point in the Coyotes rebuild. The probability of Strome playing in the NHL next season is low as it seems like he may need to sharpen his skills a little bit more with Erie. With that being said, having a superstar playmaker to set up players like Mikkel Boedker and Max Domi will be a huge threat in the future. His offensive awareness would be something that the Coyotes desperately need.

Position: Right Wing Games Played: 63 Goals: 44 Assists: 82 Points: 126

Mitch Marner has slowly climbed up the draft ladder as he was not expected to be a third overall pick at the beginning of the season. Marner has proved that he has what it takes to compete at the next level with his prolific offensive performance with London this year. Mitch would finish second behind Dylan Strome for the OHL scoring title at 126 points. Mitch is also the first player in London to reach a 100 point season since John Tavares in 2008.

Mitch Marner makes scoring look easy with his speed and ability to control the puck. He enjoys having the puck on his stick when entering the offensive zone in order to snipe one past the goaltender. Mitch is also recognized as a relentless forechecker and attacker. Marner compares himself to Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks and tries to model his game after him.

One of the reasons that a few analysts would pass on Mitch Marner would be due to his size. He is 5’11” and 160 pounds which isn’t necessarily ideal in the NHL. On the other hand, many players already in the league have a size limitation and that does not stop them. Tyler Johnson of the Tampa Bay Lightning currently leads the 2015 NHL Playoffs with 21 points at only 5’9″ and 175 pounds. Patrick Kane is a close second with 20 points in the playoffs at 5’11”. Size does not matter if you know how to use it and Mitch Marner certainly knows how to use his. There is a high possibility that he will hit another growth spurt before the year is over too.

Curtis Joe of EliteProspects describes Mitch Marner as:

“A dynamic offensive forward that backchecks hard and establishes his presence through playing smart, puck-possession hockey. A very quick skater gifted with great hands and hockey sense. Battles hard in all three zones and shows a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the puck to the back of the net; an unselfish player. Embodies the definition of a dynamic number-generating machine who makes the players around him better.”

The Arizona Coyotes could use a guy of Marner’s caliber on their team. Marner is a pure goal scorer that lets his presence be known with each shift he takes. Size does not limit him as he can be physical with anyone he is put up against. Drafting Marner will be beneficial to the Coyotes in terms of team chemistry as well. His junior hockey teammates Max Domi and Christian Dvorak have already been drafted by the Arizona Coyotes organization. Having three guys that all played in London together would definitely help their transition from the OHL to the NHL. Mitch Marner will aid in the Coyotes goal production if given the opportunity.

Now it’s time to let your voice be heard! There is the defensive talents of a Duncan Keith style player in Noah Hanifin, a playmaking Joe Thornton caliber player in Dylan Strome, and then a Patrick Kane influenced player in Mitch Marner. Who would you like the Arizona Coyotes to draft with the third overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft?

Who should the Arizona Coyotes draft with the third overall pick? Noah Hanifin

Dylan Strome

Mitch Marner View Results
Are we on the verge of creating artificial intelligence capable of finding answers to the world’s most pressing challenges? After steady progress in basic AI tasks in recent years, this is the vision that some leading technologists have for AI. And yet, how we will make this grand leap is anyone’s guess.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet (formerly Google), says AI could be harnessed to help solve major challenges, including climate change and food security. Speaking at an event convened in New York this week to discuss the opportunities and risks in AI, Schmidt offered no details on how the technology might be adapted for such complex and abstract problems.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind, a division within Google doing groundbreaking work in machine learning, and which aims to bring about an “artificial general intelligence” (see “Google’s Intelligence Designer”), said the goal of this effort was to harness AI for grand challenges. “If we can solve intelligence in a general enough way, then we can apply it to all sorts of things to make the world a better place,” he said.

And the chief technology officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, expressed similar hope. “The power of AI technology is it can solve problems that scale to the whole planet,” he said.

Eric Schmidt

A steady stream of advances—mostly enabled by the latest machine-learning techniques—are indeed empowering computers to do ever more things, from recognizing the contents of images to holding short text or voice conversations. These advances seem destined to change the way computers are used in many industries, but it’s far from clear how the industry will go from captioning images to tackling poverty and climate change.

In fact, speaking after his talk, Schroepfer was eager to limit expectations, at least in the short term. Schroepfer said that recent advances were not enough to allow machines to reach human levels of intelligence, and that two dozen or more “major breakthroughs” would be needed before this happened. And he said many people apparently had the wrong idea about how rapidly the field was moving. “People see one cool example, and then extrapolate from that,” he said.

The event, organized by New York University as well as companies leading the effort to harness artificial intelligence, including Facebook and Google, comes at a delicate moment for academic researchers and companies riding the wave of progress in AI. Progress seems certain to revolutionize many industries, perhaps with negative consequences, such as eradicating certain jobs (see “Who Will Own the Robots?”). It will surely also raise new ethical questions, such as the legal and moral liability in self-driving cars, or the implications of autonomous weapons (see “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions”).

But the impressive progress has inspired some within the field of AI (as well as a few outside it) to pontificate about the long-term implications of the technology. Sometimes this discussion has focused on the challenge of controlling AI should it become vastly more powerful and independent—something that is very far from possible today.

Worries over the long-term risks of AI recently inspired the foundation of a new nonprofit called OpenAI dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence that benefits humanity (see “What Will It Take to Build a Virtuous AI?”). OpenAI is funded by a billion-dollar grant from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has been outspoken about the long-term dangers of AI, and other technology heavyweights.

Hassabis and several others acknowledged that the ethical issues should be taken seriously. “As with any technology, if it’s going to be that powerful, we have to think about how to use it ethically and responsibly,” he said.
The Dallas Police Officers Association PAC endorsed Texas Governor Greg Abbott in his bid for re-election. The nod comes on the same day Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez announced her run against the incumbent governor in 2018.

Frederick Frazier, 1st vice president of the Dallas Police Association PAC praised the governor for his commitment to increasing public safety and for building a strong relationship between law enforcement officials and their communities, according to a statement provided to Breitbart Texas by the Abbott for Governor Campaign.

“Governor Greg Abbott has been a true advocate for law enforcement in Dallas and throughout our state,” Frazier said. “He has strengthened protections for our officers in the line of duty, and has worked to make sure we have the resources to better serve our communities. Texas needs four more years of Governor Greg Abbott to ensure our officers here in Dallas have the support they need to keep our communities safe.”

Governor Abbott has put law enforcement officers first during his tenure as the head of state government. Following the murder of five Dallas-area police officers in July 2016, Governor Abbott flew back from Texas to attend a press conference with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings despite having been severely burned. The governor did not announce his injury until after the funeral to avoid distracting attention from the slain officers.

Doctors advised the governor not to attend the meeting because of the risk of infection. Abbott’s first words were, “I’ve got to come back,” spokesman Matt Hirsch told the Dallas Morning News after the word of the governor’s injury spread. “It was hugely important for him to be in Dallas the next day without regard to his well-being.”

In response to the murder of the officers, Abbott began the process of issuing rifle-resistant body armor to police officers. He also proposed legislation to make targeting police officers with acts of violence a hate crime, Breitbart Texas reported.

“I, along with so many Texans, have a deep respect for our law enforcement officers,” Abbott said while thanking the officers association for their endorsement. “They put their lives on the line each and every day to make our communities safer, and we remain grateful for their sacrifice and dedication.”

“I am committed to increasing support and protections for our police officers, and I will do whatever I can to make sure they know that Texans have their backs,” the governor continued. “I am honored to receive the endorsement of the Dallas Police Association PAC. I am committed to working alongside our law enforcement officers over the next four years to improve public safety and to make sure that the men and women in law enforcement have the support and protection that they need to carry out their duties.”

The Dallas Police Officers Association is the largest police employee organization in Dallas, Frazer stated. “We are proud to endorse Governor Greg Abbott for reelection as governor of Texas,” he announced on Wednesday.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, GAB, and Facebook.
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VRChat has announced that they’ve raised $4 million in a Series A Round led by HTC Vive. They are now the key investor and strategic partner of VRChat. Joining them is Brightsone VC, GVR Fund, and Rothenberg Venture.

VRChat lets users create, publish and explore virtual worlds with other VR users from all over the world. The experience was built as a social platform for the virtual space, similar to AltspaceVR.

“Our goal is to enable anybody to create their own social VR experiences,” said Graham Gaylor, CEO of VRChat. “Partnering with HTC gets us that much closer to achieving that, and driving social experiences for VR forward.”

According to VRChat, this new stash of money will help power the future of the metaverse where they can better serve the consumer and enterprise space. And what’s quite different about VRChat is that their employees all work remotely from around the world. They have their meetings in the virtual space and immerse themselves in their own product to brainstorm their next ideas. The company is currently made up of 16 team members who were directly hired through VRChat.

“Not since the early Blizzard days have I experienced the right mix of passion, talent and magic on a project,” said Ron Millar, Chief Creative Officer at VRChat. “Now that HTC Vive is part of the VRChat dream I foresee the making of something truly epic!”

While we’ve seen social VR spaces such as AltspaceVR not make it through the test of time, maybe VRChat will be able to do so. But they will soon be facing tough competition as Linden Labs gets closer to releasing Sansar. VRChat is available for free today on Viveport so make sure to check it out.
At this point, the journey that Mighty No. 9 has taken to development has become almost comical. After a record breaking Kickstarter, hype was at an all-time high, but things quickly began to deflate after numerous delays and an attempt at doing a second fundraising campaign. The development team has remained worryingly quiet as of late, and the 'Spring 2016' window looks increasingly more unlikely with each passing day.

If a store listing at EB Games is to be believed, then it seems the game has been pushed back again. A fan recently snapped a picture of a store display, which puts the game down for a Summer 2016 release. While it's not been confirmed by the development studio yet, retailers occasionally have access to release data that's not yet public knowledge, so there's a chance that it has, in fact, been delayed once again. At this rate, perhaps we can finally expect to see the game release for the NX's successor sometime in 2022.

What do you think? How many more times will Mighty No. 9 be delayed? Were you one of the original backers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi addressed a workers' meet at Malad on Friday; turns out, some who attended, came only for the goodies

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi began his speech with 'Til gul ghya, god, god bola,' (Have tilgul, talk sweetly) the traditional greeting on Makar Sankrant, at Malad on Friday. While his speech saw a huge crowd, it seems some had gathered because they had allegedly been sweet-talked into attending and given promises of what they would get if they did. mid-day spoke to a number of people at the event. While some said that they were promised R100, one said that she was given biryani before the event. Some residents of Kandivli’s Damu Nagar who had lost their homes to the fire said that corporator Ajanta Yadav had promised them houses.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi arrives to address a workers’ meet at Malad yesterday. The Congress leader arrived more or less on time, but had to wait while other leaders gave their speeches

Also Read: Rahul Gandhi's Mumbai padyatra over power tariff hike evokes good response

Makar Sankrant was unusually busy for Malad this year as the Congress had organised a karyakarta melava (workers’ meet), to be addressed by Gandhi at the St Joseph’s School ground. A moderately sized school ground, it had the stage at its far end and a shamiana for the audience. All routes to the ground were decorated with Congress posters and banners. The police, as well as traffic police, were having a busy time controlling the situation as people thronged the gates in large groups. Inside the shamiana, people were given vada-pav and packaged water since they had been waiting for hours. The crowds largely consisted of people from the Malad, Kandivli, Charkop areas, including Malwani, Congress MLA Aslam Shaikh’s stronghold. Sanjay Nirupam, Kripashankar Singh, Priya Dutt were also present for the meeting.

Also Read: Rahul Gandhi blasts RSS, BJP's 'rigid thinking'

Gandhi sat next to the AICC secretary, Sanjay Nirupam. Nirupam passed him a chit with “Til gul ghya, god, god bola,” (Have tilgul, speak sweetly) the traditional Marathi greeting on Makar Sankrant, written on it. Gandhi used it in the beginning of his speech, to the delight of the crowds. He said, “I am going to take this phrase back with me to Delhi. And whenever Congressmen fight amongst themselves, I will say this to them.” Pics/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

Also Read: Start ups and intolerance can't go together, says Rahul Gandhi

The event started more or less on time. Gandhi’s convoy arrived at the venue around 2.20 pm, but since other leaders gave elaborate speeches, Rahul, dressed in his trademark white kurta, stood up to speak only around 3 pm. Starting off with “Til gul ghya, god god bola,” Gandhi tried to reach out to the masses. People instantly cheered and some shouted slogans like “Rahul Gandhi ki jai”. His speech ended in less than 30 minutes and he made a swift exit.

Chetna Kadam claimed she was promised Rs 100 if she attended the speech

Promises

This reporter chatted with several people from the audience and there emerged shocking details of how the party had allegedly got them to attend the event. Money, food, houses...there was no end to the things allegedly promised to get people to come and join the meeting on a hot afternoon.

Mahmooda said Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi was coming

Chetna Kadam and Lata Joshi, seated in the back row, said, “We have been promised Rs 100 by her (Neelam Mhatre) for attending. Otherwise, why would we leave our household chores?” Both are residents of Charkop and had reached the venue around 1 pm. “Today is the day of Sankrant. We were supposed to do puja in the house. The programme was supposed to start at 1 that is why I couldn’t even do puja properly and rushed here. A lot of housework is remaining.” When asked who promised them money, Joshi said that Mhatre promised it to them, and that it will be delivered to their houses soon. “You also contact the person (from Congress), you will also get it,” she said.

Hamida said they were given biryani to attend (right) Kastura of Damu Nagar said they were promised houses

Homes for all

There were a large number of people from Kandivli’s Damu Nagar attending the event. This is the area where a major fire ravaged 2,000 shanties last month.

Kastura, a resident who had lost her house in the fire said they had been promised houses by local corporator Ajanta Yadav. “Yadav has called all of us here. She arranged buses for us. Do bus bhar ke log aaye hai, (Two buses full of people arrived)” she told mid-day. Kastura and people like her were allegedly given passes by Yadav along with transportation. “I have come here for a house. Yadav said we would be given houses.” When asked how big the houses would be, where and when they would get them, she said she did not know.

Even Alka Vidyadhar, another resident of Damu Nagar, said they had been promised houses by Yadav. “I lost Rs 80,000 in the fire. I had my shanty there and that was the day we all had got our salaries. Fridge, TV, cash... everything got burnt. Right now we are living there (in another shanty). Today, we have been brought here in luxury buses,” she said.

Shakeela, another resident said that they were promised breakfast. “Pata nahin kya milega,” she said.

Biryani treat

Hamida, a resident of Ambulwadi in Malwani, had been waiting in the crowd for about two hours before Rahul Gandhi arrived. Dressed in a burkha, she said, “Aslam’s (Shaikh) men have been coming to our area for 3-4 days and registering us for the event. They gave us passes and even arranged a bus for us. Today morning, we were given biryani,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll get anything in the evening as well.”

Sanjay Gandhi?

Mehmooda, a resident of Malwani unit no.8, was sitting in one of the front rows with her daughter. In a reply that said a lot about the sorry state of affairs in the country, when asked who is coming for the event, she said Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay is coming. When asked why she was attending the event, she said their local Congress people asked them to come. They had not been offered anything.
When the Charlotte Hornets selected Malik Monk with the 11th overall pick in the 2017 NBA draft, there were some undoubtedly high expectations by fans and scouts. Many expected Monk to be able to step in almost immediately and be not only a solid role player but an above average starter as well.

Let's rewind to that day. I covered draft night for At The Hive, and remember how excited many were about this big-name prospect. There were about seven or eight guards that were very highly touted of in the NBA draft, and all were all projected to go in the top ten. Charlotte, of course, had the 11th pick, making it unlikely to come away with one of these prospects. However, when Sacramento traded the 10th overall pick to the Portland Trail Blazers, most watching the draft knew that Charlotte would have an opportunity to select the high-firepower guard from Kentucky.

Then, it happened. Rich Cho and Michael Jordan selected the nineteen-year-old, from the Kentucky Wildcats over the likes of Donovan Mitchell, Luke Kennard, and Bam Adebayo. In fact, in a poll that was run among Hornets fans before the draft (where 227 total votes were tallied), 27 percent of fans agreed the Hornets should trade up for Monk, while 70 percent agreed that Charlotte should take him if available. In fact, only three percent of Hornets fans would have picked another player over Monk (seven total votes).

It was a pick out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a ‘Charlotte’ pick. It shattered the stereotypes of the Hornets always picking big, white, unathletic centers. Monk, when asked to describe his own game in one word, said, “Electric”. As you can tell by his own response, this is not the typical Charlotte first round pick. When you think of a Hornets’ draft pick (before the 2017 NBA Draft), your thought probably floats around three ideas. A lengthy defensive guard, a grit-and-grind wing, or a defensive center. Malik Monk fits into none of the above.

However, disappointment struck after Monk missed Orlando Summer League with an ankle injury sustained in a pre-draft workout. Recovery took longer than expected, but Monk eventually made his debut in the preseason. He performed well, averaging 16 points, three rebounds, and two assists, managing to only turn the ball over once per game, and more importantly, remaining healthy. As if the expectations were not already high, this raised the bar another degree. But many forget that preseason is, well, the only preseason.

In the regular season, Monk has been streaky to say the least. Other than a few games, he has been a below average role player. His best scoring outbreak came against the Milwaukee Bucks on November 1st. He scored 25 points on 10-17 shooting, most of which came in the fourth quarter.

He is also currently one of the worst defensive players in the NBA. He ranks in the bottom 29 percent in points per possession allowed, giving up almost a full point (0.96) points per possession when his man shoots the ball. Monk also struggles to defend spot-up shooters. He ranks in the bottom nine percent, allowing a full 1.296 points per possession when his man is spotting up. This isn’t good. Considering Clifford’s defense-first mentality, this stat alone makes the fact that Monk minutes are disappearing not surprising.

That said, rookies often struggling defensively, and most teams that do actually have a top rookie don’t have any players to play above their selected player. For instance, Lauri Markkanen of the Chicago Bulls has been just plain bad on defense this season. However, what separates him from Monk are a few different factors. First of all, Markkanen has been the main scoring threat on a team that many would consider, the worst in the NBA. The Bulls aren’t exactly a playoff threat (despite beating the Hornets now twice).

It’s important to remember that the Hornets are in a win-now-or-everybody-might-be-fired mode. Cho is in a contract year, and Steve Clifford is on the hot seat. This is part of the reason that Monk will a) not start many, if not any games this season, or b) get many minutes when he does actually play. It’s all about circumstance.

Monk is the team’s third-best shooting guard behind Nicolas Batum and sixth-man Jeremy Lamb. When a team is trying to win games, they do not exactly want their third-best shooting guard playing more than 20 minutes per game.

However, there is an argument that Monk could play point-guard instead. When Michael Carter-Williams was out with an injury to start the season, Monk played backup to Kemba Walker, and even showed off some flashy passes and nice vision as well. And with the way MCW has been playing recently, there is definitely a solid argument to play Monk over him. But once again, when a borderline playoff team is trying to play with the big dogs, playing a nineteen-year-old with little point guard experience over experienced players is not ideal. In fact, it's a wildcard move. It is not a Steve Clifford-esque move.

Let’s compare Monk’s efficiency to Lamb, Batum, and Carter-Williams.

FG% of Active Hornet Guards Name FG% 3P% FT% eFG% Name FG% 3P% FT% eFG% Nic Batum 44% 36% 84% 52% Jeremy Lamb 44% 33% 83% 50% Malik Monk 34% 33% 75% 44% Michael Carter-Williams 40% 25% 70% 31.00%

As you can see, if you compare Monk’s game so far to the likes of Batum and Lamb, it isn’t even a contest.

So, why is Monk not playing instead of MCW?

It’s simple. Would you rather have an experienced player, who is solid defensively, that has size, or an inexperienced rookie who has not found a rhythm yet? This is not just confined to Clifford. I’d bet that nine out of ten coaches in the NBA would choose the experienced vet above the rookie. There have been two coaches fired so far this year. Clifford is not attempting to be the third.

Criticism aside, I still believe in Monk. I was ecstatic when the Hornets drafted him, and wrote this on him pre-draft:

Before the draft, I wrote about how it would be mindless to pass on Monk:

“Malik Monk is the most explosive player in this draft, but he is no safe bet. He is inconsistent on defense and also settles for mid-range jumpers instead of using his vision to creates shots. That being said, he is also the draft’s the best shooter, and if the Hornets are able to select him with the 11th overall pick, it would be foolish to pass on him.”

We should not be worried about Monk’s start. There is little reason to panic. He has the ability to be one of the future stars in today’s league. Sure, players like Donovan Mitchell make you concerned, considering Mitchell was taken two spots after Monk. But in reality, it takes years to fully evaluate and compare players, and even then, no comparison will be fully accurate.

But here’s a comparison that could be eye-opening. Compare Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker to Monk through their first 20 games:

Malik Monk vs Devin Booker in their first 20 games. Name Minutes Points Rebounds Assists Name Minutes Points Rebounds Assists Devin Booker 14.6 6 1.2 0.7 Malik Monk 16.9 7.1 0.2 1.8

It may be hard to remember, especially when a player like Monk falls into your hands, but greatness does not happen overnight. It’s also important to remember that Booker and Monk were very similar players coming out of college. They both went to Kentucky, both were expected to go earlier in the draft. Both were also the best shooters of their class, and both are horrible on defense. This comparison strikes many similarities.

The point is, don’t panic. Some rookies adjust quicker than others, and it often depends on many factors. Monk has potential, he just may need more time to realize it.
Human puff-adder Bill Kristol drolly noted on Morning Joe this week that the shutdown is not "the end of the world". The Huffington Post's Sam Stein snapped back, "For these people affected by these cuts, it is sort of comparable to the end of the world."

I have one quibble with Stein's otherwise satisfying smackdown: "For the people affected by these cuts" implies that there are people who are not affected by these cuts. Stein was talking specifically about the families and children across the country most likely to suffer when the government stops paying for Head Start programs and nutritional aid, but they are only the most sympathetic victims of the shutdown.

And there are a lot of them: Almost 9m mothers and children rely on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (Wic). Most states will be able to operate for about a week on the money they have, but in the words of one administrator in Cook County, "We have no cushion. If our funding stream stops we will temporarily suspend service."

The US Department of Agriculture is attempting to prop up the program in the states hardest hit – they announced this week a $2.5m grant to Utah. But the $125m they have on reserve is laughably small for a program that costs $7b a year – it's less than 2% of the total budget. If $125m was all the money the program had, it would operate for six days.

But that's just women and children. The poorest of the poor, right? We're a civilized country; we won't let them starve. As Kristol told Stein, "Localities can help out. Churches can help out." Because obviously, up until now, localities and churches were just standing around twiddling their thumbs as lounged on divans and wondered if it was time to pick out new wallpaper or maybe treat themselves to a day at the spa.

If you actually attend a church or do service work, I hope you've picked up the laptop from when you hurled it across the room just now. Already a huge patch in the patchwork of federal social services across the country, churches and private food banks have stretched themselves thin to cover the drop in federal aid that accompanied the sequester cuts last spring (Remember that? The last time we had a budget showdown?).

The ripple effects of a Wic crash spread outward quickly. Food stamp and Wic programs pump about $23m a year into retail grocery stores – indeed, a quarter of all meals for recipients of nutritional aid come from a supermarket. The Wic buys 60% of all the baby formula produced in the country. For every dollar spent on Wic, states save about $3.5 in Medicaid spending – but that's just a quantitative way of saying that Wic produces healthier babies.

But maybe you're still thinking of this as a sad story, not that has anything to do with you or anyone you know. You don't go to national parks, or live near one. (Communities that depend on national park tourism stand to lose $30m a day.) You're not a veteran. (At the VA, money allocated for disability payments and students studying under the GI bill will run out in a few weeks.)

You don't take commercial airplane flights. (About 34% of the Federal Aviation Administraion workforce is now on leave, including almost 3,000 safety inspectors.) You eat only meat and vegetables grown by your own hand and don't take any medications. (The Food and Drug Administration will cease all food and drug safety inspections, except for meat. They usually monitor about 80% of the nation's food supply; in the interm, state agencies will try to pick up the slack.) You're not in college and no one you know is one of the approximately 14 million students working their way through college or paying for it with a subsidized loan. (There will be no payments made via the Federal Work-Study or Perkins Loan Programs, or Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants.)

Basically, you are a very rich, very healthy person that lives in a cave. If you are not, then the shutdown affects you.

And this produces the one aspect of the shutdown I'm almost cynical enough to enjoy myself: far from producing proof dispositive that government is a burdensome hindrance to personal freedom, they've simply proven how little personal freedom we can enjoy if government breaks down. If this sounds familiar, it's because that reasoning has been the cornerstone of modern civilization. Or you watched "Lost".

It's not that Americans don't want government in their lives, it's that they'd like it to be an unobtrusive part of their lives. The National Security Agency might be just a little too unobtrusive, it's true. If capitalism is governed by an invisible hand, then a well-functioning government is an invisible safety net – not just for those getting obviously slapped around by capitalism, but also for anyone whose well-being depends on the free market not taking too many whiplash turns. We want the government to help the least of us, we also want it to keep planes from falling out of the sky and our food from making us sick.

This goes on long enough, and a lot that we take for granted will go away – and the thing about an invisible safety net is that you only notice it's gone once you fall.
Warner Bros. has stuck pretty much solely to Batman and Justice League related animated features in recent years, but it seems as if the success of Batman: The Killing Joke and the recently released Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders may have opened the door to some slightly riskier ventures from the studio. That's according to WGTC as they're reporting that moviegoers who paid to see the studio's latest animated release earlier this week were handed a very interesting survey.On that, they were presented with a list of possible upcoming releases and asked how interested they would be in each of them. That's clearly a way of guaging interest in the movies by Warner Bros.Among those mentioned were a Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, a Wonder Woman '77 movie (presumably with Lynda Carter voicing the titular hero), and Swamp-Thing, a character who will soon get the spotlight in the Justice League Dark animated feature. That's an interesting mixture, and while there's nothing to say any of them will happen, it's entirely possible that any or all of these movies could end up on Warner Bros. Animations 2018 slate. What do you guys think of them?
Image caption New rules should make it cheaper to book cinema tickets

Consumers booking a range of items from cinema tickets to hotel rooms now have new protection from card surcharges.

A ban on "excessive" debit and credit card charges begins on Saturday 6 April.

The government said it should put an end to unscrupulous practices by some businesses.

Until now, many people have been asked to pay large surcharges for using cards, especially when booking online.

Typically, people trying to book concert tickets, theatre seats, hire cars or train seats discover at the end of the payments process that they have to pay many pounds extra to use a debit or credit card.

"The practice of excessive payment surcharges has been ripping off consumers for far too long," said Jo Swinson, the consumer affairs minister.

"They are fed up of thinking they will be paying a certain price for goods, only to find out towards the end of the process that the final price is much higher," she said.

Airline industry

Under the new rules, payment surcharges will have to reflect the actual cost to the retailer of processing the card transaction.

That includes fees they have to pay to Visa or Mastercard, for instance, or the cost of installing a chip-and-pin device.

How much should your credit card surcharge be? transaction of £50: £1.16

transaction of £100: £2.10

transaction of £250: £4.94 source: OFT, 2011

But in many cases, this should be minimal.

For example, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), someone spending £100 on a travel ticket could expect to be charged 53 pence extra if using a debit card, or £2.10 if using a credit card.

The figures, produced in 2011, suggest the cost of using a debit card remains at just over 50 pence, however large the transaction.

But the government stresses that charges will differ according to individual businesses.

In the past, the airline industry was the worst offender.

The government says that in 2010, airlines charged passengers up to £350m in card surcharges.

But following an investigation by the OFT, airlines including Ryanair, Easyjet and Aer Lingus agreed to include debit card charges at least in their headline prices.

The ferry industry was the next biggest user of surcharges, according to the government, charging its customers up to £145m.

Enforcement

The new rules are being brought in earlier than the rest of the EU Consumer Rights Directive, because of the concern that was first raised by Which?

"Over 50,000 people supported our campaign to end rip off surcharges, so we're pleased the Government is implementing this ban," said Richard Lloyd, the executive director of Which?

But he warned that people needed to be vigilant about businesses that tried to avoid the ban.

"For it to be effective, there must be a tough enforcement regime and companies must play fair and not pass costs on to customers in other ways. We will be monitoring the ban closely and want people to tell us about surcharges they think are excessive," he said.

Consumers are entitled to receive a refund of the excess surcharge they have paid, according to the government. If necessary, they can bring a private claim to recover such surcharges.

However, there are a number of sectors which are excluded from the new rules.

Very small businesses and companies just starting out will not be subject to the rules until June 2014.

Some companies in financial services, gambling, healthcare, social services, property and passenger transport are also excluded.

Other elements of the directive will be implemented over the next year.

Those include new rules on cancellations, refunds and delivery times.
Government spending restraint will be a drag on Canada’s economic growth in 2013, according to an analysis by CIBC World Markets.

That finding is at odds with one from the Bank of Canada, which sees the country’s real GDP getting a slight boost from government spending. Real GDP measures growth after inflation has been taken into account.

To arrive at its conclusion, CIBC economists took projections from the last federal budget as well as those from the four biggest provinces. It then adjusted the figures to strip out such things as transfers to households and added back capital spending.

"Our analysis points to yet another drop in real expenditures, with no major offset from planned tax reductions," says CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld.

Shenfeld estimates that real government spending will drop by 0.9 per cent in 2013/14. For the 2013 calendar year, he says that works out to a drag on real GDP of 0.2 per cent.

Bank of Canada's growth forecast 'too high'

"That doesn't look like a big deal, until one contrasts it with the 0.3 per cent boost to growth in the Bank of Canada forecast," Shenfeld says.

"The result is that the Bank’s forecast could be about 0.5 percentage points too high, enough to make the difference between growth being above potential, requiring interest rate hikes, or as in our forecast of 2.0 per cent growth next year, not fast enough to narrow the output gap and call for monetary tightening."

In April, parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page said his office's analysis of federal spending plans also led him to conclude that government restraint would be a drag on growth.

"The [Parliamentary Budget Office] expects that restraint and reductions in government spending on programs in Canada will act as a drag on economic growth and job creation, pushing the economy further away from its potential [GDP] and delaying the economic recovery," the report said.

The PBO report projected that spending restraints and cutbacks will reduce economic output by 0.3 per cent this year, climbing to 0.88 per cent in 2014. The PBO’s analysis was sharply criticized by Conservative MPs as being "too pessimistic."

In its last monetary policy announcement in July, the Bank of Canada said overall government spending was expected to contribute "modestly" to growth in 2013 – the finding that CIBC takes issue with.

In that same announcement, the central bank slightly lowered its forecast for real GDP growth next year to 2.3 per cent – still higher than CIBC’s 2.0 per cent forecast.

No recession risk

Shenfeld notes that any belt-tightening in Canada poses no threat that the country will slide back into recession.

"Having started from a combined federal/provincial deficit of only a third of that stateside, there's no equivalent threat of an outright recession being induced by cuts coming from Ottawa and the provinces," he says.

"We'll get through our fiscal drag much sooner than the U.S. with a lot less pain in total."
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- A "frustrated" Mark Davis said he stands behind general manager Reggie McKenzie and new interim head coach Tony Sparano as the Oakland Raiders try to bounce back from a 0-4 start and the firing of coach Dennis Allen.

However, Davis said it is imperative that the Raiders improve.

"The way we were losing was frustrating," the Raiders owner said after the news conference to announce Allen's firing and Sparano's hiring for the rest of the season. "I think it's just the way we lost some of the games, yeah, I think we weren't in them. To me, that's not what the Raiders are. ... In my analysis, I think we do have players that can play in this game. And I just think that there may be some changes in how the schemes are utilized. Dennis is the one who has taken the fall for it."

Editor's Picks Williamson: Raiders need to remember how to win What does interim head coach Tony Sparano think the Raiders' biggest problem is? They have forgotten how to win, Bill Williamson writes.

Davis said it was McKenzie's decision to fire Allen and that he agreed. McKenzie chose Allen in 2012 after Davis made McKenzie the primary decision-maker of the franchise in the first move after the death of his father, Al Davis, in November 2011.

Allen was 8-28 as the Raiders coach and they have lost a league-high 10 games dating to last season.

Asked if it was a mistake to keep Allen after consecutive 4-12 seasons, Allen said, "No, that was Reggie's decision, and you see where it ended up. So, I don't know if you'd call it a mistake."

McKenzie said in the news conference that he will hire the next coach. Yet he said he realizes nothing is guaranteed with his own job security.

"A lot rides on me," said McKenzie, whose drafting and free-agent signings have yet to pay dividends on the field in Oakland. "I brought Dennis here to win, and that did not materialize."

Sparano At A Loss Since Tony Sparano became the Dolphins' head coach in 2008, the teams he has been involved with have had just one season .500 or better. The past six seasons, his teams have finished below .500 every year: Team W-L Role 2008 Dolphins 11-5 HC 2009 Dolphins 7-9 HC 2010 Dolphins 7-9 HC 2011 Dolphins 4-9* HC 2012 Jets 6-10 Off. Coord. 2013 Raiders 4-12 Asst. HC 2014 Raiders 0-4 Asst. HC * Fired after Week 14 -- ESPN Stats & Information

Davis said he has not considered firing McKenzie. However, if the losing continues, Davis made no promises. He said it could be considered "a step backward or step forward" to fire McKenzie, depending on how this season goes. Davis said he will take an increased role in hiring decisions going forward.

Davis said he wasn't sure when asked whether he would contact former Oakland coach and current ESPN "Monday Night Football" analyst Jon Gruden.

"I don't know," Davis said. "He may reach out to me, I may reach out to him. I may reach out to anybody. That's the future, and I'm not going to talk about future coaches."

Davis said McKenzie can start looking for a permanent new coach now to hire after the season. But he also said Sparano will have the opportunity to show the team he can be the permanent coach. Sparano, 52, was the head coach in Miami from 2008 to 2011. He went 29-31 there.

Sparano, who has been the Raiders' assistant head coach/offensive line coach since last season, said he believes the Raiders need a "philosophy" change. He was not ready to announce what that was. However, Davis said he believes the Raiders need to work on schemes, and Sparano hinted that some could change.

"I think my evaluation is that we do have some players," Davis said. "And we may be running some schemes that are putting a square peg into a round hole, and that maybe with some changes in that type of environment we might be able to get something out of these players."

Asked what the Raiders' biggest problem is, Sparano said the team had forgotten "how to win. ... They have to get that taste back."
Australia's agricultural export growth is slower than the global average in all key markets except Oceania, a report has found.

A rural think tank is warning Australia's agriculture export performance is waning in the face of stiff competition from rising agricultural producers.

At the centre of the issue is Australia's lack of new farm lands, which has effectively capped agricultural production when compared with countries in Asian and South America where production is expanding.

The Australian Farm Institute's trade review concludes that with little opportunity to expand production, Australian agriculture needs a renewed focus on productivity gains.

"In effect, Australia is losing market share in those neighbouring markets that we identify as our own," director Mick Keogh said.

"That really is a wake up call about the need to be competitive and to be not assuming these markets are ours and there for the taking."

The AFI's analysis found the growth of Australia's exports to every global region except Oceania and North Asia was slower than the equivalent global growth figure.

Alarmingly, the report also finds that in addition to the volume of exports fall, so too is the value.

"The results highlight the need for Australian agricultural producers and exporters to dispel any complacency that might be held about the ability of Australian agriculture to automatically benefit from the growth in global demand for agricultural product as world populations increase and diets change." — Australian Farm Institute: Review of Agriculture Trade Performance 2016.

Mr Keogh said the report's finding highlighted the need to find on-going productivity improvements.

"The one thing we have learned from our New Zealand cousins' success is that isn't something you do and then stop.

Rural Newsletter Rural news in your inbox? Subscribe for the national headlines of the day.

"You cannot assume our agriculture sector is competitive and going to be successful — it is a continuous process."

Speaking to the draft findings of a recent Productivity Commission report, Mr Keogh said there would not be a single action that will help boost productivity.

"All the sorts of things that have been talked about in that Productivity Commission report are worth thinking about, especially in terms of continual improvement.

"You cannot assume there is a 'big bang' solution to successfully capturing all these markets."
Hillary Clinton and her aides directed Platte River Networks to systematically alter, fabricate and forge emails to protect her communications from being “exposed to anyone,” according to documents obtained by True Pundit.

The request was so unusual and complex that Denver-based Platte River IT executives, who maintained Clinton’s private email server, had to turn to other IT gurus on a clandestine chat forum for a solution to try to satisfy their “VIP” client, as executives dubbed Clinton. Platte River computer specialist Paul Combetta turned to a web forum on computer coding to solicit help with Clinton’s directive to forge her emails, according to documents. Writing under the seemingly-stealth screen name “stonetear,” Combetta asked reddit.com forum users in July 2014:

“Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

Combetta’s online plea for guidance was met with limited resistance, as many users offered advice on how he could effectively alter the emails. One user, however warned him that he could be stepping into a legal mine field: “To my knowledge, there’s no way to edit existing messages, that’s a possibility for a (legal) discovery nightmare.”

True Pundit was able to trace the screen name “stonetear” directly to Combetta, as he has used it exclusively for social media and gaming accounts, as well as certain anonymous email accounts, according to our intelligence. Combetta never revealed his real name or company name in the communications but the IT specialist with no security clearance did divulge: “I have full access to the server.”

These damning revelations comprise the first public intelligence pinpointed indicating that Platte River was directly requested to perform what can only be described as illegally altering Clinton’s emails and related federal records.

The criminal code, 18 U.S. Code § 1519, dealing with destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy is very clear. It states: Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. While previous laws applied only to an “official proceeding,” like a public FBI investigation, or pending judicial and federal agency proceedings, the new stipulations in subsection § 802 passed under Sarbanes-Oxley now also covers those individuals who destroy or fabricate documents merely “in contemplation” of a future investigation or “any matter” within the jurisdiction of a federal agency.

“The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you’d recognize, and we’re trying to replace it with a placeholder address as to not expose it,” Combetta wrote later in the forum to answer a user’s technical questions. “I think maybe I wasn’t clear enough in the original post. I have these emails available in a PST file. Can I rewrite them in the PST? I could also export to MSG and do some sort of batch find/replace. Anyone know of tools that might help with this?”

Combetta is also accused of deleting an untold number Clinton’s emails despite orders from Congress to preserve them. Platte River’s destruction of these emails followed months of warnings from by the House Select Committee on Benghazi to obtain them. The house select committee likewise instructed Clinton’s attorney David Kendall on Dec. 2, 2014, to retain these emails, and a formal House subpoena was issued on March 4, 2015.

Combetta and a Platte River colleague Bill Thornton were on Capitol Hill last week answering subpoenas to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Combetta refused to answer all of committee chairman Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s questions about his role in maintaining Clinton’s private server. That included Chaffetz’s inquiry on whether Combetta received an immunity agreement from the Justice Deoartment to cooperate with the FBI’s now defunct criminal investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified email while secretary of state. Combetta cited his 5th Amendment right not to incriminate himself at the hearing. Combetta’s immunity agreement was divulged in a recent New York Times article detailing its stipulations.

Congressman Chaffetz’s committee has shed light on other internal Platte River communications where company executives scurried to distance the company from what they believed was Clinton “covering up some shaddy s- -t.”

In another internal message, one executive called Clinton’s requests to Platte River “Hillary’s coverup operation.”

These new revelations, however, place a white-hot light on the FBI’s arrangement with Combetta. If FBI agents were aware of this request from Clinton to illegally mask her emails, one has to wonder even more than usual how Clinton walked away without an indictment form the bureau’s year-long probe. This only adds to other recent troubling revelations regarding the FBI’s investigation.

-30-

Queen #HillarysEmails Server Hosting Company BUSTED Erasing Backups, Then Clams Up at Oversight Hearing Part 1 RT pic.twitter.com/pHPS5sHAM3 — Thomas Paine (@Thomas1774Paine) September 15, 2016
Passengers on United Airlines reported long delays after the latest in a long line of technology problems at the nation’s biggest carriers.

United said Friday that it had fixed the overnight issue, yet hours later the airline still could not explain what went wrong or even how many flights were canceled or delayed.

Tracking service FlightStats Inc. said in late afternoon that United had cancelled 10 flights — not an unusual number — and delayed more than 380. However, those numbers don’t include United Express flights, which are outsourced to smaller carriers.

READ MORE: 2 United Airlines pilots suspected of being drunk arrested at Glasgow Airport

Timing helped United. The outage spanned a late-night period when few U.S. flights were operating, and United reported it was fixed before the wave of morning departures.

United responded on Twitter to passengers who experienced delays or problems with the airline’s website. The airline tweeted that it was having problems with its weight-reporting system.

Some passengers travelling late Thursday and early Friday took to social media to complain about delays as long as six hours.

United spokeswoman Maddie King said that overnight the airline “experienced a system issue causing some flights delays.” She said the problem was fixed by 4 a.m. Eastern time, although there could be lingering brief delays on Friday.

READ MORE: United Airlines flights temporarily grounded due to ‘automation issues’

Asked about the cause of the outage, King said, “We are still working to determine that.”

In August, Delta Air Lines suffered a computer breakdown after a power outage in its operations center. The airline canceled more than 2,000 flights over three days. In July, Southwest Airlines also canceled more than 2,000 flights after an outage that it blamed on a failed network router. United and American Airlines both suffered computer-system problems in summer 2015.

Airline technology systems have hundreds of programs that are often of different ages and sources and are layered on top of each other. After recent outages at other carriers, outside experts have questioned whether airlines have enough redundancy in their systems and test the systems frequently enough.
Obama’s speech aside, why don’t Republicans want for America the world’s best, state of the art infra-structure–high speed trains and the 75 industries that would design and build the systems, attracting revenue and growth to sustain the economy and families? Why don’t they want the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose news roundups let European and Asian travelers and business people feel at home–and give Americans a peek at the world beyond our coasts? Why build weapons systems the Forces line out, but are restored in each budget cycle?

The Times reports 2,000 mental health patients released by a major service provider due to cuts and privatization in Salt Lake City. We know the House-passed Farm bill leaves the SNAP safety net on the table without a promise of passage.

Where, as the President asked, is the GOP’s economic plan? Is it spending cuts and repealing Obamacare?

The impressive growth of 7 million new jobs, doubling domestic oil production, providing stimulus to states to protect essential services, creating the largest crackdown on fraud in Medicaid’s history, securing a escrow trust for the Gulf oil spill victims–how much more could be done if the GOP reached out, taking credit for leadership and innovation?

Yet the GOP persists in blame and labels.They agreed–before the speech–to use the hashtag,#SpeechesDontHire, Is that their best response? To plan an attack with a generic putdown before the speech was heard? Their fault finding never has a fix.
As the UK referendum result dropped in that fateful Friday morning, the tech startup world didn’t immediately grind to a halt. Websites kept loading. Apps kept opening. But what left UK technology entrepreneurs aghast was not just that Britain had chosen to leave the European Union after 40 years, but that all those years of trying compete with the giants of Silicon Valley would now be thrown into doubt.

Although Europe’s 500 million citizens dwarfs the 323 million in the US, for years European startups had to deal with 28 jurisdictions and many languages. But the EU had at least managed to harmonize (more or less) the processes of company operation, data sharing and hiring.

Hiring from a talent base of 500 million people was also an incredible asset to startups, as was raising funding from Venture capitalists. Based in Berlin? No problem. Developers in Slovenia, but the the HQ was in London? No problem. And, after several Eastern European states had joined, suddenly the whole of Europe could tap into the talent produced from Soviet-era education systems built around engineering and maths.

The truth is the overwhelming majority of the UK tech startup industry was for ‘Remain’. Industry body COADEC found over 80% of companies were in favour of staying in the EU, citing the single market, free movement of labour and economic stability as their reasons.

But “Brexit” has now thrown into enormous doubt how all of that will operate in the future.

The immediate effects on startups have been incredibly personal. Bewilderment is the word you hear most. European staff suddenly have no idea how long they will be able to work in Britain. They created business ties, friendships, relationships, often marriages. Their kids are in nursery schools and high schools across the country.

Furthermore, so many tech startups today are created by young people, who typically voted in droves for Remain. The decision to leave Europe will have disproportionate effects on them and their companies, which, ironically are so often labelled by politicians as providing the jobs of the future. What future now for them?

The immediate reaction of some in the sector has been typically entrepreneurial. “Stay calm and make lemonade,” wrote leading investor Saul Klein. Leading voices have been quick to come out as upbeat — anything not to ‘frighten the horses’ and potentially spook the pipeline of possible new companies to invest in. Some see it as an opportunity. The UK is still open for business! This, despite imploring everyone to vote for Remain only a few days earlier.

Klein’s sanguine attitude is reflected by many VCs. Early stage startups are agile and can relocate if need be. Big tech companies are global and not overly dependent on the U.K. But VCs have warned that mid-stage companies too dependent on the U.K. could feel the heat of Brexit.

Taavet Hinrikus, Co-founder and CEO ofTransferWise, a declared ‘Remainer’, says he is “moving on” from the Brexit decision. His London-based company couldn’t be more quintessentially European: he’s an Estonian immigrant living in London. Half his staff are British, a third from mainland Europe, with others from the US, Latin America and elsewhere. TransferWise also benefits from “passporting”: because it is regulated in the UK by the FCA, it’s therefore regulated all across Europe. For now. But, he blogged, “Five years ago, we chose to base TransferWise here in the UK — and we’ll continue that plan.”

And ‘seize the day’ was effectively the message put out by former Number 10 tech adviser Rohan Silva, who wrote in the Sunday Times that Britain should now embrace the technology future to use Artificial Intelligence to drive its society. Free from the constraints of a ponderous EU, the UK could now go feet-first into a tech-driven future. These were upbeat words from voices who had openly declared they were for Remain prior to the Referendum.

It was true that the EU had often lurched towards heavy regulation. Ironically, as the EU Commission had often created encouraging programmes for startups, EU legislators were making laws which could put more and more onerous restraints on startups around data privacy, for instance. There were clearly going to be many arguments worth engaging with if Europe was to compete globally. Arguments which, because of Brexit, the UK will no longer have a say in, of course.

Many felt the EU had gone too far in regulation. One startup founder told me the European Data Privacy Regulations could have “ruined” her online advertising business, which relies on being able to transport data between the EU and the US.

However, while the sun-lit uplands of a world where the UK fully embraces the advances of technology (and speeds ahead of the EU) could well be a possible future, that ideal is thrown into sharp relief when set against the realities biting today. Some, like Jeff Lynn of Seedrs, were utterly incensed.

The day after the referendum I was contacted by three separate startups to say their venture capital funding had been cancelled because they were being financially backed from the UK and were in the EU, or in the UK and backed by EU-based investors. Several more have come to me since with similar news. Uncertainty has left the normally upbeat tech sector reeling.

And we’ve been coldly reminded of the complexity of the modern international startup, once seen as a strength, but, post-Brexit, could now become a huge headache. One UK-based founder contacted me: “My entire budget is now completely invalid as we have employees in 3 different EU countries, and in the USA. We are deeply affected by the currency devaluation issue. Every single person that I employ is from a different EU country. Most are based in London and now there is a real feeling of unease and uncertainty as to what will happened to them in the future – which means that this is affecting the day to day running of the business,” she told me.

In addition, she was about to embark on a fundraising tour and was hoping to get US investors: “I now think that this will be much more difficult, if at all possible. Which means that the 6 jobs I have created and the 5 more that I need to fill – will be in jeopardy.”

The company in question also took on interns from underprivileged backgrounds. That programme will now likely be cancelled because of a lack of funding.

“Long term I think I will have to relocate my business to the USA as the market in the UK is just too small to justify staying here,” she told me. What’s that? A market of 65 million too small? Well, yes, when just a fortnight ago it was 500 million.

In Manchester, Tom New, CEO of Formisimo, believes startups in the North West and EU-backed UK regions will find it much harder to raise funding because part of their cash was raised because it had that EU cushion underneath. Without that “we would have likely have had to move to the South East and the North West’s tech ecosystem would still be where it was back then,” he told me.

The UK also could now face a potential brain drain of talent. Before June 23 London was seen as Europe’s largest powerhouse of startups. Just over a week later an adverting-hoarding truck was seen trawling the startup-filled streets of Shoreditch, extolling the benefits of moving to Berlin (London’s chief tech startup competitor). The van was sponsored by a German political party. Suddenly other European hubs like Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm or Amsterdam look attractive as bases from which to reach the EU single market. Even some London VCs are privately saying that they will invest more on the continent now as a result.

Tech companies will no doubt work around it all – moving people and HQs around, knowing they can all still work online. And it may be that the booming nature of London’s tech scene will now have to be spread more equally to Europe’s other tech centres. This much was admitted by Balderton Capital, which plans now to stockpile cash and invest more internationally. Look for talented British entrepreneurs suddenly turning up in Berlin, Stockholm, Lisbon and Barcelona.

But one of the greatest myths ever told about the tech world is that it’s about technology. The truth is, it’s about people. Extremely smart and talented people. Given that the UK had been part of a single market which allowed for enormous freedom of movement, its access to all that talent in Europe is now in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, the march of technology continues, as does the soul searching. Did those of us in London pay too much attention to our hackathons and our Flat Whites to notice that so much of the rest of the UK wasn’t interested in the tech startup revolution? It looks like we just found out.

(A shorter version of this article is also published in the first edition of The New European newspaper)

(Picture by Tom Hayton)
“You can’t get bigger arms unless you go heavy on the barbell or on some dumbbells.”

Yeah, that’s what more than one guy told me at the gym. Hearing this advice made sense to me. I had seen the workouts before in magazines and they always threw in 4 exercises for biceps and 4 exercises for triceps. Add in 10 to 12 reps per set per exercise and I was being promised arms bigger than the Hulk.

It made sense at the time. Lift some iron and watch the muscle grow. That’s the common advice and it works, but only if you do it right.

However, lifting weights is not the only way to gain muscle in your arms. If you want to get awesome results you should include bodyweight exercises.

Anytime someone tells me that you can’t get muscular arms by using only your bodyweight I point to a gymnast. Simply look at a gymnast and you will quickly see that weights are not the only way to make significant gains in muscle.

You don’t have to lift like a bodybuilder.

Sure you can grab a barbell, put some weight and go at it.

I am all for that. You can lift heavy weight and see results but having thicker arms is best when you do certain exercises that trigger maximum growth.

That’s where bodyweight movements can come in.

Here are a list of exercises for biceps and triceps without having to use weights.

Bodyweight Exercises For Biceps

Chin Ups: This exercise is one of the forgotten and unsung bodyweight exercises. Some see this as either being too easy while others look at it as too difficult to do. It is often considered a back exercise but in reality it is much more than that. Chin ups are a compound movement that will give your back and your biceps a killer workout. This exercise is similar to a barbell curl except that it follows a natural movement and can be tough as you lift your own weight.

Parallel Grip Chin Ups: Another great option for building your biceps. The palms face each other on parallel bars allowing for a movement that is easier on the wrists and shoulders than a pull ups. The positioning of the hands and arms is very much like a Hammer Curl; however this exercise also works on the lats. If you don’t have access to parallel bars simply grip a bar with both hands with both palms facing each other.

Pull Ups: Some time ago I dropped all biceps curls for about a year. The only stimulation my biceps received was through my back workouts. My primary back exercise at the time was pull ups and my biceps never decreased in size. Whether you choose to do a shoulder wide grip or wider than shoulder wide grip you will still find this exercise giving your lats and biceps a boost. Don’t confuse this exercise with chin ups. Pull ups require a “palms out” grip while a chin up uses a “palms in” grip.

Bodyweight Rows/ Inverted Rows: When was the last time you saw someone at the gym using this exercise? Yeah, I never do either. Simply use a Smith Machine and set the bar below your waist. Proceed to sit down on the floor, grab the bar and with your back flat and facing the floor you then do a rowing movement. For the easier version of this exercise keep your heels resting on the floor. If you prefer a challenge lift your feet off the floor and leave your body suspended, then proceed with performing a row.

Note: Even though these exercises are usually done using a bar you can always use variations with gymnastics rings and using the TRX.

Bodyweight Exercises For Triceps

Dips: This is a popular exercise and rightfully so. Anyone who has ever tried this exercise knows the power and the results you get. You can either use parallel bars, TRX or rings. This exercise primarily targets the triceps and the chest with the back and lats getting some stimulation as well. By doing this exercise with a closer grip, elbows close to your side and your chin tucked in you will target the triceps more.

Bodyweight Triceps Extensions: Place your hands on a strong surface like a bar, bench or rings. Place your feet back so your body is as close to a horizontal position. Your head should be placed in between your elbows. Push your bodyweight up and then lower yourself slowly. This exercise is close to a skull crusher except you are not lying on your back.

Close Grip Push Ups: Any type of pushups exercise works great for your triceps. Most pushups exercises will primarily target your chest with secondary work done on the triceps. However, close grip pushups or triangle pushups will work primarily on the triceps with less emphasis on the chest.

Bonus Exercise Works The Entire Arms

Muscle Up: Every time I see this exercise I think of the guys from “300.” This exercise requires a lot of upper body strength and is a combination of a pull up with dip. The workout is a combination of a biceps exercise and triceps exercise. The entire motion of the exercise is meant to work on the biceps, triceps and the back and chest muscles. Stand underneath a pull up bar and jump up, grab the bar and use the momentum to pull yourself up and push up until the bar is at waist level. Proceed to come back down in a controlled motion. As you can see the explosive pull up motion will work the biceps while the pushing movement and lowering of the body is going to target the triceps.

Tips For Your Next Arm Workout

Looking at these exercises it is tempting to stack a workout with 4-5 or more of these exercises. Avoid the temptation of doing too many exercises all at once. Doing too much at once will only make you over train.

The best way to achieve ideal results is by choosing 1 or 2 of these exercises for biceps or 1 to 2 exercises when doing triceps workouts. If you decide to add weight training for your arms simply do 1 exercise using weights and 1 exercise using your bodyweight.

The best thing to do is to include a bodyweight exercise along with an exercise using weights. Sticking to an all bodyweight workout for your arms works too.

If your goal is to gain muscle stick to rep ranges of 8 to 10 and 3 to 4 sets. Make sure to be as explosive as possible in each repetition.

Final Thoughts

One thing that is very clear is that you won’t find isolation type exercises in this list. Bodyweight type workouts are always going to be compound type. Unlike dumbbell exercises, like dumbbell curls, you won’t find the equivalent version using your bodyweight. Each one of these exercises works not only the biceps and triceps but also works in conjunction with another muscle group like back muscles or chest.

If you only use weights to add muscle to your arms it is best to add bodyweight exercises as well. The benefits you will gain will be tremendous.

If you have never done a workout using only your body then feel free to try it. A good combination of these exercises will allow you to make significant gains in size.
When Mark Baker looks up at the moon at night, he does not see magic or mystery. He ponders megawatts.

Twice a day, like clockwork, the moon’s gravity makes the seas ebb and flow. For Baker, a marine renewables business manager at GE Power Conversion, the tides are the perfect source of energy, more predictable and reliable than wind or solar power. “Some U.K. locations have significant tidal head ranges,” he says. “They offer a tantalizing energy generation potential.“

The moon could join the sun as a source of renewable energy.

GE Power Conversion is testing tidal turbine generators and other underwater technology in turbines standing on the sea floor near the Orkneys in Scotland and at Ramsey Sound in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Baker says that GE is ready to scale up the power system to a large array of tidal turbines planned for the bottom of the Pentland Firth, a narrow channel that separates the Orkneys from the northern tip of Scotland. The channel has some of the fastest moving currents in the U.K. (see video).

People tried to capture tidal and wave energy since the Middle Ages when they used “tide mills” to grind grain. Ideas Lab reported that the first tidal power station was the Rance tidal power plant built between 1960 and 1966 in La Rance, France. But the technology did not catch on because of its high capital cost and the limited availability of sites with sufficient tidal flows.

Although innovations in turbine technology and design have begun to lower those costs and make deployment possible in more areas, the technology is “decades behind other forms of renewables and will likely need significant government support and research to become a true clean energy player,” according Ideas Lab.

The Orkneys’ rugged coast has some of the strongest tides.

The U.S. is currently underwriting development of 17 tidal and wave energy demonstration projects. The U.S. Department of Energy’s latest assessment identified up to 1,400 terawatt hours of potential tidal energy generation per year—one terawatt-hour of electricity is enough to power about 85,000 homes. Developing just a small fraction of the wave and tidal energy available in the U.S. could power millions of American homes.

“Wave and tidal energy represent a large, untapped resource for the United States and responsible development of this clean, renewable energy source is an important part of our all-of-the-above energy strategy,” said Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy David Danielson in a statement last year.

BBC recently described Scotland as “a Saudi Arabia of renewable energy potential.” The Pentland Firth project alone could supply almost half of Scotland’s electricity needs – as much as 1.9 gigawatts.

The turbines resemble large aircraft propellers submerged in 180 to 240 feet of water. They stand in strategic “pinch points” of the firth, where the tides rush in and out at the highest speeds.

Engineers can capture energy from the vertical and horizontal movements of the tides. Some teams have also used buoys that generate electricity from the up and down movement of the waves. But “it happens to be roughly an order of magnitude more difficult to mount and maintain equipment on the surface of the sea,” Baker says. “Companies have put in wave systems only to find them dashed upon the rocks.”

Baker believes that tidal power generation arrays will start popping up in the U.K. and elsewhere in the world. “Tidal lagoon power stations could soon also become a reality in the U.K.,” he says. “They are capable of utility-scale power generation.”
Pune: In a bizarre case, a parrot accused of "hurling obscenities" at an octogenarian woman was summoned to a police station at Rajura in Maharashtra's Chandrapur district on Monday after a complaint against its owner that he had allegedly tutored his caged pet to do so.

The police was at its wit's end after 85-year-old Janabai Sakharkar accused her stepson Suresh of teaching his parrot 'Hariyal', to shower abuses at her whenever she passed by his house.

In order to verify the agitated woman's complaint, the police called all the three involved, including Janabai, her stepson Suresh and Hariyal the parrot to the police station.

However, the parrot seemed to have became conscious of khaki clad policmen and kept mum when his cage was brought near Janabai, to see if it would hurl any obscenities at her.

"There is a dispute over land and property between the woman and her stepson. We watched the parrot carefully but it did not utter a word at the police station after being confronted by the complainant," Police Inspector P S Dongre told reporters.

Although Hariyal never showed any alleged penchant to abuse the woman, the police decided to hand it over to forest department officials, after taking into account the harassed mental condition of the aged woman.

PTI

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According to some of the most popular dating advice books, one of the keys to attracting a romantic partner is to take the somewhat counterintuitive step of pretending like you aren’t interested in the other person. But does this tactic really work? Can “playing hard to get” really help you score a date? According to a new set of studies published in the European Journal of Personality, it would appear so.

In one of these studies, researchers gave 270 heterosexual college students three dating profiles that were equivalent in terms of attractiveness, age, and background information [1]. The only thing that differed was the likelihood that the person would go out with someone they had just met (i.e., the target was described as having either low, intermediate, or high availability). Participants were asked to choose which person they would be most likely to have casual sex with, which one they would be most likely to date, and which one they would be most likely to start a romantic relationship with. Participants could choose the same or different persons for each option.

When it came to casual sex, both men and women overwhelming preferred the highly available target. So, if you’re hoping to get lucky, playing hard to get is not particularly advantageous. However, when it came to dating and starting a romantic relationship, both men and women preferred the target with intermediate availability. So, if you’re looking for love, playing at least a little hard to get seems advisable.

In another study, the researchers gave heterosexual college student participants photos of equally attractive targets that again varied in perceived availability (low, intermediate, or high). Participants were asked what kind of restaurant they would take this person to (fast food, casual, or fine dining) and how much money they would be willing to spend on the other person’s dinner.

In this case, the low availability targets won hands down. Both men and women reported that they would take the low availability target to a fancier restaurant, as well as spend more money on this person. Specifically, the low availability target was worth $44.45 on average, compared to $34.99 and $33.10 for the intermediate and high availability targets, respectively. In other words, playing hard to get may lead your date to spring for a better meal.

One other question this set of studies sought to answer is how people play hard to get. To answer this, the researchers asked a sample of men and women whether they have ever played hard to get and, if so, how they accomplished this. Women reported playing hard to get more often than did men. In addition, the two most commonly reported tactics were acting confident and talking to other people, with men and women being equally likely to say that they had done these specific things before. However, several other reasons were reported, and some important sex differences emerged. Specifically, women were more likely than men to say that they do things like not calling, not talking much, and keeping busy. In contrast, men were more likely than women to report things like “saying all the right things but not calling,” “acting snotty or rude,” and “treating others like sh*t.” Fortunately, those last two were rated as occurring with very low frequency. I should also mention that just because at least a few people reported doing these behaviors, it does not necessarily mean that they work!

Of course, these findings are limited in that they only looked at college students and, further, all participants were heterosexual. However, the results suggest that if you're looking for casual sex, being more available will make you more successful--but if you're looking for love, playing hard to get is the better strategy. In other words, when it comes to love, the old adage rings true: "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"

Want to learn more about The Psychology of Human Sexuality? Click here for a complete list of articles or like the Facebook page to get articles delivered to your newsfeed.

[1] Jonason, P. K., & Li, N. P. (in press). Playing hard‐to‐get: Manipulating one's perceived availability as a mate. European Journal of Personality.

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Document number: N2271=07-0131 Date: 2007-04-27 Reply to: Paul Pedriana

Electronic Arts

ppedriana at ea.com

EASTL -- Electronic Arts Standard Template Library

Paul Pedriana

Electronic Arts

ppedriana at ea.com

Abstract

Gaming platforms and game designs place requirements on game software which differ from requirements of other platforms. Most significantly, game software requires large amounts of memory but has a limited amount to work with. Gaming software is also faced with other limitations such as weaker processor caches, weaker CPUs, and non-default memory alignment requirements. A result of this is that game software needs to be careful with its use of memory and the CPU. The C++ standard library's containers, iterators, and algorithms are potentially useful for a variety of game programming needs. However, weaknesses and omissions of the standard library prevent it from being ideal for high performance game software. Foremost among these weaknesses is the allocator model. An extended and partially redesigned replacement (EASTL) for the C++ standard library was implemented at Electronic Arts in order to resolve these weaknesses in a portable and consistent way. This paper describes game software development issues, perceived weaknesses of the current C++ standard, and the design of EASTL as a partial solution for these weaknesses.

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to explain the motivation and design of EASTL so that it may help the C++ community better understand the needs of game software development. This document is not a proposal, though some of EASTL's changes and extensions could form the basis for such discussions. The large majority of EASTL would be useful to any kind of C++ software development.

This document describes an STL implementation (EASTL) developed within Electronic Arts as an alternative to and extension of the STL defined by the C++ standard library. By STL, we mean the container, iterator, and algorithm components of the C++ standard library, hereafter referred to as std STL (with std referring to the std namespace, whereas the S in STL refers to standard C++). By C++ standard, we mean ISO 14882 (1998) and the 2003 update. The large majority of the design of std STL is excellent and achieves its intended purpose. However, some aspects of it make it hard to use and other aspects prevent it from performing as well as it could. Among game developers the most fundamental weakness is the std allocator design, and it is this weakness that was the largest contributing factor to the creation of EASTL. Secondarily was the lack of std STL containers designed to be memory-friendly. There are additional reasons that will be discussed below.

We hope that those reading this document have an open mind to the idea that std STL may not be ideal for all purposes. Before this document was written, sketches of it were shown to some outside of the game development industry. In some cases we found that there was an initial reaction to dismiss an alternative STL and assume that the somebody must be misunderstanding or misusing the STL. But upon explaining game development and high performance software issues and comparing these to std STL's design and implementation by current vendors, people usually reduce their skepticism. Indeed we have found that those have the most extensive and deep STL experience have been those most enthusiastic about EASTL. We nevertheless have a great respect for the C++ standard library and the great work that has gone into its design and implementation, especially after having gone through the long and difficult process of implementing it.

This document is divided into the following sections. The first section summarizes the motivation for the creation of EASTL and its design; the subsequent sections flow from this.

Throughout this document there are references to the Appendix. The Appendix contains supplementary material which provides more detail about some item of discussion. This material is placed there in order to avoid getting in the way of the primary text, as the material is a bit verbose and is sometimes tangential to the discussion of EASTL. It was nevertheless felt to be important that the Appendix exist in order to provide a better understanding of practical game development issues.

Motivation for EASTL

The following is a listing of some of the reasons why std STL and its current implementations are not currently ideal for game development. There are additional reasons, but the list here should hopefully convey to you some sense of the situation. Each of the items listed below deserves a document of its own, as a single sentence alone cannot fully convey the nature or significance of these items. Some of the items refer to the STL design, whereas some of the items refer to existing STL implementations. It would be best if these were discussed independently, but to many users this distinction is often of little practical significance because they have little choice but to use the standard library that comes with their compiler.

std STL allocators are painful to work with and lead to code bloat and sub-optimal performance. This topic is addressed separately within this document.

Useful STL extensions (e.g. slist, hash_map, shared_ptr) found in some std STL implementations are not portable because they don't exist in other versions of STL or are inconsistent between STL versions (though they are present in the current C++09 draft).

The STL lacks functionality that game programmers find useful (e.g. intrusive containers) and which could be best optimized in a portable STL environment. See Appendix item 16.

Existing std STL implementations use deep function calls. This results in low performance with compilers that are weak at inlining, as is the currently prevalent open-source C++ compiler. See Appendix item 15 and Appendix item 10.

Existing STL implementations are hard to debug. For example, you typically cannot browse the contents of a std::list container with a debugger due to std::list's usage of void pointers. On the other hand, EASTL allows you to view lists without incurring a performance or memory cost. See Appendix item 2.

The STL doesn't explicitly support alignment requirements of contained objects, yet non-default alignment requirements are common in game development. A std STL allocator has no way of knowing the alignment requirements of the objects it is being asked to allocate, aside from compiler extensions. Granted, this is part of the larger problem of the C++ language providing minimal support for alignment requirements. Alignment support is proposed for C++09.

STL containers won't let you insert an entry into a container without supplying an entry to copy from. This can be inefficient in the case of elements that are expensive to construct.

The STL implementations that are provided by compiler vendors for the most popular PC and console (box connected to TV) gaming platforms have performance problems. EASTL generally outperforms all existing STL implementations; it does so partly due to algorithmic improvements but mostly due to practical improvements that take into account compiler and hardware behavior. See Appendix item 20.

Existing STL implementations are hard to debug/trace, as some STL implementations use cryptic variable names and unusual data structures and have no code documentation. See Appendix item 2.

STL containers have private implementations that don't allow you to work with their data structures in a portable way, yet sometimes this is an important thing to be able to do (e.g. node pools). See Appendix item 22.

Many current versions of std STL allocate memory in empty versions of at least some of their containers. This is not ideal and prevents optimizations such as container memory resets that can significantly increase performance in some situations. An empty container should allocate no memory.

All current std STL algorithm implementations fail to support the use of predicate references, which results in inefficient hacks to work around the problem. See Appendix item 3.

The STL puts an emphasis on correctness before practicality and performance. This is an understandable policy but in some cases (particularly std::allocator) it gets in the way of usability and optimized performance.

Differences between std STL and EASTL

First, EASTL provides a set of containers, iterators, and algorithms that are identical in interface and behavior to std STL versions with one exception: allocators. EASTL has a different allocator specification which is simpler, more efficient, more flexible, and easier to use than std::allocator. Both std::allocator and eastl::allocator are described below. EASTL follows the defect reports and TR1 as well. EASTL additionally provides and uses some of the TR1 functionality as well, including most significantly the smart pointers, type traits, and hashing containers.

Second, EASTL provides extension functionality to the above containers, iterators, and algorithms. An example of this is the push_back(void), set_capacity(size), and validate() functions added to eastl::vector. The majority of these extensions are driven by the need for higher performance (push_back(void)), higher clarity (set_capacity), or higher debuggability (validate()). There are about 30 such extensions to the various entities in the library. These are described in detail below.

Third, EASTL provides additional containers and algorithms that don't correspond to std STL. These include intrusive_list, vector_map, fixed_hash_set, slist, ring_buffer, radix_sort, has_trivial_relocate, and others. These are described in detail below.

There are additional differences not related to the functional specification. They include a programming philosophy that emphasizes readability, consistency, and optimal performance on limited hardware. See Appendix item 23.

EASTL functionality summary

EASTL coverage of std STL (not including TR1)

EASTL covers the following parts of the C++ standard library.

Entity Comments list

vector

deque

basic_string

set

multiset

map

multimap

bitset

EASTL has a small number of additional requirements for containers beyond those std STL containers. An example of this is the requirement that a newly constructed or reset container allocates no memory. These are discussed in the next section. EASTL has additional functionality in most of the containers in order to obtain higher performance. These are discussed after the next section. EASTL uses a different allocator model, as described below. Otherwise, the EASTL versions logically behave the same as std STL versions. The EASTL implementations of the containers listed on the left are not modifications of any existing std STL implementation but are largely complete reimplementations. queue

stack

priority_queue iterator EASTL defines an additional iterator_tag in addition to bidirectional_iterator, random_access_iterator, etc: contiguous_iterator_tag. A contiguous iterator has all the properties of a random_access_iterator but additionally specifies that the range is contiguous in memory as with an array. memory

numeric

algorithm

utility

functional

EASTL augmentations/amendments to std STL

Here we list extension functionality that EASTL provides over std STL along with a rationale for each item. In some cases additional information can be found in the appendix and will be noted. All of these changes were prompted by real issues that were encountered in the use of std STL and EASTL. None were the result of speculation or "premature optimization."

Extension Rationale All containers have a node_type typedef and kNodeAlignment constant. Much as containers define types such as value_type and key_type, EASTL defines node_type for all containers. node_type is the storage type that the container uses, as opposed to the user-specified contained type. It is the type that the container allocates. Explicitly defining this type allows users to implement allocators such that the allocated type is known at compile-time. Additionally, kNodeAlignment is a size_t constant which defines the alignment of the node_type. For containers such as hash tables which have multiple allocated types, additional node types are explicitly defined for the class. Similarly, all containers understand and respect object alignment requirements. As discussed elsewhere in this document, game development platforms explicitly or implicitly require the use of non-default alignments. A typical example is VMX vector types, which explicitly require 16 byte alignment because they are an array of 4 floats which are processed in parallel in a single 128 bit register. All containers have a get_allocator and set_allocator function, which return the actual allocator instead of a copy of it. std STL lets you set the allocator for a class only during class construction. Additionally, std STL doesn't let you access its allocator; you can only get a copy of it. This and other weaknesses of std STL allocators are discussed elsewhere in this document in more detail. All containers guarantee that there is no memory allocation upon being newly empty-constructed. Since EASTL containers have a set_allocator function and allow the user to set the container's allocator after the container's construction, this requirement naturally follows. It's also simply more efficient to avoid memory allocation whenever possible. Lastly, there is the game development policy that memory should never be allocated "behind a user's back" or when the user doesn't expect it. All containers have a reset function, which unilaterally resets the container to an initialized (and unallocated) state, avoiding container teardown and reallocation. A common high-performance technique is to create a temporary hash table with a fixed-size memory buffer, do processing with it, and then "nuke" the hash table when done instead of going through the process of clearing and deallocating its nodes. EASTL explicitly supports this programming pattern via the reset function. The supplied allocator generally must cooperate with this, lest memory leaks occur. However, it can work safely only with value types that have a trivial destructor. All containers have explicit validate and validate_iterator functions. EASTL provides an option to do implicit automatic iterator and container validation, but full validation (which can be potentially extensive) has too much of a performance cost to execute implicitly, even in a debug build. So EASTL provides these explicit functions which can be called by the user at the appropriate time and in optimized builds as well as debug builds. bool validate() const; iterator_status_flag validate_iterator(const_iterator i) const; See the EASTL container section for more. Containers should be viewable in a basic debugger to the extent possible. A common complaint by users is that std STL implementations use void pointers for linked list items and makes the container overly difficult to view while debugging. EASTL rectifies this with no overhead. See Appendix item 2. vector has a data() function which acts similar to basic_string::data() data() is not the same thing as &v[0], as the latter will result in an invalid dereference assertion failure when v is empty. This is also in the current C++09 draft. vector<bool> is an array of bool. It is not a bit vector. The user can use eastl::bitvector if the user wants a bit vector, and vector<bool> is deprecated in the current C++09 draft. vector and basic_string have set_capacity(size), which sets the capacity to exactly what the user specifies. People have been recommending the "swap trick" for years, but this is an obfuscated and easy-to-forget workaround in place of what should be built-in functionality. If a workaround is well-known enough that there are hundreds of pages on the Internet devoted to it and it has its own nickname, it probably should be built into the standard library. set_capacity is the same thing as resize_capacity which has been suggested by some. vector::iterator and basic_string::​iterator are pointers. Primarily this allows for easier debugging by the user and easier optimization by the compiler. A random access iterator is not the same thing as a pointer, which refers to contiguous memory. Even in the presence of type_traits optimizations there are things a compiler can do with known-contiguous pointers that it cannot do with random access iterators. See Appendix item 25. The downside to vector and string iterators as pointers is that some types of automated runtime validation can't be done. So far it doesn't seem to have been greatly missed. All containers have a push_back(void) and/or similarly useful functions. Existing std STL implementations implement insertion operations by copying from an element. For example, resize(size() + 1) creates a throw-away temporary object. There is no way in existing std STL implementations to add an element to a container without implicitly or explicitly providing one to copy from (aside from some existing POD optimizations). For expensive-to-construct objects this creates a potentially serious performance problem. A typical suggested workaround to this problem with std STL is to store pointers instead of objects; however, such external memory allocation is undesirable for reasons described elsewhere in this document. list and deque have both push_back(void) and push_front(void). slist has push_front(void). map, multimap, hash_map, and hash_multimap have insert(key). insert(key) is the same thing as the lazy_insert function that has been suggested by some. Other related proposals have been put forward. There are sprintf, append_sprintf, trim, compare_i, make_lower, and make_upper functions for the basic_string class. These are practical useful functions. Game developers prefer to use sprintf instead of stream and strstream functionality where possible because the latter is unacceptably slow in practice. The obscurity and lack of readability of stream operations adds to their unpopularity. The compare_i, make_lower, and make_upper functions are by definition not locale-savvy. They are nevertheless useful practical functions due to the large amount of non-localized string usage in utilities and applications. Not all strings are destined to be viewed by the end-user. deque allows the user to specify the node size as a template parameter. std STL deque guesses the node size for the user; the user cannot control it. This can result in undesirably large or undesirably small memory allocations that the user cannot control. Making the node size available like this does represent a leaking of the deque abstraction. template <typename T, typename Allocator, size_t kNodeSize> class deque { };

Associative containers (e.g. map, hash_map) have the find_as function, which allows fast key lookups for expensive key types. If you have a map<string, int> and you want to look up an entry, std STL requires you to supply a string object to the map::find function. This is overly expensive for the common case whereby you have a string literal which you want to look up, because passing such a literal to the map::find function silently creates a temporary string object and allocates memory. EASTL solves this problem by defining the following member template function, which allows you to, for example, look up a string object via a lightweight string literal: template <typename U, typename BinaryPredicate>

iterator find_as(const U& u, BinaryPredicate predicate); This is similar to the lazy_find that has been suggested by some.

An additional iterator_tag beyond random_access​_iterator_tag is defined: contiguous_​iterator_tag. random_access_iterator_tag defines a range which has random access, but isn't necessarily contiguous. This may lead to missed optimization opportunities. type_traits can be used to work around some of these opportunities but not in all cases and not in as explicit a way. Need to provide an example here. eastl::pair has a single argument constructor. It accepts the first element as a constructor argument and default-constructs the second argument. pair();

pair(const T1& x);

pair(const T1& x, const T2& y);

The usefulness comes about because the map::value_type is pair<const key_type, mapped_type>. As a result, inserting a value into a map requires the user to create a temporary pair whose contents must be set at its construction. This turns out to be inefficient when the mapped_type is expensive to construct or copy, as the pair constructor forces you to provide a mapped_type to copy from. It's more efficient to write code like this: map<int, expensive>::value_type value(37);

value.second.blah = blah;

m.insert(value); bitset uses uint32_t instead of unsigned long. unsigned long is not a portable type. On game development platforms it can be any of 32, 64 or 128 bits. On platforms where it is 64 or 128 bits, it can be inefficient to work with these types, as it is on the PlayStation 2 platform. Types such as short, int, long, and long long cannot be used in a portable way and thus EASTL and many game programming standards disallow their usage in API interfaces. Sized types such as int16_t, int32_t, etc. are used instead. bitset has neither string nor iostream functionality. string and iostream are unrelated to bitset and embedding knowledge about them into bitset bloats the bitset implementation and dependency graph in a way that yields marginal and limited benefits. bitset has find_first, find_next functions. These are of course more efficient for the user than manually checking every bit in turn. Three additional heap algorithms are provided: remove_heap, change_heap, is_heap. Similarly, priority_queue has change and remove member functions. These are useful practical additions. remove_heap and change_heap provide functionality that can't be efficiently implemented externally. eastl::list, slist, intrusive_list, and intrusive_slist don't cache the list size. Thus the list::size is O(n). However, there is a configuration option to cache it an make it O(1). The C++ standard specifies that list::size is O(1), and some STL implementations cache the list size and implement it as O(1). The SGI STL branch of STL doesn't cache the list size and list::size is thus O(n). EASTL can be configured to work either way, but defaults to O(n). The rationale for this is that it adds extra memory and processing cost to the list container, whereas users of linked lists often don't care about the size of the list. The user can always maintain a list size cache on their own. A future revision of eastl::list will likely make this a template policy option. EASTL algorithms respect user-supplied template argument types and are guaranteed to do so. No existing std STL currently does so. The following code does not work as one might expect or hope with any current std STL implementation: struct ExpensiveToConstructCompare{ };

ExpensiveToConstructCompare compare;

std::sort<int*, ExpensiveToConstructCompare&>(begin, end, compare); The problem is that std STL implementations ignore the user-specified compare reference type and convert it to a value type and proceed to make (possibly very many) copies of it. This can be prohibitively expensive. The conventional workaround for this problem is to create a proxy compare class that references the real compare object. Why not simply have the algorithms obey the user's request and avoid such workarounds and their resulting overhead? It's not clear if the C++ standard requires that the user's request be respected, but it would be nice if it did. The currently proposed std::ref adapater could help this situation with existing std STL implementations, but it would be nice if they didn't require this. EASTL type traits can be explicitly user-controlled. Some type traits cannot be discerned by compilers, and in some cases you may want to override the compiler's automatic view of a type trait. EASTL provides a supported mechanism for explicitly setting a type_trait: EASTL_DECLARE_*. An example of this is EASTL_DECLARE_TRIVIAL_RELOCATE(x). EASTL's shared_ptr/weak_ptr allow the user to specify an allocator instead of implicitly using global new. As described in the game software issues section, global new usage is often verboten in game software development, at least for console platforms. Thus any library facility which uses global operator new or any memory allocation that cannot be controlled by the user is unacceptable. Allocators are named. All containers have a default name in case one isn't supplied by the user. Naming allocators and allocations is a common and useful practice for software development where all memory must be accounted for. Tracking allocations by file/line doesn't work well with libraries - especially fundamental libraries such as STL - and EASTL builds it into the API, though allocators can ignore it when appropriate. This is a case of a feature that might not be popular if it was in std STL, but since EASTL is developed for use by a game development company it works well. queue, priority_queue, and stack have a get_container function. It is sometimes simply practical to have this. A typical case is one whereby the creator of the queue is different from the user of the queue. It is also useful for diagnostics. EASTL doesn't use char and wchar_t but instead uses char8_t, char16_t, and char32_t. wchar_t isn't portable. See Appendix item 13. EASTL defines eastl_size_t and eastl_ssize_t, and container size_type is typedef'd to eastl_size_t. These default to size_t and signed size_t respectively but can be configured to be uint32_t and int32_t on 64 bit platforms, as a 64 bit size_t wastes space in practice in most cases.

Changes that aren't related to API specifications:

hash and tree containers work by inheritance instead of by composition in order to reduce a layer of indirection. It is common for std STL implementations to implement std::set by having it own a member rbtree and route most of its functionality through the member. This has some theoretical advantages but results in asking the compiler to deal with a layer of indirection which it may or may not optimize away. EASTL supplies per-platform optimizations in some cases. For example, the min function specialized for float can be implemented in a way that avoids branching. float min(float a, float b)

{

float result, test(a - b);

__asm__ ("fsel %0, %1, %2, %3" :

"=f" (result) :

"f" (test), "f" (b), "f" (a));

return result;

} Such optimizations are implementation details, but are described here because they provide a practical performance benefit to the performance-conscious user. It would be nice if std STL implementations provided such things, though Metrowerks has been known to do so in some cases.

Instead of just <algorithm>, EASTL has <algorithm.h>, <sort.h>, <algoset.h>, and <heap.h>. std STL <algorithm> is a large file that is slow to compile and creates large object files for compilers that use the Borland template model (most compilers) as opposed to the Cfront model. EASTL containers avoid function calls to the extent possible, even if such calls might be inlined by the compiler. This makes it easier for the compiler to optimize and easier for the user to trace. Debug game builds that heavily use std STL with all its function calls can be unacceptably slow. See Appendix item 9 and Appendix item 10. EASTL is argument-dependent-lookup safe and guaranteed to be so. This allows you to safely call STL functions with code from other namespaces. See Appendix item 11. EASTL compiles without warning on the highest warning levels available by the compiler. This might seem like an obvious idea, but the most common commercial STL implementation does not follow it. Nearly all shared libraries and most games within EA are developed with the highest possible warning levels, and many teams set warnings to be errors. As it currently stands, usage of the C++ standard library and STL provided by the aforementioned vendor must be wrapped in warning disabling clauses wherever they are used. This results in more messy code and more fragile builds. Exception handling can be disabled in EASTL by explicitly supported configuration directives. Almost all game development is done with exception handling disabled. The discussion of this policy is outside the scope of this paragraph, but is handled in Appendix item 19. It useful if users can explicitly disable exception handling in the libraries that they use, independently of how the compiler is configured for exception handling. Header files are explicitly in an EASTL header directory and have a .h suffix. Thus we have #include <EASTL/list.h> instead of #include <list>. Putting header files in an explicit directory gives them a "namespace" of sorts. This goes a long way towards avoiding header conflicts between shared libraries and is the standard design within Electronic Arts. Suffix-less header names (e.g. <list>) don't work well in practice as well as suffixed names in user and development environments. This is a practical reality, and users prefer suffixed file names anyway. EASTL is implemented in a highly readable way that allows non-experts to follow it. All existing STL implementations with the possible exception of Metrowerks are hard to read. They have virtually no code documentation and use variable and function names that are cryptic and/or use unusual formatting. This has been a surprisingly negative point in EA team evaluations of STL for their use.

EASTL coverage of TR1 (C++ library extensions)

EASTL covers the parts of TR1 that relate to containers, algorithms, and iterators. Most significantly, it does not cover random number generation and regular expressions.

Entity Comments array

type_traits EASTL provides many of the type_traits defined in TR1 to the extent possible, and includes some extension traits and functionality as well. EASTL algorithms and containers make extensive use of these type traits. unordered_set

unordered_multiset

unordered_map

unordered_multimap EASTL names these hash_set, hash_multiset, hash_map, and hash_multimap. A primary reason they were renamed to unordered_* in TR1 was to avoid collision with existing std STL extensions. This is not an issue for EASTL because it has its own namespace: eastl. EASTL provides some extension functionality to the TR1 proposal, the most significant of which is the find_as function. shared_ptr

weak_ptr These are fundamentally the same as TR1 with the exception that they allow the user to provide an allocator instead of using global new, which is often verboten in game library development. Also, the use of virtual functions is avoided as well, given the potential cache miss they may cause. See Appendix item 19.

EASTL additional functionality (not found in std STL or TR1)

The following lists EASTL containers, algorithms, functors, and meta-templates that are not found in either std STL nor in TR1. The non-allocating containers and smart pointers below are viewed by many as the most important part of EASTL and some users use these more often than regular containers or even exclusively.

Entity Comments fixed_list

fixed_slist

fixed_vector

fixed_string

fixed_set

fixed_multiset

fixed_map

fixed_multimap

fixed_hash_set

fixed_hash_multiset

fixed_hash_map

fixed_hash_multimap Fixed containers are fixed-size containers with their memory stored right within the container itself. Fixed containers allocate no dynamic memory and their memory tends to be cache-friendly due to its contiguity and proximity to the container's housekeeping data. The user declares the max container size as a template parameter, and can also specify that if the container overflows that an auxiliary dynamic allocator is used. The overflow allocation feature is best used for pathological cases or during development when the container's fixed size is being tuned. All fixed containers have high-water mark tracking to assist in size tuning. The following is the template declaration for fixed_vector: template <typename T, size_t nodeCount, bool enableOverflow = true, typename Allocator overflowAllocator = EASTLAllocator> class fixed_vector { ... }; fixed_substring

This is a string which is a view on an arbitrary span of characters. Thus if you have a paragraph of text but want to treat a single sentence of it as a (const) string, fixed_substring can be used. This allows for efficient const string operations without allocating memory and copying string data. A fixed_substring can be resized, upon which it will then allocate memory and copy characters. vector_set

vector_multiset

vector_map

vector_multimap These are the same thing as sorted vectors as described in Effective STL. The underlying container is not limited to being a vector but can be any random access container, such as deque or array. Recall that the characteristic of these containers is that they provide improved memory efficiency and locality at the cost of dynamic container modification efficiency. intrusive_list

intrusive_slist

intrusive_set

intrusive_multiset

intrusive_map

intrusive_multimap

intrusive_hash_set

intrusive_hash_multiset

intrusive_hash_map

intrusive_hash_multimap Intrusive containers are containers whereby the user provides the nodes and thus no memory is allocated and cache behavior is improved during container manipulations. Another benefit is that elements can be removed from containers without referencing the container (i.e. without calling container member functions). This is useful for when a class hands out element pointers to clients which the client will eventually hand back. Another benefit of intrusive containers is that is they doesn't require elements to be copyable, and sometimes element copying is not possible. EASTL intrusive containers allow elements to safely reside in multiple unrelated containers simultaneously. See Appendix item 16 for the intrusive_list interface. slist slist is a singly-linked list that is much like the slist extension found in the SGI STL branch of STL implementations. ring_buffer This implements a constant or variable capacity ring buffer which is templated on a user-supplied bidirectional container. Typically you would use it with a list or a deque, but a constant-capacity ring_buffer might use vector or array instead. template <typename T, typename Container = vector<T> >

class ring_buffer { };

linked_ptr

linked_array

intrusive_ptr

safe_ptr

These are smart pointers which have similar characteristics to shared_ptr, but don't allocate memory. safe_ptr is an explicitly standalone weak pointer which doesn't allocate memory. linked_ptr uses a linked list to store references and thus also doesn't allocate memory. intrusive_ptr uses an object-supplied addref/release function to manage object lifetime. shared_array

scoped_array

These are array versions of shared_ptr and scoped_ptr. The conventional explanation for why the TR1 doesn't provide such array versions is that vector already supplies this. That's a fine argument, though vector and shared_array are not identical. binary_search_i

find_first_not_of

find_last_of

find_last_not_of

identical

change_heap

remove_heap

is_heap

median These are additional algorithms. binary_search_i is an alternative to binary_search which returns an iterator instead of bool. It turns out that users often want the result of the binary search and not the just status. This is the same as the binary_find function suggested by some. identical is an algorithm which is like the equal algorithm except it doesn't assume/require that the input ranges are of equal length. identical efficiently compares ranges for both length equality and element equality. is_sorted

radix_sort

bucket_sort

shell_sort

insertion_sort

merge_sort

merge_sort_buffer

comb_sort

bubble_sort

These are additional sort algorithms. radix_sort is implemented via the following interface: template <typename RandomAccessIterator, typename ExtractKey, typename IntegerType>

void radix_sort(RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last,

RandomAccessIterator buffer, ExtractKey extractKey, IntegerType); merge_sort_buffer is a merge_sort whereby the user supplies the scratch buffer instead of relying on dynamic allocation to provide it. bubble_sort has curiously been shown in practice to be a good sort for very small element counts (<5), and so it is retained for both practical and instructional purposes, though insertion_sort also works well for small sizes. comb_sort is a fast sort which is almost as fast as the (introspective) sort algorithm, but has the benefit of using much less code and thus may be more friendly with the instruction cache. equal_to_2

not_equal_to_2

less_2

str_equal_to

str_equal_to_i

These are additions to the functional module. equal_to_2 compares two different types T and U for equality. less_2 is similar. These are useful for things such as the find_as extension. str_equal_to compares two C strings represented by character pointers. It is like strcmp. is_aligned

has_trivial_relocate

EASTL_DECLARE_* EASTL has a couple additional type traits in addition to the TR1 set. Of note is the has_trivial_relocate trait, which defines whether a class instance can be moved (memcpy'd) to another location in memory safely. This is useful for classes that are expensive to copy construct and assign but are easy to memcpy. The classic example is a reference count. A vector of reference counts is expensive to manipulate because it triggers what we call "ref count storms" or "ref count thrashing" which slows down execution and makes some types of debugging very difficult. However, a reference count is merely an integer and so can memcpy'd to its new location by the vector. Note that a relocatable object is not the same thing as a POD. A POD may or may not be relocatable, and a non-POD may or may not be relocatable. relocation is very much related to move semantics proposed for the C++ language, but is called "relocate" in order to avoid confusion with evolving definition of move semantics. EASTL has a formal mechanism which allows the user to explicitly ascribe a type trait to a class. This can be applied to most of the type traits but is particularly targeted at the type traits which the compiler cannot determine for itself. For example, the EASTL_DECLARE_HAS_TRIVIAL_RELOCATE(T) tells the compiler that type T should have the has_trivial_relocate type trait. uninitialized_copy_ptr

uninitialized_fill_ptr

uninitialized_fill_n_ptr

uninitialized_copy_fill

uninitialized_fill_copy

uninitialized_copy_copy

These are the same as equivalents found in libstdc++ and its predecessors. These do operations on uninitialized memory such a filling to it or copying to it and thus initializing it as it goes. generic_iterator EASTL defines a generic iterator which can be wrapped around a pointer to make it act like a contiguous iterator. use_self

use_first

use_second

make_pair_ref These are utility templates for the pair template. make_pair_ref is a version of make_pair that explicitly uses object references instead of values in order to prevent potentially expensive copy operations. compressed_pair

call_traits These are as per existing similar extensions found elsewhere. compressed_pair is useful for implementing the "empty base class" optimization.

Game software issues

The discussion here involves gaming platforms currently developed for by EA. These include primarily console, hand-held, and desktop platforms. Virtually all game development within EA and other companies is done in C++; this isn't likely to change for many years. A number of characteristics distinguish game software requirements from desktop productivity software requirements. These include:

Game software always maximizes the hardware and is subject to Nathan's Laws.

Game source and binaries tend to be rather large. See Appendix item 5.

Game applications work with large amounts of application data. See Appendix item 5.

Console-based games run off of DVD drives, which are much slower than hard drives.

Game applications must execute very smoothly; there can't be unplanned execution pauses.

Non-desktop platforms don't have paged memory. If the application exhausts memory, it dies.

The lack of paged memory means that memory fragmentation can kill an application.

Non-desktop platforms have a fixed amount of memory, and it is smaller than desktop platforms. See Appendix item 27.

Non-desktop platforms have special kinds of memory, such as "physical memory," "non-local memory," "non-cacheable memory," etc.

Non-desktop platforms have processors and memory caches are less forgiving than those on desktops. See Appendix item 28.

Debug builds of game software need to be reasonably fast. See Appendix item 9.

Game platforms sometimes require the use of non-default memory alignment.

The above conditions lead to the following results:

No matter how powerful any game computer ever gets, it will never have any free memory or CPU cycles.

Game developers are very concerned about software performance and software development practices.

Game software often doesn't use conventional synchronous disk IO such as <stdio.h> or <fstream> but uses asynchronous IO.

Game applications cannot leak memory. If an application leaks even a small amount of memory, it eventually dies.

Every byte of allocated memory must be accounted for and trackable. This is partly to assist in leak detection but is also to enforce budgeting.

Game software rarely uses system-provided heaps but uses custom heaps instead. See Appendix item 26.

A lot of effort is expended in reducing memory fragmentation.

A lot of effort is expended in creating memory analysis tools and debugging heaps.

A lot of effort is expended in improving source and data build times.

Application code and libraries cannot be very slow in debug builds. See Appendix item 9.

Memory allocation of any type is avoided to the extent possible.

Operator new overrides (class and global) are the rule and not the exception.

Use of built-in global operator new is verboten, at least with shareable libraries.

Any memory a library allocates must be controllable by the user.

Game software must be savvy to non-default memory alignment requirements.

Memory pools are sometimes used in order to avoid fragmentation, even though they necessarily waste some memory themselves. See Appendix item 26.

Branching (if/else/while/for/do) is avoided to the extent possible, especially mispredicted branches. See Appendix item 28.

Virtual functions are avoided to the extent possible, especially in bottleneck code. See Appendix item 19.

Exception handling is usually disabled. See Appendix item 17.

RTTI is usually disabled or at least unused in shipping code.

Many of the above items are related to memory management and performance. As a result a lot of effort is put into optimizing the use of memory. Some games have been known to run with only a few KiB of system memory free. Some games run with no memory free at all and install an out-of-memory callback to free memory from elsewhere to satisfy the current request. See Appendix item 18. The memory fragmentation is not solved, as many of the analyses that have been used to measure memory fragmentation have largely applied to desktop software memory usage patterns, requirements, and environments. Game development has further memory constraints which make problems harder to solve. EA would like to welcome researchers to work with us on some of these problems, as they represent difficult problems that don't appear to be going away.

We also have the following practical considerations regarding C++ game programmers:

C++ isn't taught much any more in college. It's hard enough finding people who know C++, and harder finding people who understand templates of the kind you find in STL.

An increasing number of game developers are young and generic programming is foreign to them. Readers of this paper may have no trouble navigating a std STL header file, but this can be a daunting task for a less experienced programmer. An STL implementation that is very clear is worth more than experts may intially think.

Game developers (all developers, really) need to be able to examine and trace STL containers and algorithms. It's not a matter of debugging the containers themselves (which are already debugged) but a matter of debugging the user's use of the containers.

C++ templates are disliked by some because they are "tricky" and have "gotchas." You shouldn't have to be a language lawyer to use a programming language.

Section 20.1.5 of the C++ standard describes the requirements for an allocator, and the result looks more or less like below. The requirement that the allocator be a templated class is not explicitly stated in the standard, though the requirements for rebind make it virtually mandatory that allocators be templated. Items of interest to this discussion are colored in blue.

template <typename T> class allocator { public: typedef size_t size_type; typedef ptrdiff_t difference_type; typedef T* pointer; typedef const T* const_pointer; typedef T& reference; typedef const T& const_reference; typedef T value_type; allocator(); allocator(const allocator<T>&); ~allocator(); template <class U> allocator(const allocator<U>&); template <class U> struct rebind { typedef allocator<U> other; }; T* address(T&) const; const T* address(const T&) const; T* allocate(size_type, const void* = NULL); void deallocate(T*, size_type); void construct(T*, const T&); void destroy(T*); size_type max_size() const; }; bool operator ==(const allocator<T>&, const allocator<T>&); bool operator !=(const allocator<T>&, const allocator<T>&);

Unfortunately, the std allocator design and its use by std containers make it hard to work with and leads to suboptimal performance and code bloat. These are some serious charges, but in the realm of high performance game development they are real and significant. The following is a list of some of the issues of std allocators and std containers' use of std allocators:

As described in the Halpern proposal, std allocators are class-based and not instance-based. This results in some awkward attempts to make them act as if instance-based.

Allocators are virtually required to be templates, and rebind is required to be a member template. Unless the compiler is very good at inlining (and some compilers are not -- see Appendix item 15), this can result in an explosion of templates, code, and performance problems.

Allocators are rebound by containers to one or more additional types -- types which the user cannot know in any portable way. Thus the author of an allocator cannot know what it will actually be asked to allocate and construct. It is ironic that user-supplied allocators to STL containers in practice don't allocate objects of the user-specified type. It is unfortunate that there is no portable way for the container user or allocator implementor to know what the allocator will be asked to allocator or what it will be rebound to. This somewhat defeats the purpose of the allocator being templated on some type.

Allocators don't understand alignment requirements. Objects allocated by a std allocator are assumed to be of default alignment (usually equal to sizeof double) or it is assumed that the implementor of the allocator knows what the alignment is. Neither of these assumptions are satisfactory, as the former can be simply untrue and the latter can be impractical or impossible.

Allocators are required to construct and destroy objects as well as allocate them. This forces the mixing of two separate concepts: allocation and construction.

Containers require you to set an allocator at container construction time; you cannot set it later.

Containers do not let you access their allocators; they only give you copies of their allocators.

Current STL implementations such as libstdc++ (up to libstdc++ v4.1, apparently rectified with v4.2) copy allocators and create temporary allocators during empty construction and copy construction, which can result in performance problems in the case of expensive allocators. The user is thus steered towards making allocators lightweight classes which are references to the actual allocators in use, which results in unwanted indirection overhead and extra code.

EASTL allocators bear a resemblance to std allocators but have one fundamental difference: they malloc memory rather than allocate and construct objects. EASTL allocators are thus more like the malloc and free functions than like the new and delete operators. EASTL allocators also bear a marked resemblence to the allocators described in the Towards a Better Allocator Model proposal though they were developed independently without knowledge of the former. A fundamental difference between the two is that EASTL allocators don't have virtual functions; these have a performance cost that is to be avoided whenever possible.

The following illustrates the interface requirements for EASTL allocators. Items of interest are colored in blue.

class allocator { public: allocator( const char* name = "EASTL" ); allocator(const allocator& x); allocator(const allocator& x, const char* name); allocator& operator=(const allocator& x); void* allocate(size_t n, int flags = 0); void* allocate(size_t n, size_t alignment, size_t offset, int flags = 0 ); void deallocate(void* p, size_t n); const char* get_name() const; void set_name(const char* name); }; bool operator==(const allocator& a, const allocator& b); bool operator!=(const allocator& a, const allocator& b);

Some notes regarding eastl allocators:

Allocators are required to be assignable. The user may define a swap function for the allocator as well.

allocator is not necessarily a template, nor does it necessarily have member templates.

The flags parameter describes hints for the allocation, such as whether the memory is temporary or permanent. This is very useful for high performance non-fragmenting memory allocation. See Appendix item 7.

The alignment and offset parameters specify the alignment requirements of the allocation. This is important on platforms that require non-default memory alignment. It's not feasible for the container to expect the allocator know the required alignment ahead of time. This is because allocators may be shared between containers and because containers may use an allocator to allocate multiple types, as is the case with deque and hashtable containers.

The name-related functions allow the user to name the allocator, which in turn results in all allocations from that allocator being tagged with a user-supplied name. This is important in game software whereby all allocated memory must be accountable. See Appendix item 12.

The allocator is assumed to save the name pointer as opposed to copying its contents.

allocator comparisons are significant, and equality is defined as meaning that equal containers can free memory allocated by each other.

There is no max_size function, though such a thing might be useful for fixed-size pool allocators and their containers.

An allocator which is a copy of another allocator compares as equal to the original allocator and acts as such.

EASTL containers

All EASTL containers follow a set of consistent conventions. Here we define the prototypical container which has the minimal functionality that all (non-adapter) containers must have. Items of interest are colored in blue.

enum iterator_status_flag

{

isf_none = 0x00,

isf_valid = 0x01,

isf_current = 0x02,

isf_can_dereference = 0x04

};

template <class T, class Allocator = eastl::allocator>

class container

{

public:

typedef container<T, Allocator> this_type;

typedef T value_type;

typedef T* pointer;

typedef const T* const_pointer;

typedef T& reference;

typedef const T& const_reference;

typedef ptrdiff_t difference_type;

typedef impl_defined size_type;

typedef impl-defined iterator;

typedef impl-defined const_iterator;

typedef reverse_iterator<iterator> reverse_iterator;

typedef reverse_iterator<const_iterator> reverse_const_iterator;

typedef Allocator allocator_type; typedef impl-defined node_type; static const size_t kNodeAlignment = impl-defined;

static const size_t kNodeAlignmentOffset = impl-defined; public: container(const allocator_type& allocator = allocator_type()); container(const this_type& x); this_type& operator=(this_type& x); void swap(this_type& x); void reset(); allocator_type& get_allocator(); const allocator_type& get_allocator() const; void set_allocator(allocator_type& allocator); iterator begin(); const_iterator begin() const; iterator end(); const_iterator end() const; bool validate() const; iterator_status_flag validate_iterator(const_iterator i) const; }; template <class T, class Allocator> bool operator==(const container<T, Allocator>& a, const container<T, Allocator>& b); template <class T, class Allocator> bool operator!=(const container<T, Allocator>& a, const container<T, Allocator>& b);

Notes:

EASTL guarantees that existing std STL container usage will behave the same under EASTL. Changes in functionality are introduced only by new member functions, extra template parameters, or simply new containers. This allows for easy conversion to EASTL, and often from EASTL to std STL as well.

The get_allocator function allows the user to access the container's allocator as opposed to a copy of it. Without this, the user can only set the container's allocator on container construction, and this is impractical under some situations.

Note that allocator parameters are specified by value and not by pointer, unlike the Halpern proposal. A pointer-based parameter was initially considered but it was determined that a class can encapsulate a pointer and thus act as a superset of a pointer-based design.

Swapped containers do not swap their allocators. See Appendix item 29 regarding LWG #431.

Some operations that involve multiple containers (such as list::splice) are invalid when container allocators are unequal and an exception is thrown if the allocators are unequal.

Newly constructed empty containers must do no memory allocation. Some STL and other container libraries allocate an initial node from the class memory allocator. EASTL containers by design never do this. If a container needs an initial node, that node should be made part of the container itself or be a static empty node object.

Empty containers (new or otherwise) contain no constructed objects, including those that might be in an 'end' node. Similarly, no user object (e.g. of type T) should be constructed unless required by the design and unless documented in the container/algorithm contract.

The reset function is a special extension function which unilaterally resets the container to an empty state without freeing the memory of the contained objects. This is useful for very quickly tearing down a container built into scratch memory and is a useful feature for high performance programming. No memory is allocated by reset, and the container has no allocated memory after the reset is executed. It is inherently unsafe for types that have non-trivial destructor.

There is no max_size function, though such a thing might be useful for fixed-size containers. The reason it doesn't exist is simply because in practice it is rarely used.

The validate and validate_iterator functions provide explicit container and iterator validation. EASTL provides an option to do implicit automatic iterator and container validation, but full validation (which can be potentially extensive) has too much of a performance cost to execute implicitly, even in a debug build. So EASTL provides these explicit functions which can be called by the user at the appropriate time and in optimized builds as well as debug builds.

EASTL does not solve the out of memory problem. See Appendix item 18.

EASTL flaws

Some aspects of EASTL turned out to be not quite right. The following is a list of some of the things that might be done differently.

The basic_string implementation propagates the problems with std::basic_string. Two fundamental problems with basic_string are that it has too many member functions and that end() should have been used instead of npos for member algorithms. EASTL fixes neither of these and in fact adds a few additional member functions. A better string class would fix the above two problems and would also implement optional behavior policies such as copy-on-write.

Some people want list::size to be O(1) and some want it to be O(n). eastl::list should solve this by providing a template parameter to let the user choose, but currently it has no such option. A future revision of eastl::list will likely make this a template policy option.

fixed-substring is currently a subclass of basic_string, which creates some unsafe situations. However, this is an implementation detail which can be rectified.

The container reset function should perhaps have been given a less simple name. Some new users confuse it with clear.

EASTL does not solve the out-of-memory problem any differently than std STL (aside from it providing intrusive containers and fixed size containers). The std STL solution (exception handling) is supported by EASTL but is not favored and is usually disabled. See Appendix item 18.

The EASTL compile-time and runtime checking is not as thorough as that of libstdc++, as libstdc++ and possibly other std STL implementations have compile-time checking for some types of requirements. This too is something that can be improved in EASTL if deemed necessary.

Appendix

This appendix contains supplementary material referenced by the document body. In many cases the items here describe in more detail what is meant in the body. It is placed here in order to avoid getting in the way of the primary text.

1 - (removed)

2 - A debuggable list container

To make a list container debuggable, whereby the user can easily inspect and traverse it with a traditional debugger, we use Curiously Recurring Template Pattern like so in EASTL.

template <typename LN>

struct ListNodeBaseProxy

{

LN* mpNext;

LN* mpPrev;

}; template <typename T> struct ListNode : public ListNodeBaseProxy< ListNode<T> > { T mValue; }; template <typename T, typename Allocator> class ListBase // Typically the list class inherits from a base class such as this. { public: typedef T value_type; typedef ListNode<T> node_type; typedef ListNodeBaseProxy< ListNode<T> > base_node_type; protected: base_node_type mNode; . . . };

3 - Algorithm type preservation problem

The following example demonstrates a problem with current std STL implementations. What the TableBasedSorter specifically does is somewhat meaningless and arbitrary.

struct TableBasedSorter { TableBasedSorter(const int values[128]) { for(int i = 0; i < 128; ++i) mTable[i] = ((values[i] ^ 0xff80) + 128) - i; } bool operator()(int a, int b) const { return mTable[b] < mTable[a]; } int mTable[128]; }; std::sort(v, v + 128, TableBasedSorter(values));

The problem is that the std STL implementations pass the Compare function object around internally by value, triggering copying of it. This is compounded by debug STL implementations which call a Compare checker that evaluates the comparison twice instead of once so that it can enforce !(Compare(x, y) && Compare(y, x)). It thus ends up calling the copy constructor O(n log(n)) times. The user might think that the following should rectify the problem:

HuffmanHistoSorter compare; std::sort<int*, TableBasedSorter& >(v, v + 128, compare);

But it doesn't work, because the sort function ignores the compare reference template parameter and makes copies of the compare internally.

The conventional workaround for this problem is to create a proxy compare class that references the real compare object, but this is clumsy and creates a performance dragging memory indirection. Why not simply have the algorithm obey the user's request? It's not clear if the C++ standard requires that the user's request be respected, but it would be nice if it did. EASTL does so.

4 - (removed)

5 - Game source and binary sizes

Game software for desktop platforms and for 2005+ console platforms is often large-scale software.

The source code for large PC games is usually in the range of 500,000 to 2 million lines.

Application binaries are in the range of 5 to 20 MB.

Game source data (graphics, maps, search graphs, UI, movies, animations, scripting) source is in the range of 5 to 50 GB.

Compiled game data is usually in the range of 500 MB to 4 GB (not including movie files).

In addition to the code for the games themselves, game software tends to have a lot of supporting tool or "pipeline" code. Since games tend to have a lot of data, a lot of custom tools are written to generate and process this data. The size of these tools can be larger than the size of the game applications themselves. However, these tools usually don't need to have the same attention to performance as does the game code itself. While game code is almost exclusively C++, tools are written in a variety of languages, including most commonly C#, Python, C++, and Perl.

6 - Garbage collected allocators

Garbage collected memory is not currently considered an option for game development, though current iterative generational garbage collection is well-done. A full discussion of this deserves a paper of its own, but suffice it to say that the realities of limited memory and specialized memory as well as the somewhat real-time requirements of game software make garbage collected memory currently not viable. However, EA is interested in the results of research in this area and is interested in the possibility of collaborative work with researchers on this topic.

7 - Permanent and temporary memory

A useful technique for reducing memory fragmentation which is often used by game developers is to separate allocated memory into two classes: temporary memory and permanent memory. Some EA games have consumed system memory completely enough that that they would fail to run without this optimization. The way it works is that memory which is allocated once on startup is deemed to be permanently allocated. Similarly, memory which is allocated once for a new game level is deemed to be permanently allocated. Memory which is dynamically allocated and freed in a arbitrary or out-of-order way is deemed to be temporarily allocated. Memory which is permanent is allocated from the top of the heap downward, and memory which is temporary is allocated from the low end of the heap.

[temporary memory --> (free space) <-- permanent memory] (low memory) (high memory)

The result is that permanent allocations are tightly packed together in high memory and don't create dead spots in low memory. Sometimes permanent and temporary memory are sometimes referred to as high and low memory, for reasons that should be obvious. This technique is useful on both fixed-memory systems and on mapped virtual memory systems such as Windows. The custom heaps in use at EA explicitly support the concept of permanent and temporary (high and low) memory.

8 - (removed)

9 - Debug builds can't be slow

Game software is notoriously difficult to test, and it is particularly difficult to automate game software testing. Individual modular components can be automatically unit tested (as is EASTL) but the interactive gameplay of an application is much harder test. There is currently no satisfactory solution to this problem and no solution appears to be imminent. This is a topic of research on its own, and until it may be some day solved, the majority of game testing is done interactively by humans.

The interactive nature of game software means that slow debug builds are hard to test and can waste a lot of human testers' time. Since much of the testing involves testing the interactivity of the game, a slow game can make interactivity testing virtually impossible. Also, a slow application can waste a lot of programmer time spent waiting for the application to get to some desired state. Such a wait occurs for any programmer testing any kind of application, but it often happens in game programming that the programmer needs to follow a potentially long series of gameplay steps in order to get the application to some state, and there might not shortcuts or cheats to get there.

When we were using STLPort on some of our earlier STL-based PC games at EA, we enabled inlining in debug builds in order to avoid all the function calls that aren't being inlined in debug builds. Enabling inlining wasn't desirable (as it made debugging more difficult) but it made the debug builds more responsive.

10 - Function call avoidance

EASTL containers avoid function calls to the extent possible, even if such calls might be inlined by the compiler. The avoidance of function calls makes it easier for the compiler to optimize and easier for the user to trace at runtime. Many of the improved benchmark results of EASTL over std STL are due to the compiler not being able to inline functions that the std STL author assumed or hoped that it would. Compiler inlining weaknesses are discussed in Appendix item 15 . Additionally, builds with inlining disabled can yield sluggish applications that become unsuitable for testing. See Appendix item 9.

The downside to function call avoidance is that it makes container authoring and maintenance more difficult for the author, though containers tend to have little work done on them once implemented and debugged. There is a maxim that EASTL attempts to follow: write for your users first, your peers second, and yourself last.

The following demonstrates the function calls involved in the vector::resize function in EASTL and libstdc++. The EASTL version does some math and then calls insert or erase. The libstdc++ version class functions which themselves call functions, and so on. Consider that the code calling resize may itself be subject to inlining. This layering of function calls puts a burden on the compiler to inline optimally which it may or may not be able to do.

EASTL vector::resize

void resize(size_type n) { if(n > (mpEnd - mpBegin)) insert(mpEnd, n - (mpEnd - mpBegin), value_type()); else erase(mpBegin + n, mpEnd); }

void resize(size_type __new_size) { resize(__new_size, value_type()); }

void resize(size_type __new_size, const value_type& __x)

{

if(__new_size < size())

erase(begin() + __new_size, end());

else

insert(end(), __new_size - size(), __x);

}

size_type size() const

{ return size_type(end() - begin()); }

const_iterator begin() const

{ return const_iterator(this->_M_impl._M_start); } const_iterator end() const

{ return const_iterator(this->_M_impl._M_finish); } __normal_iterator(const _Iterator& __i) : _M_current(__i) { }

11 - Argument-dependent lookup safety

If the user calls a std STL function with an argument that happens to exist in a namespace that has functions of the same name as those in the std namespace, what should std STL do if it needs to call a function of that name? Is the C++ standard clear on the requirement here? Should std STL explicitly call the std version of that function or should it call the version unqualified? In the large majority of cases, the STL should explicitly call the std version, with exceptions being made only for functions that were intended to be overridden, such as swap.

The following code may fail to compile if the std::sort implementation makes unqualified min calls, as the compiler will use ADL to find the test::min function in addition to std::min.

namespace test

{

int min(int x, int y);

class X { };

}

std::sort(XArray, XArray + 10);

At least one major commercial STL implementation has recently not been ADL-safe, despite having otherwise excellent standards support. The vendor has been notified and agreed to fix the problem future releases.

12 - Memory tagging

Memory tagging is the process of associating some useful information with a memory allocation. It is typically done in one or more of three ways:

1 file / line The __FILE__ and __LINE__ values of the allocation request are stored. This is lightweight but doesn't work well when the allocation comes from within a shared library, such as STL. Another problem with it is that it doesn't tell you anything about the nature of the allocation, such as who did the allocation or what the allocation is used for. 2 call stack The call stack of the allocation request is stored. This works well but is not as lightweight as file / line tagging. As with file / line tagging, call stack tagging doesn't tell you much about the allocation aside from where it was done. 3 name The allocation is given a name, such as "VehicleInfo". This has the advantage of telling you what the allocation is used for. For categorization and budgeting purposes, the name can be hierarchical, such as with "Automata/VehicleInfo". Allocation names can also be used in many cases to tell you where the allocation occurred as well. Memory tagging combined with detailed heap reports can tell you if similarly used memory is physically proximate. A disadvantage of this scheme is that it requires explicit support in user libraries; it cannot be automatically generated like a call stack can.

Each has its strengths and weaknesses and users will often favor one technique over another. However, they aren't mutually exclusive. Typically file/line and name will be used or callstack and name will be used together, as naming is somewhat complementary with the other two. EASTL explicitly supports memory name tagging, as it is so useful. Memory heaps in EA explicitly support all three of the above methods of memory tagging, as well as others: allocation time, allocation number, allocation group ids, arbitrary user-supplied data, and others.

13 - wchar_t portability

The large majority of commercial game software uses 8 bit UTF8-encoded text or 16 bit UCS2-encoded text. Different operating systems have different conventions for encoding text, but these have little bearing on what a game chooses to use for its text. The discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of text encoding options is outside the scope of this document, but the discussion of how to portably support a given encoding in a library is pertinent.

char16_t and char32_t are sized character types, much like uint16_t and uint32_t are sized integer types. These sized character types are extensions defined by EA which allow string code and data to be more portable, though they don't solve the string literal problem. wchar_t is not considered portable, as it may be 8, 16, or 32 bits, depending on the system (BEOS, Windows, Unix, respectively). The Unicode Standard recommands against using wchar_t for this same reason (version 4, section 5.2, paragraph 2).

If your application wants to use a 16 bit string but your compiler defines wchar_t as 32 bits, you cannot use the standard string library provided with the compiler. And even if you could recompile the standard string library to be 16 bit, you'd then be breaking any code you have that wants to use a 32 bit wchar_t. Another problem is that there is no way to declare a 16 bit string literal if wchar_t is 32 bits. Also, if wchar_t is defined as 8 bit UTF-8, there will be difficulties if you do a lot of string processing, which we can say with confidence because we've done this. So what we do is define char8_t, char16_t, and char32_t and rewrite the standard string library to explicitly support all three types. A side benefit is that the resulting string library is more efficient than the one provided with the compiler. See Appendix item 14.

Sized character types would be useful to have in C++, as they allow for portable and efficient usage of strings in a multi-platform development environment. Instead of prefixing a string with L, how about prefixing it with L16 or L32 instead? There are proposals for such sized char types in C++09.

14 - Why replace standard library functions?

Often you will see game programmers avoid using functions from the C and C++ standard library and instead use re-implemented versions. The reasons for this depend on the individual case but are usually driven by some practical performance issue. We provide a table of commonly re-implemented functionality and the most common reasons for it. We hope that this may help library designers understand the requirements of game software.

Replaced functionality Rationale memcpy, memmove, memset memcpy implementations for existing well-established desktop platforms are known to be well-optimized and are rarely replaced. However, it turns out that library vendors for new hardware sometimes don't come up with optimized implementations until well after the hardware's initial availability. Also, in many cases memory manipulation functions can be improved for the case of memory aligned on page-sized or cache line-sized boundaries and thus game software often implements specialized memory manipulation functions for these cases. printf, sprintf

sprintf is a function that is often re-implemented by game software. Typical reasons are thus: sprintf is slow because it locks mutexes and reads internal locale information.

sprintf brings in enough extenal code to make it too big to be usable on some machines such as the new Sony/IBM Cell processors.

wsprintf can't be relied upon to work with 16 bit strings, as described in Appendix item 13.

Some sprintf implementations may allocate memory from the global heap.

Some sprintf implementations (e.g. Playstation 2) are very slow with double precision floating point math.

sprintf doesn't support explicitly sized types such as int32_t. C99's PRId32 is a poor workaround, as it is obfuscational and non-portable.

sprintf supports decimal (%d), octal (%o), and hexidecimal (%x) output, but not binary output (%b).

sprintf sometimes isn't provided by the compiler vendor. Or more often, some useful variation of it such as vsnprintf isn't provided by the compiler vendor. wcscpy, wcslen, etc. As explained in Appendix item 13, wchar_t is not portable in practice. If your game uses 16 bit UCS2-encoded strings -- as many do -- then you can't rely on the standard library wide string functions being usable. So games will commonly re-write the entire string library in order to be portable. This is unfortunate, as the vendor-provided C string functions are usually well-implemented. fopen, fstream The FILE-based standard library functions for manipulating files is fine for many purposes and applications. However, it isn't very good for game applications, particularly console-based applications. Even in those cases where sychronous fopen/fread behavior is appropriate, games almost always use the lower level operating system-provided equivalent functionality. As such, FILE use is uncommon in console-based games and often in PC-based games as well. The primary reasons for this are: FILE-based IO is inherently blocking, and games work best if IO is asynchronous and priority and head proximity-driven

FILE-based IO is inherently buffered, whereas this is often not what game software wants.

FILE-based IO is slower (e.g. mutex locking) than equivalent system-provided functionality and usually more limited (e.g. no buffer control) in capabilities. rand The problems with the standard library rand are well-known and are likely part of the impetus for improving random number generation with TR1. A brief summary of the weaknesses is: Limited to 16 bit values in practice.

Poor randomness.

Can't have a private implementation.

Poor performance. atoi, strtol, etc. A problem with functions such as atoi and strtol is that they work with non-portable types such as long and wchar_t. On game platforms, a long may be an inefficient data type (as it is on the Playstation 2). It is preferable to use APIs that work with sized types such as uint32_t and uint64_t, as they guarantee portable behavior and in practice are at least as efficient as types such as int and long. See Appendix item 21. strncpy, strncat These functions are too hard to use safely. We have replaced them with strlcpy and strlcat respectively, though much game software inside and outside EA still use these. Also, the fixed_string or fixed_substring class can be safely used to replace these functions in a friendly way. strftime, set_locale C-provided locale functionality suffers from being neither portable nor overridable. There is no portable way to tell what locale to use, as compilers implement it differently. However, the differences can often be abstracted away with macros. But once you get over this you still have the problem of API functions not always being helpful. The strftime function, for example, doesn't do time/date format localization but instead requires the user to do it. Again the user is required to abstract this away. Another problem is that the user has no way of extending or modifying the behavior of functions like strftime to accomodate some practical requirement. An end result of this is that game software often just rewrites functions like strftime to be simpler, more flexible, and usually more efficient as well. new/delete, malloc/free Custom heaps fragment memory less, use memory more efficiently, and handle aligned memory better that system provided heaps. Custom heaps provide built-in debugging features such as tagging and strong validation, among others. Additionally, gaming platforms often require usage of different kinds of memory for which there is no portable API to manipulate. assert The fundamental problem with assert is that there is no way to override it or intercept it and redirect it to application-provided facilities. The result is that assert usage is verboten because it operates outside the application's control and in practice usually unilaterally causes the application to exit. This is unfortunate because it goes against the purpose of standard library facilities: to provide a portable standard implementation of useful universal functionality. What we would like to see in the C++ standard is a portable way for users to be able to override the assert function and redefine its behavior.

15 - Compiler inlining problems

The GCC C++ compiler is a great compiler with a lot of flexibility and portability. However, it has one weakness of significance that affects templated libraries such as the STL: it is not very good at inlining. There are a number of compiler options to tweak the inlining parameters, but it seems to be fairly difficult to get the compiler to do the "right thing." This appears to be a known problem and it is hoped that a future version of the compiler will address this. The Microsoft C++ compiler does a rather good job of inlining and might be worth using as a reference.

A full discussion of compiler inlining characteristics is outside the scope of this document, but some Internet discussions regarding GCC inlining problems can be found at:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/browse_frm/thread/b74eed16bd48d42e

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/browse_frm/thread/1861b2634cdfa68a/

http://www.pixelglow.com/lists/archive/macstl-dev/2005-September/000154.html

16 - EASTL intrusive_list

As an example of an intrusive container, we show the interface for eastl::intrusive_list. The actual implementation breaks intrusive_list into intrusive_list_base and intrusive_list in order to place some of the non-templated functions into a base class. Other EASTL intrusive containers (e.g. intrusive_hash_map) have a similar philosophy. Recall that the primary advantage of intrusive containers is that they allow the user to provide node memory.

struct intrusive_list_node // Users can use this or provide their own. { intrusive_list_node* pNext; intrusive_list_node* pPrev; }; template <typename T, typename Pointer, typename Reference> class intrusive_list_iterator { public: typedef intrusive_list_iterator<T, Pointer, Reference> this_type; typedef intrusive_list_iterator<T, T*, T&> iterator; typedef intrusive_list_iterator<T, const T*, const T&> const_iterator; typedef T value_type; typedef T node_type; typedef ptrdiff_t difference_type; typedef Pointer pointer; typedef Reference reference; typedef bidirectional_iterator_tag iterator_category; public: intrusive_list_iterator(); explicit intrusive_list_iterator(pointer pNode); intrusive_list_iterator(const iterator& x); reference operator*() const; pointer operator->() const; intrusive_list_iterator& operator++(); intrusive_list_iterator& operator--(); intrusive_list_iterator operator++(int); intrusive_list_iterator operator--(int); }; template <typename T = intrusive_list_node> class intrusive_list { public: typedef intrusive_list<T> this_type; typedef T node_type; typedef T value_type; typedef eastl_size_t size_type; typedef ptrdiff_t difference_type; typedef T& reference; typedef const T& const_reference; typedef T* pointer; typedef const T* const_pointer; typedef intrusive_list_iterator<T, T*, T&> iterator; typedef intrusive_list_iterator<T, const T*, const T&> const_iterator; typedef eastl::reverse_iterator<iterator> reverse_iterator; typedef eastl::reverse_iterator<const_iterator> const_reverse_iterator; public: intrusive_list(); intrusive_list(const this_type& x); this_type& operator=(const this_type& x); iterator begin(); const_iterator begin() const; iterator end(); const_iterator end() const; reverse_iterator rbegin(); const_reverse_iterator rbegin() const; reverse_iterator rend(); const_reverse_iterator rend() const; reference front(); const_reference front() const; reference back(); const_reference back() const; bool empty() const; eastl_size_t size() const; void clear(); void reverse(); void push_front(T& x); void pop_front(); void push_back(T& x); void pop_back(); iterator locate(T& x); const_iterator locate(const T& x) const; iterator insert(iterator pos, T& x); iterator erase(iterator pos); iterator erase(iterator pos, iterator last); void swap(intrusive_list&); static void remove(T& value); // Erases an element from a list without having the list; O(1). void splice(iterator pos, T& x); void splice(iterator pos, intrusive_list& x); void splice(iterator pos, intrusive_list& x, iterator i); void splice(iterator pos, intrusive_list& x, iterator first, iterator last); void merge(this_type& x); template <typename Compare> void merge(this_type& x, Compare compare); void unique(); template <typename BinaryPredicate> void unique(BinaryPredicate); void sort(); template<typename Compare> void sort(Compare compare); bool validate() const; int validate_iterator(const_iterator i) const; };

17 - Disabling of exception handling

Game software usually disables exception handling. A full analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of C++ exception handling in game software is outside the scope of this document, but a few comments can be made here to help clarify some issues.

Exception handling incurs some kind of cost in all compiler implementations, including those that avoid the cost during normal execution.

However, in some cases this cost may arguably offset the cost of the code that it is replacing.

Exception handling is often agreed to be a superior solution for handling a large range of function return values.

However, avoiding the creation of functions that need large ranges of return values is superior to using exception handling to handle such values.

Using exception handling correctly can be difficult in the case of complex software.

The execution of throw and catch can be significantly expensive with some implementations.

Exception handling violates the don't-pay-for-what-you-don't-use design of C++, as it incurs overhead in any non-leaf function that has destructable stack objects regardless of whether they use exception handling.

The approach that game software usually takes is to avoid the need for exception handling where possible; avoid the possibility of circumstances that may lead to exceptions. For example, verify up front that there is enough memory for a subsystem to do its job instead of trying to deal with the problem via exception handling or any other means after it occurs.

However, some game libraries may nevertheless benefit from the use of exception handling. It's best, howerver, if such libraries keep the exception handling internal lest they force their usage of exception handling on the rest of the application.

18 - Out of memory

EASTL does not solve the out-of-memory problem any differently than std STL (aside from it providing intrusive containers and fixed size containers). The std STL solution (exception handling) is supported by EASTL but is not favored and is usually disabled (see Appendix item 17). There are four common solutions in game software to dealing with out-of-memory conditions within libraries:

The library throws an exception if memory cannot be allocated. This isn't used very often because it is has more overhead and is much harder to safely use than the following two methods. One forgotten "try" by the user and the application can unexpectedly crash. The allocator calls a user-callback upon failure, whereby the user callback frees up memory in an application-specific way. This is a reliable method because it allows the failure to be handled in a single place in a consistent way and it only needs to be written once and the user doesn't have to worry. The user simply guarantees up front that there is enough memory. This is the simplest and most reliable method and is the one that's used the most. A common way of guaranteeing the availability of the memory is to allocate it up-front and hand it to the system that needs it. The library propagates and error value up to the caller. This solution is non-optimal, especially if there are multiple return values that are specifically handled. Exception handling is often considered superior to this solution.

Dealing with exception handling at the level of the container user is tedious and error-prone; dealing with it at the level of the allocator is easier for the user and is more reliable. Using exception handling to properly and safely deal with out-of-memory conditions is a daunting and tedious task, especially in an environment of custom allocators. This is not a criticism of C++ exception handling in general but rather is an observation about using it with STL containers.

19 - Benchmarks often miss cache effects

Typically a benchmark of comparing two functions will go through some effort to make sure that the measurements aren't polluted by memory cache effects such as cache misses. This is a fine approach for comparing functions that are roughly equivalent in their memory effects. A typical such benchmark will call a function once, then start the timer, call it 1000 times, and finally stop the timer. However, such a testing approach may yield misleading results for cases whereby the compared functions are not equivalent in their memory effects. The benchmark intentionally chose to ignore cache misses that occurred during the first function call, but in real-world execution such cache misses may well affect application performance because these functions aren't actually called 1000 times in a row one after another. A better way of measuring performance is to have a 1000 different functions which are called one after another and which exercise the code and data memory caches like a real-world application might.

The Technical Report on C++ Performance recognizes cache effects at one point in the document but seems to dismiss them in its own measurements and conclusions. For example, it states that the timing analysis of virtual functions is straightforward and concludes that the cost of virtual functions is "a fixed number of machine instructions." This analysis is somewhat misleading, as it implies that there are no cache misses or that memory caches are so large that a cache miss for any code will only ever occur once on startup. See section 7.2.1 of the report. A full discussion of the usage of virtual functions in game development is outside the scope of this document, but it is sufficient to say here that the cost of virtual functions in practice is likely greater than implied by the Technical Report on C++ Performance, largely due to practical cache effects.

20 - Performance comparison

A couple of comparisons are presented here which compare EASTL with a commonly used commercial version of std STL. EASTL is generally faster, though in many cases the differences are minimal. In some cases speed improvements aren't very important; nobody is going to know or care if min_element executes 10% faster or slower in EASTL. In other cases -- such as with the sort algorithm -- speed improvements are important. The source code to the benchmark is distributed with this document. A reported result of 1.40 means that EASTL ran 40% faster; a ratio of 0.75 means that EASTL ran 33% (1/.75) slower.

In practice, with GCC it turns out that EASTL performs a little better than the benchmarks indicate due to EASTL being easier to inline. The benchmark code is very simple and is relatively easy for the compiler to inline, but real-world code in practice often turns out to not inline as well.

A: Windows / Pentium 4 x86 / VC8 -Og -Oi -Ot -Oy -Ob2 -GF -Gy / compiler-supplied STL

B: Console / 64 bit PowerPC / VC7 -Ox -Ob2 -Oi -Os / compiler-supplied STL

C: Linux / Pentium 4 x86 / GCC 4.1 -O3 / libstdc++

D: Mac OS X / G5 PowerPC 32 bit mode / GCC 4.0 -Os / libstdc++ Green: EASTL 15% or more faster (>= 1.15)

Blue: Std STL 15% or more faster (<= 0.87) Test Windows Console Linux Mac algorithm/adj_find/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/copy/vector<LargePOD>

algorithm/copy/vector<uint32_t>

algorithm/copy_backward/vector<LargePOD>

algorithm/copy_backward/vector<uint32_t>

algorithm/count/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/equal_range/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/fill/bool[]

algorithm/fill/char[]/'d'

algorithm/fill/vector<char>/'d'

algorithm/fill/vector<char>/0

algorithm/fill/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/fill/vector<void*>

algorithm/fill_n/bool[]

algorithm/fill_n/char[]

algorithm/fill_n/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/find_end/string/end

algorithm/find_end/string/middle

algorithm/find_end/string/none

algorithm/lex_cmp/schar[]

algorithm/lex_cmp/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/lex_cmp/vector<uchar>

algorithm/lower_bound/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/min_element/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/rand_shuffle/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/reverse/list<TestObject>

algorithm/reverse/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/search/string<char>

algorithm/search_n/string<char>

algorithm/unique/vector<TestObject>

algorithm/unique/vector<uint32_t>

algorithm/unique/vector<uint64_t>

algorithm/upper_bound/vector<uint32_t>

1.00

1.09

0.95

1.03

0.78

1.00

1.34

9.43

7.36

7.33

9.39

1.07

1.02

13.71

10.67

1.00

31.63

3.42

1.51

1.88

0.99

1.88

1.43

1.13

1.17

1.02

1.03

2.48

1.39

0.98

1.07

1.13

1.47

1.24

1.15

1.82

1.07

1.91

1.14

1.25

17.05

17.27

30.75

30.60

1.25

1.81

19.41

19.18

0.98

21.77

2.74

1.36

1.26

0.75

2.22

1.07

1.09

1.05

0.91

1.01

7.32

14.53

1.08

1.04

1.15

1.06 0.98

0.99

1.28

1.06

1.23

0.93

0.89

1.00

1.02

7.38

8.84

1.06

0.88

1.00

1.01

1.10

0.89

0.83

0.82

1.47

0.70

1.45

1.07

1.47

0.96

1.20

0.96

0.77

1.07

0.95

1.13

0.97

1.13

1.25

0.92

1.01

1.10

1.10

1.77

1.74

1.00

1.00

88.80

100.00

1.08

1.95

0.98

1.01

0.90

0.58

0.63

0.66

4.01

1.16

15.54

1.63

1.44

1.16

0.86

1.27

1.49

2.58

1.26

2.41

1.74

1.99

bitset<15>/>>=/1

bitset<15>/count

bitset<15>/flip

bitset<15>/reset

bitset<15>/set()

bitset<15>/set(i)

bitset<15>/test 1.04

0.97

1.87

1.00

1.25

1.17

1.02

1.10

0.97

1.08

1.00

1.08

1.00

1.10

0.82

0.94

0.80

0.91

0.80

0.91

1.17 1.61

1.00

2.00

1.00

2.63

1.96

1.87

bitset<35>/>>=/1

bitset<35>/count

bitset<35>/flip

bitset<35>/reset

bitset<35>/set()

bitset<35>/set(i)

bitset<35>/test 0.57

0.98

1.39

1.50

1.40

1.00

1.14

1.93

1.63

2.14

1.54

3.02

1.05

1.10

1.19

1.71

1.00

0.95

1.05

0.90

1.22 2.64

1.27

1.97

0.90

3.40

2.29

1.79

bitset<75>/>>=/1

bitset<75>/count

bitset<75>/flip

bitset<75>/reset

bitset<75>/set()

bitset<75>/set(i)

bitset<75>/test 0.94

1.68

1.00

1.80

1.50

1.00

0.88

0.60

0.65

1.82

2.16

3.02

0.94

0.91

0.81

1.05

0.91

1.00

0.91

0.89

1.37 1.86

1.00

1.29

0.49

1.46

1.94

2.20

bitset<1500>/>>=/1

bitset<1500>/count

bitset<1500>/flip

bitset<1500>/reset

bitset<1500>/set()

bitset<1500>/set(i)

bitset<1500>/test 0.99

0.99

1.08

0.95

1.14

0.98

1.00

1.74

1.90

1.89

2.18

1.89

0.95

0.90

1.21

1.00

1.44

0.99

1.71

0.82

1.21 1.13

1.00

0.87

1.61

1.37

2.28

1.78

deque<ValuePair>/erase

deque<ValuePair>/find

deque<ValuePair>/insert

deque<ValuePair>/iteration

deque<ValuePair>/operator[]

deque<ValuePair>/push_back

deque<ValuePair>/push_front

deque<ValuePair>/sort

2.48

1.56

2.97

0.94

1.30

8.67

9.73

1.51

1.05

1.85

1.64

1.80

1.40

6.43

5.03

1.61

1.19

1.06

1.03

1.06

1.55

0.98

1.03

1.01 0.86

1.05

1.24

0.98

2.66

1.65

1.68

1.00

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/clear

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/count

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/erase pos

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/erase range

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/erase val

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/find

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/find_as/char*

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/insert

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/iteration

hash_map<string, uint32_t>/operator[] 0.58

2.23

0.67

1.47

1.18

1.66

1.96

0.59

1.29

1.60

1.01

2.75

0.69

1.98

1.22

2.19

2.34

0.65

1.29

2.11

0.75

1.24

1.15

0.82

0.75

1.21

3.52

0.54

3.00

1.53 1.16

1.19

2.57

1.09

0.98

1.58

4.61

0.73

3.49

2.21

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/clear

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/count

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/erase pos

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/erase range

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/erase val

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/find

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/insert

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/iteration

hash_map<uint32_t, TestObject>/operator[] 0.89

2.95

0.90

3.41

1.94

2.72

2.55

1.04

2.20

1.02

2.78

1.34

5.30

1.89

1.89

2.04

0.74

1.75

0.82

1.02

1.00

1.05

1.05

0.76

0.91

2.29

1.37 1.22

1.38

1.62

1.03

1.24

1.24

1.05

4.03

1.96

heap (uint32_t[])/make_heap

heap (uint32_t[])/pop_heap

heap (uint32_t[])/push_heap

heap (uint32_t[])/sort_heap 1.21

1.09

1.59

0.96

1.07

1.01

1.08

1.02

0.97

0.98

1.05

1.12 0.93

0.98

1.13

1.01

heap (vector<TestObject>)/make_heap

heap (vector<TestObject>)/pop_heap

heap (vector<TestObject>)/push_heap

heap (vector<TestObject>)/sort_heap 0.93

0.93

0.97

0.95

1.05

0.98

1.03

0.97

1.11

1.07

0.88

0.99 1.02

1.02

1.12

1.06

list<TestObject>/ctor(it)

list<TestObject>/ctor(n)

list<TestObject>/erase

list<TestObject>/find

list<TestObject>/insert

list<TestObject>/push_back

list<TestObject>/remove

list<TestObject>/reverse

list<TestObject>/size/1

list<TestObject>/size/10

list<TestObject>/size/100

list<TestObject>/splice 1.10

1.04

1.13

1.24

1.34

1.60

1.23

1.06

1.00

1.00

1.00

2.28

1.09

1.15

0.96

0.97

0.99

1.17

1.13

1.25

1.00

1.00

1.00

2.27

1.03

0.91

0.97

1.00

1.00

1.04

0.90

1.09

1.00

1.01

0.96

1.30

1.00

1.18

1.47

2.33

1.35

1.35

1.61

1.33

1.07

1.00

1.00

3.56

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/clear

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/count

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/equal_range

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/erase/key

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/erase/pos

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/erase/range

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/find

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/insert

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/iteration

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/lower_bound

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/operator[]

map<TestObject, uint32_t>/upper_bound 1.00

2.15

1.75

1.38

1.26

1.10

1.42

1.03

1.88

1.18

1.16

1.26

1.01

2.03

1.56

1.53

1.31

1.08

1.12

1.08

1.83

1.13

1.06

1.09

1.00

0.94

1.35

1.26

1.38

1.01

0.99

1.04

2.05

0.92

0.92

0.83 1.02

1.21

1.81

1.66

1.09

0.97

1.25

1.17

1.36

1.29

1.12

1.30

set<uint32_t>/clear

set<uint32_t>/count

set<uint32_t>/equal_range

set<uint32_t>/erase range

set<uint32_t>/erase/pos

set<uint32_t>/erase/val

set<uint32_t>/find

set<uint32_t>/insert

set<uint32_t>/iteration

set<uint32_t>/lower_bound

set<uint32_t>/upper_bound 1.00

1.98

1.59

1.06

0.92

1.37

1.08

1.04

0.86

1.06

1.07

0.98

2.18

1.78

1.09

1.13

1.49

1.10

1.11

1.62

1.17

1.13

1.00

1.05

1.49

1.10

1.11

1.62

1.02

1.13

1.55

1.06

0.93 1.01

1.31

2.12

1.00

0.99

1.88

1.39

1.29

1.33

1.11

1.04

sort/q_sort/TestObject[]

sort/q_sort/TestObject[]/sorted

sort/q_sort/vector<TestObject>

sort/q_sort/vector<TestObject>/sorted

sort/q_sort/vector<ValuePair>

sort/q_sort/vector<ValuePair>/sorted

sort/q_sort/vector<uint32>

sort/q_sort/vector<uint32>/sorted 1.50

1.31

1.49

1.38

1.25

1.46

1.42

1.27

2.39

1.60

2.40

1.60

2.42

1.49

3.53

2.31

1.14

1.01

1.28

1.34

1.04

1.25

0.96

1.10 1.15

1.32

1.14

1.36

1.33

1.75

1.40

1.72

string<char16_t>/compare

string<char16_t>/erase/pos,n

string<char16_t>/find/p,pos,n

string<char16_t>/find_first_not_of/p,pos,n

string<char16_t>/find_first_of/p,pos,n

string<char16_t>/find_last_of/p,pos,n

string<char16_t>/insert/pos,p

string<char16_t>/iteration

string<char16_t>/operator[]

string<char16_t>/push_back

string<char16_t>/replace/pos,n,p,n

string<char16_t>/reserve

string<char16_t>/rfind/p,pos,n

string<char16_t>/size

string<char16_t>/swap 1.85

1.00

1.00

0.95

0.97

0.78

1.01

1.33

1.45

2.14

0.99

1.16

1.92

0.92

1.94

1.01

1.00

0.96

1.17

1.13

1.25

1.01

1.53

1.83

6.39

1.01

0.92

2.04

0.93

1.40

1.64

1.00

5.03

0.78

0.99

0.46

1.10

1.07

1.30

1.22

1.18

100.00

1.08

0.91

1.10 1.45

1.01

4.22

1.63

1.00

1.64

1.06

3.67

5.16

1.35

1.06

100.00

2.36

0.85

1.38

string<char8_t>/compare

string<char8_t>/erase/pos,n

string<char8_t>/find/p,pos,n

string<char8_t>/find_first_not_of/p,pos,n

string<char8_t>/find_first_of/p,pos,n

string<char8_t>/find_last_of/p,pos,n

string<char8_t>/insert/pos,p

string<char8_t>/iteration

string<char8_t>/operator[]

string<char8_t>/push_back

string<char8_t>/replace/pos,n,p,n

string<char8_t>/reserve

string<char8_t>/rfind/p,pos,n

string<char8_t>/size

string<char8_t>/swap 0.99

1.07

0.58

0.85

1.34

1.57

1.15

1.00

2.23

2.28

1.00

1.19

1.86

1.08

1.95

1.00

1.00

1.00

0.94

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.79

2.10

5.09

1.02

1.70

2.12

1.00

1.31

0.99

1.01

5.06

3.20

10.11

8.27

0.77

0.86

1.66

2.28

1.03

100.00

8.70

0.94

1.45 0.91

1.03

3.69

1.17

1.45

1.15

1.05

4.05

5.66

2.05

1.06

100.00

4.22

1.12

3.99

vector<uint64>/erase

vector<uint64>/insert

vector<uint64>/iteration

vector<uint64>/operator[]

vector<uint64>/push_back

vector<uint64>/sort 0.99

0.99

0.93

1.39

1.63

1.01

3.28

1.01

1.16

1.02

2.18

1.00

1.00

1.03

1.15

1.29

1.02

0.92 1.02

1.12

2.69

1.70

1.59

1.27

21 - int is not a machine word

The int data type was originally intended to represent a machine word. The C99 standard states:

A ‘‘plain’’ int object has the natural size suggested by the architecture of the execution environment (C99 6.2.5 p5)

But in practice int is nearly always 4 bytes (int32_t), even on 64 bit and 128 bit platforms.

22 - How do you make a node pool for a linked list?

If you want to make a std::list that uses a fixed-size node pool, there is no portable way to do it, as you don't know what your allocator needs to allocate:

template <size_t allocSize, size_t nodeCount>

class NodePool{ }; std::l
Buy Photo A series of water pipes at Indiana American Water Co. Tuesday. The city issues a boil order for its water after a valve was opened too wide, leading to contamination. (Photo: Jordan Kartholl / The Star Press)Buy Photo

MUNCIE, Ind. — A boil order announced early Tuesday morning for the city of Muncie was lifted by 8:30 p.m. Tuesday after tests found water to be safe for consumption.

Valves that were opened too wide, allowing too much water to rush through a treatment plant system, resulted in the boil order, closing some restaurants and prompting schools and other institutions to implement emergency steps to provide drinking water.

The city of Muncie and some of the surrounding area had been placed on the boil order because of the valve mishap at Indiana American Water Company's plant along Burlington Drive.

Delaware County Emergency Management announced in an email Tuesday night that testing sites in and around Muncie had been tested throughout the day, and " All indications have been that the water is safe for consumers to use and return to all normal water usage." Indiana American Water Company phoned customers with an automated "all clear" announcement shortly after that.

The water company issued an alert shortly after midnight Tuesday morning noting that "during routine maintenance, issues with valves opening beyond their normal range resulted in an increased turbidity level beyond the permitted limit for less than one hour in the Muncie system." The turbidity level was below the Environmental Protection Agency level, Indiana American said.

In initial social media postings, Delaware County 911 attributed the problem to a water main break along Burlington Drive, where the water company office is located.

But Indiana American Water spokesman Joe Loughmiller told The Star Press early Tuesday, and again later in the morning, that the alert and boil order were because valves at the company's water plant "were opened too far."

"This had to do with doing maintenance," Loughmiller said. "It had nothing to do with a main break. This order was not the result of a break."

Loughmiller said valves in the filtering system at the plant were opened too wide around 3 p.m. Monday. Water company executives assessed the situation and consulted with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management before issuing the "Code Red" alert and boil order.

The water that moved too quickly through the system was from White River and the company's groundwater wells at its Burlington Drive plant. Loughmiller said that while the water was filtered, it still was "clouded," a sign of suspended solids in the water.

Buy Photo The Youth Opportunity Center's campus along Kilgore Ave. was affected by Muncie's boil order Monday, causing the campus to shut down water usage in the kitchen and drinking fountains while providing safe water in beverage dispensers and bottled water to the staff and students. (Photo: Corey Ohlenkamp/The Star Press)

People throughout the area received automated calls at about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, warning them against drinking tap water and urging them to either drink bottled water or boil water for approximately three minutes. Tap water can be used for washing and bathing, the company said.

A map on Indiana American Water's website indicated the affected area reaches beyond city limits. Loughmiller said as many as 30,000 customers were affected.

Officials had expected the boil order to be lifted by 10 p.m. or earlier Tuesday, Loughmiller said, depending on how quickly water test results came back.

About the 12:30 a.m. Tuesday automated call, Loughmiller said he was aware it might have alarmed some who heard their phone ring so late.

"We really look at our normal hours for Code Red calls, which is 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. But in a case like this, we felt like we should go on and get it out."

A map from Indiana American Water's website showing the affected area of the boil order issued in Delaware County. (Photo: Indiana American Water)

The entire City of Muncie and customers of Indiana American Water are on a water boil order until 10 pm Tuesday... https://t.co/1ZdpTruNlT — DELAWARE COUNTY E911 (@DELAWARECO911) November 15, 2016

All residents of City of Muncie using City water, do not drink water. Boil alert has been issued until 10:00pm Tues Nov 15 — Ball State Alert (@ballstate_alert) November 15, 2016

Several Muncie restaurants, faced with no usable water, decided to close. Among those announcing their closing on Tuesday were the Caffeinery, Savages Ale House and Sitara.

Food establishments that remained open were taking precautions.

Thr3e Wisemen, for example, emptied out and sterilized its ice bins, which will remain out of use until the boil advisory is lifted. The restaurant also stopped serving carbonated soft drinks, which contain tap water. Dish washing machines, however, remained in use because of their very hot temperatures and sanitizers.

A sign on the front door of a Village Pantry read, "No fountain pop or coffee."

Buy Photo Potentially hazardous tap water halted coffee making and carbonated beverage service at Muncie food establishments including this Village Pantry. (Photo: Seth Slabaugh/The Star Press)

Delaware County Health Administrator Jammie Bane told The Star Press:

"The only advice I’d offer to the public would be to feel free to question an establishment on whether they are aware of the order and whether they have taken the proper precautions including boiling water and using ice produced from either boiled water or ice produced outside of the boil water order. Boil water orders are nothing new. The scale of this one is just geographically larger based on the location where the problem occurred. There is no indication of a direct health threat, just the slightest of possibilities of one due to an occurrence that fell outside of the water company’s standard procedures. As I understand it, the disinfectant levels never fell below the standard, and the water company took all the proper steps following the occurrence in order to notify the public and to remedy the problem in the shortest time frame possible."

Muncie Community Schools was in session Tuesday. Water fountains were to be blocked in all buildings and water bottles were to be provided to students, according to corporation spokesperson Ana Pichardo. Liberty-Perry, Delaware Community and Burris/Indiana Academy schools are the only others affected by the boil order, and all were in session Tuesday, according to school officials.

The campus at the Youth Opportunity Center along Kilgore Ave. also had to block water fountains and water use in their kitchens. Water bottles and other safe potable water sources were provided to students and staff according to Jeff Helm, Director of Information Technology and Facilities for the campus. So far, 1,160 bottles of water have been delivered to campus, and additional distilled water for kitchen use.

IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital has put in place contingency plans so that its patients and employees will not be impacted. Neil Gifford, director of marketing and communication, said that the hospital has placed signs on public water fountains, has made bottled water available to patients and team members and is taking necessary precautions during food preparations and other day-to-day operations.

Elm Street Brewing Co. offered to assist those in need of water today at their business on 519 N Elm St.

"The city of Muncie has been great for us as we are getting ready to open, so we want to be a good neighbor," said co-owner Eric Jones.

The full original alert from Indiana American Water was as follows:

"Muncie Boil Water Advisory This is an important message from Indiana American Water. Our water system recently violated a drinking water standard. Although this is not an emergency, we are issuing a boil water advisory as a precautionary measure through at least 10 p.m., Tuesday, November 15, 2016 while samples are being collected and analyzed. Customers in the affected area are advised to drink and cook with tap water only after boiling it for approximately three minutes. Tap water can be used for washing/bathing. As our customers, you have a right to know what happened, what you should do, and what we are doing to correct this situation. We are required to monitor your drinking water for specific contaminants on a regular basis. The results of regular monitoring are an indicator of whether or not our drinking water meets EPA's health standards. Our November 14, 2016 results showed the combined filter effluent turbidity exceeded 1 NTU. If you have specific health concerns, consult your doctor. Turbidity has no health effects. However, turbidity can interfere with disinfection and provide a medium for microbial growth. Turbidity may indicate the presence of disease-causing organisms. These organisms include bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can cause symptoms such as nausea, cramps, diarrhea, and associated headaches. The treatment issue leading to the turbidity violation occurred during routine maintenance after valves opened beyond their normal range, resulting in an increased turbidity level beyond the permitted limit for less than one hour. During this time, the chloramine disinfection residual remained within its normal range and never dropped below 2 parts per million in the water leaving the treatment plant and at a representative site within the distribution system where it is continuously monitored. The problem has already been corrected and Indiana American Water is in the process of collecting and analyzing samples to ensure the safety of your drinking water. Any additional information regarding this boil advisory will be shared with residents through local media outlets, the company's Facebook page and through the company’s CodeRed phone notification service. Please share this information with all other people who drink this water, especially those who may not have received this notice directly (for example, people in apartments, nursing homes, schools, and businesses). Customers can also call the Indiana American Water Customer Service Center at 1-800-492-8373 for the latest updates."

Read or Share this story: http://tspne.ws/2fsWKMO
I absolutely love strawberries and cook with them frequently. I’ve tried to grow them several times in our gardens but there is just something about our property that strawberries do not like. I console myself by going strawberry picking at a local strawberry patch every year and then freeze batches of them so I have them available to me year round. When I came across a recipe for Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble in The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Cookbook, I knew I wanted to try it. My only problem was that our rhubarb plant hadn’t come up yet! I really wanted to try this crumble recipe so I decided to substitute some blueberries I had frozen over the summer instead.

This post may be sponsored. Post contains affiliate links. I may be compensated if you make a purchase using my link.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble recipe

Filling

2 pounds strawberries, halved or quartered if large (5 cups)

1 pound rhubarb, cut in 1-inch lengths (or 1 pound blueberries)

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 cup granulated sugar

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

Streusel Topping

1 cup old fashioned rolled oats

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup packed light brown sugar

10 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into bits

Preheat the oven to 425F.

For the filling: In a large bowl, combine the strawberries, rhubarb/blueberries, and vinegar and toss to combine. Add the granulated sugar, flour, and salt and toss again. Transfer the mixture to a 9 inch square baking dish.

For the Streusel topping: In a medium bowl, combine the oats, flour, and brown sugar. With your fingers, cut in the butter until the mixture forms large clumbs. Scatter topping over the fruit.

Place the baking dish on a rimmed baking sheet to catch any drips and bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until the filling is bubbling and the topping is crisp.

Serve plain, with ice cream or with whipped cream.

This is absolutely delicious. This crumble recipe is quick and easy to make and can be made with either fresh or frozen fruit. This is a great way to use up berries that might be getting a little bit too soft to eat fresh. I grew up eating crumbles and crisps and this crumble recipe really brings back memories.
There is an old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I really like this saying because it is a basic principle of skepticism, and it goes hand in hand with a statement that was made famous by none other than Carl Sagan. Namely, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I find that these two principles are broadly applicable to the many “miracle treatments” and fad diets that pervade the internet, but in this post I am just going to focus on the “Miracle Mineral Solution” (a.k.a. Miracle Mineral Supplement or MMS) as an illustration. Basically, this post is just an exercise in common sense in which I am going to point out some obvious hallmarks of snake oil.

What is MMS?

To put it simply, it’s bleach. To put it more technically, it is a 28% solution of sodium chlorate which breaks down to release chlorine dioxide, and it is the chlorine dioxide which actually reacts with pathogens (remember this chemical, it is going to show up a lot in this post). To be clear, MMS is not the same type of bleach that is used to clean your house (sodium hypochlorite), but it is nevertheless a type of bleach and is used to bleach various paper, wood, and textile products. This is also one of the chlorines that is sometimes used in very low concentrations to disinfect drinking water. Now, the fact that someone is selling a concentrated bleach solution as a miracle cure should throw up some red flags, but let’s investigate further. After all, the skeptic principle is to demand evidence, not to blindly reject something without looking for evidence.

Are its effects plausible?

According to the almighty internet, MMS cures pretty much everything. Spiritportal.org states that it “CURES” (their emphasis) “malaria, AIDs, most cancers, any type of hepatitis, tuberculosis, typhoid, pneumonia, asthma, herpes, HPV, chicken pox, smallpox, measles, influenza (including bird flu), colds, food poisoning, snake bite, Lyme disease, ringworm, roundworm, tapeworm, yeast infections, and many other common diseases.” Many other websites list additional ailments, and one hilariously unfactual website even goes as far as saying that it kills 95% of all diseases! Similarly, MMSWiki has an insanely long list that includes things like Down syndrome, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, depression, etc., and, of course, what good would a miracle cure be if it didn’t cure baldness and erectile dysfunction.

This type of list is characteristic of supposed miracle cures, and it provides really obvious evidence that these “cures” are a load of crap. For one thing, diseases like AIDs, cancer, and Alzheimer’s should jump out at you. Anytime that someone claims to have found a simple cure for one of those diseases, you should be very, very skeptical. Further, the sheer range of diseases that MMS supposedly cures gives us a good reason to be cautious. The list includes cancers, viruses, fungi, bacteria, auto-immune disorders, protozoan infections, parasites, genetic disorders, neurological disorders, snake bites, etc. I’m going to walk through some of those in more detail below, but first, just ask yourself if it is actually plausible that something is going to be effective against all of those maladies (spoiler alert: it’s not).

Pathogenic diseases

First, let’s look at the list of pathogenic diseases that it supposedly treats. In other words, all of the viruses, bacteria, protozoa, intestinal parasites, and fungi. When I first started looking into MMS, I was very skeptical that it would be able to kill so many different types of organisms, because all of these organisms are extremely different from each other. For example, bacteria have a cell wall made of peptidoglycan, whereas fungi have walls made of chitin; protozoa and intestinal parasites have no cell walls, and viruses don’t even have cells. So, generally speaking, treatments are specific for each group (e.g., antibiotics work for bacteria, but not viruses).

Much to my surprise, there is actually very good evidence that chlorine dioxide (the chemical that is produced by MMS) is very effective at killing all of these organisms in water. This is a very important point. Just because something kills “germs” in a glass of water or even when it is poured on a cut, that does not inherently mean that it will kill the targeted germs inside you. There are several reasons for this, but the most important one is that the chemical will react with lots of other things before it gets to the target organism. One of the primary mechanisms through which chlorine dioxide kills cells is by reacting with amine groups through oxidation/reduction reactions (type “chlorine dioxide amine” into Google Scholar for a host of articles about how it behaves). Amines are a type of chemical that contains a nitrogen with a lone pair of atoms, and they are ubiquitous in living organisms. They are, for example, part of some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins. So, we have amines, good bacteria have amines, bad bacteria have amines, etc. This is important because MMS is going to react with the first amines it encounters. Remember, this is just a chlorine atom bound to two oxygen atoms. It doesn’t have any way to detect good cells and bad cells. It’s just doing simple chemical reactions. So, let’s say that you take a few drops of MMS to treat chicken pox, most of it is going to react with the amines in the bacteria that populate your mouth and throat long before it gets circulated to the viruses that you want it to react with. True believers of course claim otherwise. According to one website:

“It [MMS] does not react with organic matter, such as food, body cells or even our ‘good’ intestinal bacteria, but is specific in destroying pathogenic microbes.”

This statement is hilariously impossible. First, all living things are made of organic matter. Amines are, for example, organic matter. So this statement is clearly false. If it were true, then MMS wouldn’t kill pathogenic microbes because they are made of organic matter. In fact, here is a paper entirely devoted to the fact that chlorine dioxide dissolves organic matter. Also, MMS does not discriminate between bacteria types. Both good bacteria and bad bacteria are made of the same chemicals, and chlorine dioxide will react with the amines in good bacteria just as quickly as it reacts with the amines in bad bacteria. Finally, there is evidence that chlorine dioxide reacts with bacteria more quickly than it does with our cells (this is the case because bacteria are much smaller than our cells so the chemical can react with them more quickly), but that is not the same thing as saying that it won’t react with our cells. If you put chlorine dioxide on living human cells and give it enough time, it will enter the cells and react with the amines. This is simple chemistry.

Cancer

Next up, we have cancer. I can admit that it is technically possible that MMS could treat some infectious diseases (though that still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to take it), but it is completely absurd to think that it could treat cancer. Cancer is not like most diseases because it is caused by our own cells mutating and replicating uncontrollably. This makes cancer extremely difficult to fight because we are fighting against our own cells! So almost anything that will kill a cancer cell will also kill our healthy cells. Cancer cells are made of the same chemicals as normal cells. They are both full of amines, and nothing about the chemistry of chlorine dioxide suggests that it would be able to tell the difference between a cancer cell and a regular cell. Again, it’s going to react with the first amines it encounters, regardless of whether those are in healthy cells or cancer cells.

Asthma

Asthma is also included in the list. This inclusion is rather non-specific as there are many types of asthma that can be triggered by many different things, but most asthmas fall under the umbrella of autoimmune. To put it simply, they are caused by the body over-reacting to something harmless and, as a result, damaging itself. It would, therefore, be rather curious if MMS could treat asthma since there isn’t anything for it to kill (unlike the vast majority of other things it supposedly does). Rather, it somehow has to suppress an immune response. As with cancer, there is no reason to think that chlorine dioxide is in anyway capable of doing that.

Snake bites

Next, we have my personal favorite: “snake bites.” I have to assume that this means venomous snake bites (you don’t typically need medicine for a normal snake bite), but this raises the obvious question of what type of snake bit it treats. You see, there are two broad categories of snake venom: neurotoxins (which affect the nervous system) and hemotoxins (which affect the cardiovascular and muscular systems). There are, however, numerous sub-categories, and there is a tremendous amount of variation. In other words, different species have very different venoms that act very differently. Some block nerve signals, some coagulate the blood, some destroy cell membranes, etc. The chemistry of snake venom is extremely diverse and it simply isn’t plausible that one single chemical would be able to counteract all of the different types of snake venom. As someone who does research on venomous snakes, I am begging you, if you are bitten by a venomous snake, get to a hospital ASAP and do not take MMS for the bite. (On a side note, snake bite kits are also totally worthless and typically do more harm than good. Getting to the hospital as quickly as possible really is your only option [unless you live in Australia, in which case snake bandages are a good stop-gap measure to give you more time to get to a hospital])

Disorders

Finally, I want to briefly look at a few of the most absurd claims about MMS. For example, MMS supposedly cures Down syndrome. This would be truly remarkable because Down syndrome is caused by a trisomy (extra copy) of chromosome #21. So people with Down syndrome have an entire extra chromosome which is giving commands to the body. So to cure Down syndrome, you would have to somehow shut off that entire extra chromosome without interfering with the other chromosomes (which are made of the same chemicals, btw). There is simply no mechanism through which chlorine dioxide could possibly do that.

The procedure for “curing” autism is similarly absurd (and downright barbaric). For some reason, people got it in their heads that autism is caused by intestinal parasites (which is one thing that we know doesn’t cause autism). So, to treat it, well-intended, but dangerously misguided parents are giving their children MMS enemas (sometimes daily)! Remember, MMS is a bleach, and it is caustic enough that it sometimes causes the children to shed their intestinal linings. To the true believers, however, these linings aren’t the results of bleach killing their children’s intestinal cells, rather they are parasitic “rope worms,” and their presence in a child’s discharge confirms that the MMS is doing its job.

Summary of supposed effects

To review, this chemical is supposedly able to cure an extremely broad array of aliments, each of which requires a different mechanism. A mechanism that kills bacteria won’t cure cancer, won’t treat snake venom, won’t suppress the immune system, won’t cause hair to grow, won’t cure Down syndrome, etc. It just isn’t plausible for one chemical to do all of these things. Now, you may be thinking, “fine, maybe the claims are exaggerated, but just because it doesn’t cure all of these doesn’t mean that it can’t cure some of them.” That is true, but there are still several problems. First, without rigorous testing, you have no way of knowing which (if any) ailment it actually treats, and you have no reason to trust the people selling this stuff. I think that I have clearly demonstrated that at least some of the claims about MMS are scientifically incorrect. This means that the people making these claims are either dishonest or ignorant. Either way, you shouldn’t be getting medical advice from them. Second, without rigorous testing, you don’t know if it is safe. There are, for example, many things that will kill bacteria (such as iodine, gasoline, Clorox, rubbing alcohol, etc.), but that doesn’t mean that drinking them is a good idea.

Is the scientific evidence to support these claims?

Every once in a great while, a truly extraordinary claim turns out to be true, but we need some really solid evidence before concluding that it is true. So, are the claims of MMS peddlers supported by science? NO! There is not a scrap of scientific evidence that ingesting MMS does anything beneficial! The only “studies” are poorly designed, uncontrolled, and self-reported tests that were conducted by the inventor of MMS (Jim Humble). You can read about his “tests” in one of his many books which he would be more than happy to sell to you. All of the other “evidence” comes from anecdotal reports. I have previously elaborated on why anecdotes are meaningless, so I won’t do it here.

Are there side effects?

According to the charlatans that sell this stuff, it has “no harmful side effects or damage to healthy cells.” This claim is characteristic of quack treatments and miracle cures, and it is a dead giveaway that you are being lied to. Any medicine that has an effect on our bodies will also have side effects. This is an inevitability of our bodies’ chemistry. All medicines (including the handful of alternative medicines that are actually effective) work entirely because of chemical reactions inside of our bodies, and for at least some people, these reactions will invariably produce unintended consequences. So, the only way that something won’t have any side effects is if it doesn’t have any effects in the first place (on a side note, this is why homeopathy doesn’t have any side effects).

This claim is especially absurd for MMS because we know that MMS has side effects. Remember that that we are dealing with an industrial strength bleach. To be fair, it is not as caustic as regular bleach, and it attacks bacteria more readily than it attacks human cells, but, it will still kill human tissue in a high enough dose. Most people only take one or two drops of this stuff, which probably isn’t enough to do much harm, but some people take large quantities of it and use it daily, which is potentially dangerous. Despite all of the claims that MMS doesn’t affect your body’s good cells, it is a scientific fact that chlorine dioxide can be lethal. Fortunately, the LD50 (the does that will kill 50% of the mice that are given that dose) is estimated to be greater than 10,000 mg/kg, which is a very high LD50. So you probably aren’t going to kill yourself with this stuff, but at the same time, there have been plenty of lab trials where animals died from chlorine dioxide exposure. The non-lethal effects vary. Some studies haven’t found much in the way of harmful side effects, but other studies have found good evidence the chlorine dioxide causes problems such as ulcers, lesions, altered blood chemistry, nausea, and diarrhea (you can find a good review of the toxicity of chlorine dioxide here).

So, as far as a bleach goes, MMS is fairly safe, and it probably won’t do much serious damage in the doses that most people take. Nevertheless, the evidence against it is strong enough that health agencies from multiple countries warn against using it. These countries include: USA, Australia, Canada, and several others. The FDA even comically states that:

“Consumers who have MMS should stop using it immediately and throw it away.”

But, of course, we all know that every major health organization in the world is paid off by Big Pharma (note the immense sarcasm), so let’s look at the information given to us by the supporters of MMS. Miracle-mineral-supplement.com makes the following statement:

“Note: If you notice diarrhea, or even vomiting that is not necessarily a bad sign. The body is simply throwing off toxins and cleaning itself out. Some people say they feel much better after having diarrhea.”

Now, a rational person might stop and think that perhaps they were throwing up because they drank bleach, but according to the true believers, that is simply the MMS doing its job of removing vague “toxins” and whatever else might ail you (all of course without damaging your cells or the good bacteria that live in your gut). This is clearly rubbish. First, even if the claim that your nausea and diarrhea were from the MMS working was true, that is still a side effect! You cannot simultaneously say “this has no side effects” and “while taking this you may lose your lunch and your anus may be converted into an upside-down volcano.” If taking something gives you diarrhea, then diarrhea is a side effect. Second, except under very rare circumstances, the death of bacteria, virus, etc. will not make you sick. You have these wonderful cells called phagocytes that go around removing old cells and harmful materials. They do this all the time, and you don’t get sick from it. Every day, thousands of your cells die, and phagocytes run around disposing of them.

Things are similarly bizarre when we look at the procedure for “treating” cancer. According to spiritportal.org you should start off with 1/2 drop and see if that makes you nauseated. If it doesn’t, you should keep slowly increasing the dose until you find an amount that does make you nauseated. You want to reach the dose that makes you nauseated because being nauseated supposedly means that it is working. You see, after the MMS kills your cancer cells, they become “a poison to your body,” and it is those poisonous dead cells (not the bleach) that are making you sick. I honestly laughed the first time that I read this. For one thing, Occam’s razor tells us that we should default to the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions, and that explanation is clearly that you are throwing up because you drank bleach. Further, why on earth would a dead cancer cell be poisonous? The chemical composition of cancer cells isn’t substantially different from other cells, and, as previously stated, your cells die constantly. So why would a dead cancer cell be poisonous when a normal dead cell is not? Once again, you have phagocytes that do a very good job of getting rid of dead cells.

Why isn’t MMS an approved treatment?

No miracle cure would be complete without a conspiracy theory, and MMS supporters are more than happy to concoct one. In classic conspiracy theorist form, almost every MMS website that I have looked at has stated that pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the truth of MMS because they make so much money treating these ailments, and, of course, all of the world’s health organizations (and bloggers like me) are paid shills. There are so many problems with this argument that I plan on eventually devoting an entire post to it, but for now, I’ll just hit the highlights.

First, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars looking for cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc. Why would they do that if they already have a cure that they have no intention of using?

Second, if MMS actually works, why wouldn’t they start marketing it themselves and make billions of dollars of off it? Inevitably they would charge way more for it than it costs to produce, and, yes, they would have to compete with the unlicensed internet retailers, but there are still plenty of people who would rather pay a little bit more and get something official than use something from the internet. Surely that would make more sense than spending billions of dollars paying off all of the world’s doctors while simultaneously spending billions of dollars looking for a cure that they already have.

Third, realize that all of the thousands of doctors who work for pharmaceutical companies have friends and family who are afflicted by these diseases (especially cancer). Do you really think that they are just going to sit by and watch tons of people suffer and die when they know that a cure exists?

Finally, realize that this claim is a question begging fallacy/ad hoc fallacy (depending on how it is worded). In other words, I would never accept this absurd conspiracy theory unless I was already totally convinced that MMS worked. So it’s a logically invalid argument.

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has made it clear that MMS is nothing but snake oil and shouldn’t be trusted. More importantly, I hope that this post has given you some basic common sense guidelines for examining miracle treatments, fad diets, etc. The following list gives some of the hallmark characteristics of quack treatments, and you should watch out for them.

Implausible effects (e.g. an absurdly wide array of ailments that it cures, unrealistic recoveries, improbable amounts of weight loss, etc.)

No plausible mechanisms for causing those effects

No scientific evidence to support its claims

Claims that it has no side effects

Conspiracy theories

For MMS, we find that it doesn’t pass any checkpoints, and there is absolutely no reason to think that taking it is a good idea.

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Bass Fishing Heating Up in Cooler Weather

by Tom Lester Old man winter has finally awakened and cooler temperatures are here and holding steady. For quite some time, we fall bass fishermen have been anxiously awaiting a cool down that would in turn our lake water temperatures lower. Although, today is the first official day of winter, the water is cooling off nicely. It's time to go fishing. Personally, I love fall pattern bass fishing. It is the time of year bass gorge themselves with food getting ready for winter. When they are filling themselves up, I like to be on the water catching 'em. Generally speaking, if you can find them, they are pretty easy to catch, and catch and catch. As the water cools down on our lakes, the shad (one of Mr. Bass' primary dishes) move into the creeks and guess who is following right behind them? That's right, ole man bass. Now that we've got 'um cornered and hemmed up in the creeks, its time put your boat in the water and get ready for some fun. I generally start out on the points of main creeks. It is a good place to find bass that are moving into the creek or coming out. They will literally "stack up" on the points as they move around to feed on the shad. My bait of choice on the points is a Norman's crankbait. My overall favorite is the Deep Little N (DLN) in any of the numerous shad colored patterns they have on the market. The Deep Little N crankbait is a medium diving bait that works really well when the fish are suspended off of the points. It is also about the same size as the shad this time of year. It has good action and sound with the built in rattles. I use 10-12# CXX P Line year round, when cranking. My friend, Eric Talley of Corsicana, TX, turned me on to using the smaller lines. I'm glad he did because it has greatly improved my numbers since I switched. The smaller line allows the bait to dive deeper and have a better action than the larger lines do. If you are like I used to be, using 15-20# line while fishing a crankbait, try sizing down your line. I bet you catch more bass, like I did. I know what you're thinking; what if I get a $4 or $5 crankbait hung up and all I have is 10 or 12 pound test line on? It's a gonner, right? Not always. You can improve your odds of retrieving that bait in two ways. First, try using P Line. It is a copolymer line that has tremendous tensile strength making it super strong. Strong enough to bring in a big fish and strong enough to help you get most of your baits back, yet small enough to let you bait perform properly in the water. For more information on P Line fishing line, see their web site at www.p-line.com or email me at the address below. Secondly, there is a new lure retriever on the market that is second to none. I like it because it is simple to use, inexpensive and mainly because it works. It's called the Easy Retriever. Basically, it is a 2 ounce lead weight with a special, film-coated, clip on it that clips right onto your line and slides down to your bait. Once it is in contact with your bait, simply use it to bounce your bait off of the snag and reel both the bait and the Easy Retriever in. For more information on the Easy Retriever, you can visit their web site at www.easyretriever.com or you can email me at the address below. Once the fish are in a feeding frenzy along the banks of the creek, it's time to pull out the spinnerbaits and jigs. The spinnerbaits work well, and in the right situation, can catch you a lot of fish. Use white spinnerbaits in clear to slightly stained water and chartreuse in off colored to stained water. I prefer a combination of gold and silver Colorado and willowleaf blades. Again, because of its strength, I use P Line in 15-20# test depending on the amount of cover (trees, logs, rocks, etc.) I'm fishing. If you're looking for the big guys, whip out a jig. Once you find a part of the creek that is holding fish, pull off of the shoreline and find the main creek channel. This is where the hawgs tend to hang out waiting for that unsuspecting meal to swim by. My favorite is a 3/8-1/2 oz. Bulldog jig. I like the lighter baits because they fall slower allowing the fish more time to eat 'em. In clear to stained water, white is my favorite color. It better represents the color of the fish's forage than any other does, even though I will use the traditional black/blue, too. Be certain to use a trailer, either a pork rind or one of the soft plastic ones will work fine. It gives the bait more bulk and slows the fall down even more. 20-25# P Line will work nicely for you with a strong reel and stout rod. Pitch the jig up close to large trees, stumps or lay downs and allow it fall slowly beside the cover. Watch your line closely. Often this time of the year, the big fish are suspended off of the bottom. They can pick up your bait and be swimming off with it, and you'll never know it if you're not watching your line. If it starts moving off to the side, set the hook and hang on. It could be the fish of a lifetime. This is also a great place to use the crankbait. Cast the bait beyond your target and slowly reel it in. When you think the bait is at or near your target area, stop it momentarily to allow the fish that might be sitting there time to strike it, then continue reeling it in. Change the retrieve from time to time to give the fish different looks. It might make a big difference. Fall and early winter can be a great time to catch large numbers of bass. Keep in mind, however, the danger associated with cool and cold weather outdoor sports. Hypothermia is a silent killer. If you or your fishing partner gets wet, find a place to get out of the weather, get dry and get warm. It doesn't have to be below freezing to die of hypothermia. Please be careful. Until next time, enjoy the Texas outdoors. Tom Lester. Author Information. Tom Lester owns and operates Four Seasons Lawnscape, a landscape and lawn maintenance service, in Corsicana, Texas. He has fished for most of his 36 years to some degree or another. He fishes competitively in bass tournaments and is beginning his professional bass fishing career in the BASS invitational circuit and the Everstart Series. Tom lives with his wife, Kelly, in Corsicana, Texas, only a few miles from Richland-Chambers reservoir, one of the hottest new bass lakes to open in Texas in the past ten years. He formerly resided in Cleburne, Texas, where he guided part-time for largemouth and smallmouth bass. Tom is currently on the field staff for Abu Garcia, Norman Lures, Inspiration Lures, and Bill Lewis Lures, and on the pro staff for Kalin's, CastAway Rods, P-Line, and Nuwave Products. Tom enjoys fishing, hunting and writing his outdoor column for the Corsicana Daily Sun and freelance writing. He is a former high school Agricultural Science instructor and animal health pharmaceutical sales rep. He graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.S in Agricultural Education and a Master of Education degree. Tom likes being his own boss so he can take off to go fishing, whenever he likes, and leave his wife in charge of the business. Email Tom at lester01@airmail.net

Visit Tom at his web site: Fishing Pro Staff
MUMBAI/DELHI: Ritesh Srivastava speaks with the fervour of a true believer. “I am a lifer here. The work and systems are as professional as any other FMCG company. But the work culture and what the brand stands for in terms of living with a purpose is totally different.”Four years ago, Srivastava joined Yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved Ltd. as senior manager marketing and sales from Himalaya . He’s not alone in his enthusiasm. In the past six months, as many as 250 executives have joined Patanjali from established fast-moving consumer goods companies. Patanjali itself has in the meantime been winning market share from its rivals as becomes a strong contender in the FMCG stakes.Executives have joined from Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble, apart from domestic companies Himalaya, Bisleri and Emami . The company is deluged with applications, it says.Apart from the controversial Ramdev’s charisma, many are drawn by the prospects for career growth, the chance of taking a business to new heights and the ethos of the company.“Ours is not a corporate culture--it is a spiritual culture and it is purpose-driven,” said managing director Acharya Balkrishna. Ramdev says people are drawn by Patanjali’s objectives of reinvesting in society and nation building.“There is no company that can be compared to Patanjali,” he said. “Professionals earlier did not have a place where they could take care of their family needs and at the same time work for a purpose, to give back to society and be proud of what they do.” It isn’t looking for top-bracket, Indian Institute of Management-trained professionals who command crores in pay.“Our compensation packages are in line with industry standards,” said managing director Balkrishna. “We do not seek great qualifications. During our interviews, we only make sure of two things--that the applicant does not smoke or consume liquor and should be of Satvik nature.”This has led to questions about its ability to recruit the best talent, especially at the senior level. But that’s exactly what may be a draw for some.Sharad Bharadwaj, who joined Patanjali as western zonal manager in 2015 from P&G, said he was taken by the swadeshi model and the emphasis on treating employees well.“At least 70% of the talent in MNCs is sidelined,” he said. “At Patanjali, they do not give up on an individual. If someone is not up to a task, he is trained to do things that he is capable of. That does not mean there are no targets and we are all very aggressive about that. In that sense, it is like any other FMCG company with accountability.” There is criticism that the system isn’t professional enough. “Patanjali does not have a professional CEO who can attract top talent,” said the CEO of an Indian soaps and detergent maker. “Their systems and processes are still rudimentary and until they improve that, attracting senior-level talent will be a challenge.”Vibhav Dhawan, managing partner at search firm Positive Moves Consulting, said, "While there will always be people Patanjali will be looking to hire, the A-grade, top-notch talent looking for sustainable career growth and pedigree are unlikely to join the company."But people are keen on joining, said Abneesh Roy, vice president at Edelweiss Securities. Patanjali is seeking to professionalise the management and incorporate processes and technology in the work culture. “During our visit and interactions, we found there any many professionals who are managing different units and have past work experience in companies like Dabur, Shahnaz Hussain, SGH Labs and Alkem Laboratories,” he said.Gurvinder Pal Singh, who joined eight months ago from Bisleri, said Patanjali was the ideal FMCG company to his mind. “Bisleri distributors were co-distributors of Patanjali brands and I was hugely impressed with their admiration for the brand and product quality,” he said. “I was also a consumer of the brand--toothpaste and atta--and the product quality was very good. That further motivated me and in the last eight months I have learnt more in Patanjali than in my previous 12 years.”Ramdev is closely involved, participating in discussions with advertising agencies, on marketing plans or research, said a senior manager. “Baba Ramdev is an astute manager with exemplary oratory skills,” said Rahul Nene, managing director of Witthaus Management Consulting, a talent search company. “Nobody has probably understood rural marketing so well and in such a short time… this is probably the magnet for officials to move out of established firms.” Besides, a growing firm offers greater opportunity than mature ones, he said. Pratima Kumari, who joined Patanjali as a marketing manager from DDB Mudra four months ago, echoed this view.“I get an opportunity to grow along with the brand,” she said. “In the mid and junior levels, I see the kind of respect this organisation gives its employees, which is missing in other companies.” Seniors are enjoined to treat colleagues with respect—rude behaviour is frowned upon. The dress code is white—it’s probably the only FMCG company where an executive can wear a kurta pyjama to work.Started as a pharmacy in Haridwar in 1997, Patanjali is now a Rs 2,000 crore company with about 1,500 employees. Reporting to Balkrishna are three vice-presidents: CP Nagpal heads foods and juices and used to be with Dabur; Ravindra Kumar Chaudhary leads the cosmetics business and was previously with Emami; and Rakesh Sharma is chief of sales and marketing, having worked with HUL earlier. Sharma, who used to handle HR as well, elaborated on hiring practices.“We do not follow the conventional FMCG system of hiring IIMs or IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) candidates or those with fancy degrees,” he said. “We are also recruiting youths, around 250 from several non-metros in each market, training them and taking them on our rolls as territory in-charges… Corporates tend to view non-English speaking youth as unqualified, when the fact is it has nothing to do with the actual skills required.Rajesh Sharma joined Patanjali as senior manager of sales and marketing a month ago after 14 years in companies such as Revlon and JL Morrison, having been struck by a Discovery Channel report on the big profits that multinational FMCG companies made in India.“When I heard about Patanjali, I was willing to even take a pay cut to join,” he said. “Patanjali not only matched my compensation expectations but also offered a work culture rich in diversity of talent in the truest sense.”Patanjali prefers people without experience, he said. “All they need is enthusiasm and commitment. I have seen a mix of city and rural employees, some of whom you think are almost illiterate, but their work enthusiasm and commitment are amazing.”A CLSA report last year didn’t stint on praise, bearing the title “Wish You Were Listed.” Patanjali has pitchforked itself into the top league with profit said to be in excess of such companies as Jyothy Laboratories and Emami, it said.“The plans are even more interesting as the company is now looking at ‘traditional’ ways to expand and targets to more than double the top line in coming years,” CLSA said.Rishabh Sinha, a regional manager who joined a year ago from HUL, said the nature of the company appealed to him. “That this was a swadeshi company and the culture based on spirituality appealed to me,” he said. “In all other senses, the level of professionalism in the company and systems and processes are as good as any FMCG company,” he said.Damodar Mall, CEO of Reliance Retail, pointed out that “Elitist FMCG is a homogenous club. Mavericks do not fit well there. The lure of an untreated marketing challenge appeals to such people.”Managers at some rivals are dismissive of those who’ve left to join Ramdev’s company. Patanjali executives put this down to envy.“That is always an elitist view of established players,” VP Rakesh Sharma said. “Earlier, they wrote off the company. Now, they cannot believe the numbers coming in.’’
In Bite #159, we started looking at some syntactic shortcuts in Swift. Today we'll continue by looking at a few (perhaps) lesser-known Swift tricks, and their effects. Let's get started.

@autoclosure

This attribute can help save space when writing simple closures:

func cache ( key : String , @autoclosure cacheIf : () -> Bool )

Now, the compiler will infer the curly braces {} around our statement:

cache ( "spaceships" , cacheIf : ships . count > 0 )

private(set)

struct Spaceship { private(set) var name = "Untitled" }

With the private(set) declaration, we're telling the compiler this property has the default access-level of internal for reads, but writes can only happen in the source file where it's declared.

For frameworks, we can configure both the getter/setter explicitly:

public struct Droid { public private(set) var number : String }

final

When optimizing performance-critical code, dynamic dispatch can be our enemy.

If our class's properties and functions can be overridden by subclasses, we're going to pay the performance cost of an indirect call or access every time we use one of those functions or properties.

We can easily prevent this by declaring a property or function final .
In addition to seeking an emergency declaration, the commission proposed waiving a federal rule that sharply limits the number of Medicaid recipients who can receive residential addiction treatment.

It also called for expanding access to medications that help treat opioid addiction, requiring “prescriber education initiatives” and providing model legislation for states to allow a standing order for anyone to receive naloxone, a drug used to reverse opioid overdoses.

Some public health experts said the main effect of declaring an emergency would be to make Americans regard the epidemic more urgently.

“It’s really about drawing attention to the issue and pushing for all hands on deck,” said Michael Fraser, the executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “It would allow a level of attention and coordination that the federal agencies might not otherwise have, but in terms of day-to-day lifesaving, I don’t think it would make much difference.”

The governors of Arizona, Florida, Maryland and Virginia have declared states of emergency regarding the opioid addiction crisis; in Alaska, Gov. Bill Walker has issued a disaster declaration.
I’m posting it here because I’ve mentioned it on Google+ for the third time, today. It all started with Zak posting about Evolution. He lists some well known role-playing games and shows that each one of them offers some sort of long-term promise of change for players. His point: every session produces “changes in that session”, but the really successful games promise “a specific kind of change will occur over the long haul.”

I definitely think that the promise of ever changing game play is what makes D&D interesting. The reason this works, I think, is because the spells you gain don’t simply scale. The game changes if you can be invisible and fly. The game changes when you can dimension door and teleport. The game changes when you can travel to the planes. Outside of the specific rules, the tradition also encourages changes to the game when you reach name level and build a stronghold, and it changes once more when you start to forge alliances with and wage wars against neighbors.

I think it’s also one of the reasons that Traveller can be boring. At least it didn’t hold a long-term appeal to me when I ran it. Perhaps I should have imagined the long term changes to the game play (more and bigger ships, get involved in the war) instead of focusing on changes to the setting (in my campaign, small colonies were being resettled or exterminated by the players – at the time I felt this was already a big step up). I feel like I should give Traveller another try soon.

I think Zak’s spot-on when he wonders whether campaigns using relatively simple rules have a hard time maintaining a long term appeal. For example, I claim that the long list of non-general spells with their non-linear progression of power create the long term changes over time. But what will you do in a simpler indie game? What will I do with my Solar System RPG game? Over time, I can add more gifts (feats, stunts, powers), but there’s really no promise that I will keep delivering. Plus, if I do, I’ll have to invent it all myself.

This is the key part: I have to come up with it myself – and I need to foreshadow it, make sure my players know it, want it, work towards it. In D&D, it’s simple. There’s a big Monster Manual full of critters in the book shelf. There is a big Players Guide full of spells right next to it. And there’s a list of magic items hidden away somewhere. You want to fight all this crazy stuff? Sit down at my table! That’s the promise the game makes without me saying anything at all. All the players sitting down at my table knowing the game cannot be faulted for assuming that this is going to be a big part of the game.

The Solar System campaign I’m running and the Barbarians of Lemuria campaigns I’m playing in are awesome. We’ve had a dozen sessions in each of the campaigns. They have enough potential to last us at least half a dozen more. But I think that’s because of the setting, the scope of the current plot, etc. What we don’t have, as Zak puts it, is a system that promising that “a specific kind of change will occur over the long haul.” The onus is on us, the table, to make this promise, to foreshadow it, to work towards it, etc.

In other words, it’s on us to foreshadow mechanical changes (new gifts, feats, schools of magic, spells) and new modes of play (land owning, castle building, plane hopping, politics) within the campaign. The system and the tradition around it doesn’t do that like D&D does.

I like to play all these games. This is not a value judgement per se. But the above observation can help you make value judgements elsewhere.

Here’s an example that I’ve come across twice in recent days: people propose a change to the D&D magic system; they want to make all the spells are available from the start. This is how spells work in HARP: more powerful variants just cost more power points – my second level mage, for example, has haste and fly as his two spells. Using the above observation, I must assume that these proposals remove the distinct modes of play I like so much. Any player character might have the necessary spells right from the start. As far as I’m concerned – and this is where the value judgement comes in – these proposals are taking away something I liked. What are they going to give me instead? If the answer is “more flexibility” for my character, then I feel that this change isn’t worth it. It might work for others, but I fear it won’t work for me. If I had wanted more flexibility I would have picked more flexible rules. Something with skills and point buy instead of classes and random ability scores, for example.

Tags: RPG
Homeownership rates tumbled this summer statewide and across much of Southern California.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports 53.5 percent of Californians lived in a home they owned in the third quarter, down from 53.8 percent in the second quarter and up from 53.2 percent a year ago. It’s the fourth-lowest level nationwide behind Washington, D.C., New York and Hawaii. West Virginia was best at 75.6 percent.

Ownership in Los Angeles and Orange counties fell to 46.6 percent in the summer quarter, second worst among 75 markets tracked trailing only Fresno. L.A.-O.C. had the nation’s lowest ownership levels in six out of eight quarters in 2015-16. Third-quarter ownership in L.A.-O.C. was down from 48.3 percent in the second quarter and 44.7 percent a year ago.

In San Diego County, ownership was 54.1 percent in the third quarter, eighth worst vs. 56.1 percent in the second quarter and 54.4 percent a year ago.

Gains were only found in Riverside and San Bernardino counties where ownership hit 59.2 percent in the quarter, 19th worst out of the big 75. Inland Empire ownership is up from 58.4 percent in the second quarter but down from 62.6 percent a year ago.

Other government stats show Southern Californians spending the biggest share of their household pay among major U.S. metro areas. That’s a key reason why Southern California’s renter households grew by roughly 749,000 in the past 10 years — a 33 percent jump. Meanwhile, the number of local homeowners was essentially flat.

Nationally, 63.9 percent of Americans lived in homes they owned in the third quarter, up from 63.7 percent in the second quarter and 63.5 percent a year ago. It’s also the highest homeownership rate since 2014’s fourth quarter.

By the way, best metro area for ownership? Allentown, Pa., at 75 percent in the third quarter.

How much Orange County housing can you buy for $350,000?

SEE: $350,000 new home in Orange County? It’s in the works in Rancho Mission Viejo
If Mind MGMT—Matt Kindt’s winding epic about men and women with the cognitive power to manipulate reality and those who would stop them—expanded out into a global onslaught of cities to emphasize the series’ blockbuster scope, his new project ranks up the tension and pressure by drilling deep and under. Announced today at Comic-Con International, Matt will both write and pencil the new Dark Horse monthly Dept. H, a murder mystery that takes place in a sabotaged deep-sea observatory. Sharlene Kindt, Matt’s wife who provided coloring and direction on this gorgeous Mind MGMT cover, will provide watercolors.

The plot follows Mia, a secret agent posing as a journalist, as she ventures into the Challenger Deep to investigate a homicide among the 100-strong crew. Her investigation pivots to a fight for survival as an act of vandalism sends her and her stranded researchers into a desperate search for a way to survive a two-week period before the station floods. The Kindts will embrace real-time storytelling as each issue takes place over 24-hours, adding a new tension to the suffocating pressure encroaching on the characters. Like a cross between sci-fi Jack London, The Abyss and the criss-cross espionage of Kindt’s previous material, there is no element of this new project we’re not ecstatically awaiting. (And is that a sea monster we spy?!)

While in the process of inking the last issue of Mind MGMT, Matt shared the first cover of Dept. H and discussed his fear of the deep seas, his love of Jacques Cousteau and how this project, set to debut this winter, is challenging him after decades in the industry.

Paste: So what exactly is Dept. H?

Matt Kindt: Dept. H is my next ongoing series. I’m taking the summer off to write the whole thing, or as much as I can, and then I’ll start drawing it in the fall. It’s basically an underwater adventure/murder mystery. This woman gets tasked with going down to the deepest underwater base in the world to figure out what happened when somebody’s murdered down there. The series starts out with her getting into this weird sub designed to go down that deep, then investigating the murder. The whole series is structured around her investigation. The series takes place in real time, but is released monthly. It’ll follow her and the crazy stuff that happens down there, and the mystery and then some other weird stuff I can’t spoil.

My wife, who taught me how to watercolor, is going to watercolor this one. So I’m going to be doing all the drawing, and she’s going to be doing all the painting over the top.

Paste: I saw the recent Doctor Strange commission you worked on with her.

Kindt: She uses a different kind of watercolor than I do that gets those crazy, bright colors. We’re going to do a mix of more subdued stuff, and then there are going to be parts of the story that call for crazy, bonkers over-the-top color. She can do both of those—I don’t really like using bright color. She’s well-suited for it.

Paste: The last time I spoke with you, I listed all the projects you were on and how busy you seem. Not much has changed. You’d told me, “What else am I going to do?” When you’re looking at a new book after working under every scope of project available (mini comics, creator-owned, Big Two), are you actively searching to tackle new storytelling approaches or elements, or do the ideas just come organically?

Kindt: I just have a running list of ideas of different things I want to work on. Working on Mind MGMT was long, and it took so long that these ideas built up over time. I thought maybe some of these ideas I like more than others. I think how I tell it is always a product of what the story is. I try to pick a story that I think is interesting or I think would be fun, and then let the story dictate how it’s going to be told, which is an approach I’ve tried to take my whole life. Let the story dictate the structure, how it unfolds. In comics, specifically, the story suggests ways that comics can be pushed in new directions, and how you can use pictures and words. That’s basically a wide-open art form. You can do anything. Put some pictures in any combination. That’s the part that’s exciting to me—how limitless the possibilities are, as you sit at your table and think all day.

Paste: The more read I read your comics, the more I realize how important a sense of place is to your narratives. It’s often one of the most important characters in your books, thinking back to the myriad international stops in Mind MGMT, the rotating universes of Revolver and even the psychedelic fun-house of Marvel Knights: Spider-Man. These places also define and provide a kind of relief to the characters, like Henry Lyme in Zanzibar. Now we’re going underwater. What attracted you to the deep blue sea? Does it reflect the characters in some way?

Kindt: Definitely. I think the most exciting thing to me, other than coming up with the story idea, is where it’s going to take place. A lot of it is I’m going to have to draw that place. I’m going to have to draw the environment. Comics is a visual medium; having something take place in an office or in an American city is super boring to me because we see that all the time. Again, the story dictates location as well, and what makes sense.

But with Dept. H and the underwater stuff, my greatest fear is drowning. That’s something I’ve always been intrigued by. Jacques Costeau is someone who I’ve always really loved, and he did that documentary back in the late ‘60s about the deep-sea base he made. I watched that I thought Whoa. It just made me sick to my stomach. I think it’s fun to play around with that stuff. I’m taking Scuba diving lessons, which I’m terrified of. I can swim. I’m not terrified of water. I’m scared of being underwater, I guess. Even snorkeling freaks me out for a second, until I’ve learned to trust the snorkel. I think there’s a lot of stuff there I want to deal with, as far as psychology.

I also love that the ocean is our last unexplored wilderness. It’s like the wild west…but underwater. I think there’s a lot going on down there. There’s more than we even know and have ever seen. I think that’s always appealed to me too, as a kid. NASA going into space is awesome and seeing other planets, but man if we could figure out how to go deeper, there’s a lot of stuff we could see here. We’re digging, hoping for something alive on Mars—there’s the weirdest things alive on earth in water that we haven’t found yet.

Paste: It was only within the last few years that we’ve mapped it all. Did you research much? Was there anything you found especially interesting?

Kindt: I’m actually in the process of doing that now. That’s part of my summer—doing a ton of research. Basically I got the story, but now I have to figure out the details. I’m doing a ton of research, finding out about all of these crazy creatures that we’re still finding. I’m actually doing a bunch of research just on survivability—like how deep you can go and the problems with being down that far, and how creatures can adapt to that extreme environment. All that’s going to play into it. I’m doing a ton of research into that to see how it’s going to play into the story.

Paste: Right—on a more pragmatic level, the story revolves around scientists attempting to survive on a sabotaged underwater station. How far is Dept. H going to veer into engineering, something akin to The Martian?

Kindt: It’s going to be a little bit like that. The beauty of the series is that there’s not going to be a way to save the base that’s filling up. I like the idea that every month the water gets a little bit deeper. Literally, it gets deeper. There’s going to be design elements to track the rise of the water, sort of this impending doom. So every month there’s going to be a little gauge at the edge of the paper. So when you collect the whole book or you stack the issues up, you’ll be able to see the water on the edge of the pages rising.

The problem with Mind MGMT is that I put every idea I could think of twisting comics around. So coming up with something is…hard [laughs], without repeating myself. But I’m trying.

Paste: Speaking of, you have this constraint—each issue covers 24 hours. Why take this approach? Did you personally want to challenge yourself?

Kindt: I think so. I love the format of a monthly comic. I love that you have this finite amount of time to get this piece of a story put out there, and have to work on its own, but also be part of a bigger thing. That was something that was interesting to me, but also the idea that this whole thing is finite. Her space that she’s living in is finite, it’s ticking down. You’re not going to get six issues of flashbacks and then go back to the main story. I want it to be more of an intense experience, a little more action-oriented. A little more immediate.

Paste: The general impression I’m getting is that you write without releasing until you have the whole story mapped in your head, which is something I generally associate with designers. But when you work this far in advance, do you ever think of new developments that you wish you would have had, but you can’t capitalize on because it would contradict past continuity?

Kindt: That’s part of the design of the books, too. With Mind MGMT and then this, I’m hopefully going to write out the scripts for the whole thing ahead of time. A couple years worth at least. But with Mind MGMT and how I usually structure things, I try to leave some wiggle room. Here are the main beats we’re going to hit, and then leave a little room for extra ideas. You are married to those bigger beats, but if you can structure it right, you can fit in some extra ideas or some things that occur to you on the way.

The nature of comics is like that. You sit down and you write it, you write a couple drafts, but then you’re drawing it for a few weeks, and then during those few weeks your’e thinking about it. You’re literally staring at it every day. It’s impossible not to come up with more ideas just because of the way the process works. That’s why it’s extra fun to write and draw the thing, because I’m thinking about it 1,000 times more than if I were just writing it.

The inside front covers on the single issues would be like an outlet for some extra ideas I had. And then even some of the backup stories gave me a chance to elaborate on things that I didn’t have time to hit on the main storyline or other ideas. A lot of that stuff was planned at the beginning, but then as I went along I kept a running list of ideas for some things I wanted to hit so it wouldn’t disrupt the main narrative, but I could still fit it in and use it to stitch the bigger story together, and add some backstory or some shading to some things that I wouldn’t have maybe been able to do otherwise.

Paste: So Mind MGMT. has Meru and Dept. H. has another two-consonant M-name female journalist—Mia. Are the works in dialogue within one another? Or is this just the best way to start any spy story?

Kindt: Every book I’ve ever done is connected. In my mind they’re all in the same universe. So there’s a loose connection, but there’s not a literal connection between her and Meru. I like writing female characters because they’re different than me. I think when I was first starting doing mini-comics and autobiographical stuff, I was really just writing me. I was writing this character and the character’s thoughts were my thoughts. Early on, I decided that could kind of boring, boring to read. So I unconsciously tried to pick a character who’s the opposite of me, or different than me and pushes me outside my comfort zone, makes it a little harder and makes me think a little more. Having characters with different backgrounds who aren’t me. Having a girl instead of a guy immediately makes it more interesting. As a writer, stuff like that is more of what I’m thinking about. Trying to put another hurdle in front of myself that I can jump over.

Paste: Describing your work can be difficult because pragmatic elements like government agencies and political philosophy dovetail so seamlessly with surrealism, and your visuals are incredibly stylized. What media were you into as a kid? How about now?

Kindt: When I was a kid I read everything. Pulp, science-fiction. I read almost every Philip K. Dick book. I’m saving a couple because there aren’t not many left, so I’m saving some so I don’t run out. I read all the Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. Any crime fiction from the ‘40s and ‘50s was my favorite. I read every kind of pulpy thing ever. I was a fan of The Shadow and Doc Savage, and that was all the way up through high school. I was also reading every Marvel and DC comic I could get my hands on. That’s how I grew up.

I hit college and I was starting to hate superhero comics, and I think I just didn’t like comics anymore. I stopped reading, but then I went to the Chicago Comic Con back in ’92 or ’93, where I picked up the first couple issues of Eightball [by Daniel Clowes], which had just come out. I remember reading those on the way home, and I was like ‘oh, I don’t hate comics. I’m not sick of comics. I’m sick of superhero stuff. It opened my eyes to different genres and different things you can do with comics. When I was reading those, I thought ‘here’s something that’s still fun, it’s still pulpy, but there are no capes.’ It didn’t have to fit into the superhero genre.

That got me interested, and I was reading a bunch of other stuff, too: Hate [by Peter Bagge] and pretty much everything Fantagraphics put out. This is why I went all the way to the opposite [spectrum] and was just doing autobiographical comics, and then I started getting bored of doing those. I was getting bored of real-life stuff, and then I figured that I’d take that stuff and add spies and sci-fi back into it, and then it’s more fun to draw and it’s more fun to write. It’s definitely more fun to read. That’s sort of what formed me—what I am now. I love genre, I love the trappings of it and I love the way it looks. The visuals are so great. That’s the candy coating I put my other stories in. The stories I’m telling could be in any genre. I just pick something that’s fun to draw and to look at, and then hopefully it helps further the idea and the story as well.

Now I mostly read stuff like reference and nonfiction for inspiration and for research. I’ll dip in—I’ll read comics now and again. But I mostly don’t have as much time to read for fun anymore. I read for work. Even though work is fun!
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New Orleans Saints will be mostly healthy when they face each other, as both teams only have a few inactives due to injury. For the Bucs, Jacquies Smith and George Johnson are the only injury-based inactives. Gerald McCoy and Lavonte David will play today, with McCoy having his hand in a cast.

The Bucs did make on interesting decision: they're keeping Demar Dotson inactive. The veteran tackle got his first start of the season last week filling in for the injured Gosder Cherilus, and looked better than Cherilus -- especially in the passing game. But Cherilus is healthy now, and apparently the Bucs really don't like going away from people they've started all season on the offensive line -- an attitude that led to a lot of problems last season, too.

Bruce Carter will start at middle linebacker, though Danny Lansanah may see some playing time there too. Howard Jones will start at defensive end for Jacquies Smith.

Buccaneers inactives: QB Ryan Griffin, DE Jacquies Smith, DE George Johnson, LB Jeremiah George, T Demar Dotson, TE Brandon Myers, DE Josh Shirley

Saints inactives: DT John Jenkins, G Jahri Evans, WR T.J. Graham, QB Garrett Grayson, DB Chris Owens, LB David Hawthorne, DE Philip Hunt
- Weather shelters are now operating in various Los Angeles County locations and more are slated to open soon, authorities said Wednesday.

Bassett Park at 510 Vineland Ave. in La Puente opened today and will remain available to those seeking shelter from cold and/or rainy weather though Dec. 8, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

"Warm meals and pet accommodations are provided," according to an authority statement that said doors open at 6 p.m., but when it rains, the shelter shifts to 24-hour operation.

As of Thursday, shelters will be open in Bell, the East San Gabriel Valley, Highland Park, Lancaster, Santa Clarita, Skid Row, South Los Angeles, Sylmar and West Los Angeles.

Shelters in Lancaster and Santa Clarita opened last Thursday. Shelters in Pacoima, Long Beach and Pomona will open later in December, according to the Homeless Services Authority.

Most of the shelters will remain open until March 1, officials said.

Transportation options are available. More information, including locations, are available on the Homeless Service Authority website at www.lahsa.org/ces/winter-shelter/ or at (800) 548-6047.

Copyright 2016 FOX 11 Los Angeles : Download our mobile app for breaking news alerts or to watch FOX 11 News | Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Be a citizen journalist for FOX 11 and get paid – download the Fresco News App today.
Winnipeg's MTS Centre is getting a whole lot flashier with $12 million in enhancements, including a new high-definition scoreboard 2½ times bigger than the current one.

The new board will feature four large screens, offering three times the resolution of the screens on the existing one.

True North Sports & Entertainment unveiled the planned improvements on Monday. They also include:

Installation of a new 360-degree power ring presenting two times the resolution of the existing power ring .

Installation of a new state-of-the-art control room that will allow the production of high-definition images throughout the MTS Centre and improve audio in the existing sound system, and allow for additional cameras which will bring an enhanced scoreboard experience.

Installation of 278 new premium loge seats, accessed through the upper concourse and initially made available to patrons currently sitting in Row 1 of the 300 Level.

Installation of new seamless glass in the front row of the 300 Level, replacing the existing mesh railing, for improved sightlines for 300-level patrons.

The upgrades will be undertaken this summer.

MTS Centre, which opened Nov. 16, 2004, has hosted almost 1,400 events, including hockey games, concerts and other entertainment events.
Adorable – short lived and with strained relations.

Adorable – in concert at Glastonbury 1993 – BBC Radio 1 –

Homage to Shoegaze tonight with Adorable, a band from Coventry who were together only four years but managed to get two albums out before splitting.

Formed in 1990, as The Candy Thieves, consisting of Pete Fijalkowski (vocals, guitar), Wayne Peters (guitar), Stephen ‘Wil’ Williams (bass) and Kevin Gritton (drums). But after the release of their first and only single, Homeboy and Underwater, which failed to make any waves. As a result, Peters quit the band in frustration and was replaced by Robert Dillam, and the band changed their name to Adorable.

But even with the name change, the band encountered not a huge pile of success at first – their debut gig under their new name had the misfortune of happening the same night The Gulf War started, in January of 1991. However, their first single, a re-recording of Sunshine Smile for Creation, who they had just signed to, was designated Single Of The Week from NME, and did well on the Indie singles charts, as did two other singles released shortly after. Their debut album, Against Perfection was released in March of 1993 and showed promise, reaching #70 on the UK album charts. The band subsequently did a tour of Europe, the US, Australia and Japan.

And it’s around the time of that tour that this appearance at Glastonbury takes place. When they released their second album, Fake, in September of 1994, it provided two singles which also did well on the Indie charts. However the album itself didn’t break into the mainstream and it proved to be a capper for the band, who were experiencing strained relations between themselves and their label, Creation.

All of that led up to an onstage announcement during a gig in Brussels, that Adorable were splitting up.

I haven’t found very much recorded live of this band, so I suspect there’s not much that is representative of them. If you missed them the first time around, here’s a memory refresher. If you’ve never heard of them before, here’s another example of what was going on in the early 90s.
Billionaire business mogul Mark Cuban recently was with “Extra’s” Renee Bargh on the set of his hit ABC show “Shark Tank,” where he is never afraid to share his honest opinions when contestants pitch their ideas to him.

When Renee asked Cuban about his former friend, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, he held nothing back. He said, “You know what? It’s rare that you see someone get stupider before your eyes, but he’s really working at it…You have to give him credit. It’s a difficult thing to do, but he’s accomplished it.”

Cuban, who has accomplished a lot as owner of the Dallas Mavericks and as an investor in many other businesses, questioned Trump’s decisions, pointing out, “Let’s look at it this way: Name one good deal he’s done… When he talks about his great renegotiations, they’re renegotiations, so tell me if you think this is a good deal: I lose four casinos, they go out of business, but I’m really good at renegotiating the debt of his companies that have already gone out of business.”

Mark smiled, “He’d get kicked out of 'Shark Tank' so fast, it would make your head spin.”

Cuban also made it clear he used to be friends with Trump, but revealed they haven’t spoken in the last month. “He sent me an email when I started picking on him… What happened was I really didn’t like Ted Cruz, so I started helping Donald, tried to encourage him, 'cause I thought he’d be, and to this day thought he’d be a better candidate than Ted Cruz… But at some point, you’ve got to start learning and understanding the issues, you know? Donald has been at this a year but you don’t look at him and say, ‘Wow, he’s gotten so much smarter on this topic or that topic.' In fact, you look at him and say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?' That’s not good for America.”
Both of them knew the conversation needed to happen. It had been simmering to the surface for quite some time, but it was only now, in June, at the Tour de Suisse that Shayne Bannan broached it.

"Come back in the car with me," offered Bannan. And so he did.

There's something about car rides that prys the heart and mind open. The unsaid, drips, then pours out, helped perhaps, by sparing eye-contact, and the gentle hum of the engine.

They were frank. Bannan, mainly. There was no sugar-coating it, the partnership hadn't been anywhere near as successful as either had hoped.

After 10 minutes, all was said and done. Catharsis.

Goss was out.

The decision was mutual, as Goss tells it anyway. Still it's not something he would have anticipated, nor desired even 12 months before. Both had wanted things to work. They hadn't.

In September, he finished his last race with the team, the Tour of Alberta, or rather didn't. A DNF is marked to his name for the final stage. An appropriately invisible close to Goss's time in Orica colours.

In three years with the team he'd clocked just two wins, and for the first time since he'd turn pro, in 2014, he hadn't won once.

Where exactly did it all go wrong for Matt Goss? What exactly happened to the world-beater that joined the team in 2012?

At a time of accelerating development, strength, speed and confidence, the Australian, stagnated, then went backwards.

For Matt Goss, these were the lost years.

***

Internally at least, frustrations with Goss's non-performance at GreenEDGE had been building for some time. One must remember that the Australian, was, at least in 2012, by far the team's best paid rider, on a deal close to double that of any of his team-mates. And yet the return on investment from the now 27 year old, in retrospect, is among the poorest of the crop.

At the time of Goss's signing, in 2011, his deal was vindicated. Here was a rider bubbling to his prime, and ready, or so it appeared to hit his stride in a new, ambitious team, unrestrained by the presence of other sprinters. He'd won Milan-San Remo, he'd very nearly won a world championship, in Copenhagen. The world was his oyster.

But things never clicked.

There's a confluence of factors that together unravelled Goss, the first, was the assumption that he could, or would be able to factor against the world's best sprinters in an incredibly tight, and highly competitive top-tier of fast men.

In reflection, Matt White conceded last week that one of the big lessons with Goss was how dramatically the trend of finely-tuned lead out trains built specifically around a single key sprinter had altered the speed game. Cavendish and Greipel, the emergence of Marcel Kittel, and the fact that Peter Sagan was a better climber, and arguably faster finisher left Goss little opportunity to succeed.

"We learnt that the hard way with Gossy," said White. "It's a very, very hard market to crack. Unless you can beat the Kittels, Greipels, or Cavs, of this world, you're pretty much wasting your time."

At least in Goss's first year with Orica, the number of near misses would suggest that even with a team focused on delivering the Australian to the line, racking up the wins the team had hoped was going to be hard graft, harder still in the evolving sprint environment without a train that rivalled Argos, Lotto, or, more recently, Omega Pharma-Quick Step. Goss did win, once, at the Giro d'Italia, a landmark of sorts for the team as its first Grand Tour win, but the number of seconds, thirds and fourths, built in droves as further wins alluded him.

As Goss sees it, contending with building a new squad around him, and vying for wins against the world's best was always going to have its challenges. At least initially he'd underestimated how long they would take to iron out.

"I had a great season in 2011, but I had it in a team which had been around in one form or another for a long time, and had a well-drilled sprint train, a really disciplined setup," Goss said. "They knew how to do everything. In 2012, we didn't. I was building a leadout train from scratch, in doing sprints I'd never really done before - I'd never really done the big bunch sprints at the Grand Tours, I'd always worked for Cav. It was a new experience, really getting the leadout to work properly."

The frustration with the team's teething problems in developing and honing a leadout, in building Goss into the sprinter they wanted him to be, netting the results they wanted, perhaps demanded, conspired to amplify in to pressure which Goss had previously never had to contend with.

Perceived and real pressure

The external pressure was there from the media, for Goss to perform. Questions were asked, doubts raised. Internally, the team remained patient, but Goss was feeling it all the same.

"When it didn't work properly, really dealing with the pressure of the media - and everything - that was a different scenario to what I'd been used to in the past. I knew it was going to be more than usual, being an Australian team, Australian riders, and at the time being a marquee signing. I knew a lot of weight was going to be on my shoulders.

"It was a combination of the pressure and expectation. It then snowballed after we missed out at the 2012 Tour."

Expectation came with the money, both Orica-GreenEDGE insiders and Goss himself acknowledge, but how much pressure that actually materialised on the Australian is contentious. Orica was finding wins across the board, its first year seeing Michael Albasini, Luke Durbridge, Daryl Impey, Aidis Kruopis, Simon Clarke and Simon Gerrans all winning at twice or more. With Gerrans's victory at San Remo, the Tour Down Under, and the National Championships, the weight was off the team's collective shoulders, 26 wins in total in its debut season, nothing to snort at.

Despite Goss being signed as the team's talismanic leader, the reality was that through such a spread pool of winners, Goss wasn't being relied on to perform. The internal pressure was less. Still it didn't make the results sheet any prettier. Goss wanted things to change. A better start to 2013 saw Goss end his pre-season and survive the hit out at Nationals, and then the Santos Tour Down Under in good shape, but winless. Success appeared to be in the offing. A win in Tirreno-Adriatico, channelling some of his old mongrel, just before Milan-San Remo was a breakthrough, and then he got sick. The unseasonably cold weather and high training load saw him repeatedly down with illness, something he failed to recover from the rest of the year.

"I tried to do more and more training to catch up in 2013 to be better but it meant I was sick a lot, I did three course of antibiotics during the Giro that year just trying to push through, and basically burning myself out in the process. At the end of the day I was the one that was paid to put the runs on the board, though. I should've known how far I could've pushed myself."

All the while, Simon Gerrans was lifting the team's profile into the stratosphere. Yellow, and a stage at the Tour de France, the "gift" to Daryl Impey, all overshadowed Goss. The signing of Michael Matthews, from Rabobank, and his immediate success gave the team a viable sprint alternative. Toward the end of 2013, Goss pulled the pin, and went back-to-basics.

A fresh start

The focus on Gerrans only increased this year. The team's golden boy delivered the team one of its biggest victories, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, while Matthews continued to quietly blossom. A growing tally of Grand Tour stage wins to Matthews name and leader's jersey both at the Vuelta and the Giro d'Italia have now eclipsed Goss's past contributions.

As Orica shifts its focus to hillier races, the arrival of more versatile sprinters, and a string of dedicated climbers, the Tasmanian has become an expensive luxury that no longer fits the team's mould. Orica clearly didn't know what to do with the Australian this season, racing him sparingly, only 50 race days compared to 85 the year before, and often making him ride in support of Matthews or Gerrans rather than chase his own ambitions.

A fresh start, by all reports, with MTN-Qhubeka, may foster Goss's resurgence as a force in the professional peloton. But exactly what the Australian needs to shift, or change is not clear. Goss will once more turn to single day races, drifting away from attempts to take swags of wins at the Giro or Tour de France, but presumably the same challenges that have blighted his success in recent years remain.

A point often made in Goss's favour is that he remains remarkably young, still only 27. Indeed, if he can find a new lease of life at his new home there's huge scope to what his career might still offer. But there's plenty to prove. Goss says he's still motivated, but the last three years must weigh on the mind.

"It's a fresh start, 2015, I'll go back to a role that I've had success with in the past (at Highroad)," says Goss. "There's another sprinter on the team who's a dedicated bunch sprinter, which means I can sit back a bit and take my opportunity from day-to-day, when they arrive, those harder stages, and one dayers again like San Remo. I won't have to keep trying something that isn't working.

"I'm looking forward to again picking and choosing my days, that's always worked better for me in the past. I'm looking forward to it."

Follow @al_hinds
President Trump will travel to Missouri on Wednesday as part of an ongoing effort to pressure Senate Democrats in states he won to back the Republican tax plan. Yet such lawmakers have shown they see no political incentive in supporting the legislation, which could come up for a vote in the upper chamber later this week.

Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, whom the president will likely call out while on her home turf, joined more than a dozen fellow Democratic senators from red or swing states for a press conference Tuesday condemning the bill and calling for a bipartisan process to overhaul the tax code. The event was a remarkable demonstration of how the president and congressional Republicans have been unable to sway some of the most vulnerable senators up for re-election next year.

Instead, Trump and the White House have spent the week trying to secure Republican votes for the bill, a dynamic that has given Democrats some political cover in holding out. A score released by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office on Sunday showed negative effects on middle-class taxpayers, which is buttressing Democratic opposition, as are polls showing the plan to be unpopular among voters.

And if red state Democrats had been eager to back a tax reform measure, the Republicans’ inclusion of a repeal of the health care law’s individual mandate has provided an easy reason to say no to the GOP bill.

“We all want to do tax reform, we all believe it needs to be done,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who organized the Democrats’ press conference. “We’re willing to work and sit down. … There’s not one person here who hasn’t worked with a Republican.”

Manchin hails from Trump country. His state voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by 42 percentage points and gives the president his highest approval ratings in the nation. Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, Manchin would likely be comfortable voting for something with the president’s name on it. But on both taxes and health care, Democrats have been united in opposition to GOP proposals, an indication of how they see political dynamics playing out in their states ahead of the 2018 midterms.

“It has been staggering. It’s just amazing how poorly the president and GOP leaders have played their hand,” says Democratic operative Jim Manley, a former top aide to retired Sen. Harry Reid. “There is a handful of Democrats who would have been desperate to vote for a tax bill. But they’re feeling no pressure because the bill is so skewed towards the wealthy.”

The CBO estimated the tax plan would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over a decade, and would cause 4 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2019 and 13 million by 2027. (Republicans dispute the CBO analysis, arguing that the effect would be Americans would simply no longer be mandated to buy insurance, not that it would be taken away.) The report also estimated that Americans earning less than $75,000 would end up paying more in taxes by 2027, as individual tax cuts would expire.

“We can do better in the Senate. We can actually come up with bipartisan solutions. ... Everyone here would agree we need a simpler tax code,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, arguing that working-class Americans would shoulder unfair burdens under the current proposal.

Trump tried to court Heitkamp early on in the process. He invited the North Dakota Democrat aboard Air Force One to accompany him to a planned rally in her state in September. There to plug the bill, the president summoned Heitkamp on stage and called her a “good woman,” irking Republican operatives who hoped he would be tougher on the first-term incumbent. The event appeared to benefit Heitkamp, who faces a tough re-election next year.

Trump also traveled to Indiana with Sen. Joe Donnelly, another Democrat facing a difficult re-election in 2018. Donnelly also joined Vice President Mike Pence for a tax reform event in their home state, which Trump carried by 19 points. During Tuesday’s press conference, Donnelly recalled those visits, attempting to show constituents he was willing to work with the White House. But the eventual legislation, he said, did not do enough for middle-class voters or for keeping jobs from going overseas. “This country is better off with a tax bill with 60 or 70 votes,” Donnelly said.

Jon Tester of Montana, which Trump carried by 21 points, also participated in the press event.

Trump has treated McCaskill more harshly than the others. During a visit to Springfield in August, he told the audience there to vote her out of office if she didn’t back the tax plan. “She’s got to make that commitment. If she doesn’t do it, we just can’t do this anymore with the obstruction and the obstructionists,” he said.

Republicans in the state note that while McCaskill is a savvy politician, a no vote could come with peril. “She was never going to vote for tax reform,” says John Hancock, a former state GOP chairman. He labeled the two-term senator “a rhetorical moderate” who in fact is “actually quite liberal and out of step with Missouri voters.”

Though McCaskill defeated a Republican incumbent to win her seat in 2006, Missouri has reddened since then. Last year, Trump carried it by 18 points, outperforming Mitt Romney’s 2012 support by eight points. Nonetheless, McCaskill isn’t feeling much pressure. She voted against the Senate bill in the Banking Committee earlier this month. “I wanted to support real tax reform. This isn’t it — this is a bad deal for Missouri families,” she said in a statement.

In a sign of how the legislation is unlikely to garner bipartisan support, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee launched new ads this week slamming the measure as a tax increase for families.

“These wrong and self-serving priorities are guaranteed to turn off voters of every political persuasion, and every GOP Senate candidate will be held accountable for their toxic and unpopular tax scam,” said the DSCC chairman, Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

Still, the legislation appeared to pick up some needed momentum on Tuesday when Trump traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican lawmakers. The bill passed the Finance Committee afterward on party lines, with skeptics Bob Corker of Tennessee and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin coming aboard. Unlike with the unsuccessful health care repeal effort, Republicans in Congress appear more eager to get to a yes vote, cognizant of the political backlash they would face following another GOP defeat.
'Naughty' joke gets Santa Claus fired from Macy's SAN FRANCISCO

John Toomey has been known as "Santa John" at the Union Square Macy's for more than 20 years -- but no more. John Toomey has been known as "Santa John" at the Union Square Macy's for more than 20 years -- but no more. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close 'Naughty' joke gets Santa Claus fired from Macy's 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Santa Claus has been canned from Macy's, and he's anything but jolly about it.

His fans aren't happy, either. And there are many.

John Toomey, known for 20 years at the Union Square Macy's in San Francisco as "Santa John," was told Saturday he'll have to take his "ho, ho, hos" elsewhere because an adult couple complained about a joke he cracked.

The joke has been in his Santa bag for decades. But after thousands of tellings, the 68-year-old retired caretaker for the elderly finally hit the wrong recipients - apparently an older woman and her husband, who considered it inappropriate.

Toomey - who stays in Oroville most summers and winters in San Francisco while he does the kiddie-on-the-knee gig - said he'd never had complaints before about the joke, which he saves for the occasional grown-up who visits him.

"When I ask the older people who sit on my lap if they've been good and they say, 'Yes,' I say, 'Gee, that's too bad,' " Toomey said Monday.

"Then, if they ask why Santa is so jolly, I joke that it's because I know where all the naughty boys and girls live."

The kids who sit on his lap, he said, get only his trademark laugh and questions about what toys they want.

Macy's spokeswoman Betsy Nelson said the store cannot comment because the matter involves personnel.

But several workers used words including "devastated" and "overreaction" to describe their take on Santa John being booted from his throne at Santaland on the seventh floor. They all asked not be named because store policy forbids them from speaking publicly about such matters, but their un-yule-ish gloom was palpable.

"People make a pilgrimage to see him every year, some for as long as 15 years," said one worker. "Everyone loves him. Everybody's just heartsick about this."

Many customers said that with his gentle manner, chest-length white beard and well-practiced laugh, Toomey looks so genuine you expect elves to be playing at his feet.

"He's totally the best Santa ever, very jolly and very authentic," said Sharon Owens, 56, of Oakland. "I've been coming to see him for years. There's just nobody better."

She and a friend, 56-year-old Theresa Pepin of Martinez, came Monday to see Santa John, and shock swept across their faces when they saw a new Kriss Kringle in his place. The new guy was doing just fine - but the women missed their old favorite.

"We're very sad," Pepin said.

As for Santa John: He's retreated to his local north pole station, otherwise known as a hotel on Market Street, to see what becomes of his request for reconsideration.

"Everything was going OK until this couple came in," he said. "I don't know why they reported me. I don't think I said anything untoward."

There's no doubt Toomey takes seriously the responsibility that comes with the red hat.

"With the children, it's important to listen carefully to them and make sure they're doing things properly, like brushing their teeth, helping Mom around the house, things like that," Toomey said. "Then when they tell you what they want, repeat it loudly enough so the parents can hear, and tell the child you'll talk it over with Mrs. Santa and the elves. That way you leave it up to the parents.

"It's an important job," he said, "and the joking around like I did is only for the adults."

While he waits to see if Macy's will relent, Toomey is looking into hiring himself out at parties and other stores.

"I've got my Social Security and some savings, so I'll be OK," he said. "But I sure do miss being Santa."
May 1st, 2013

RAWTunes.exe 10

July / December 2012

RAWTunes.exe 10 is a noise-art album made in homage to the now late, (great?) iTunes 10 release. As iTunes 11 makes its way onto computers across the globe this album will remain as a media-archive of splendid noises transcoded from iTunes 10 executables. Available for £7.99 on iTunes, now and forever (or as long as I keep paying the renewal fee).

Last year I released a music single through iTunes. Entitled RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2, it was my first foray into sound-art/noise-art. Today, I AM a popstar.

I am proud to announce the release of my 8 track album RAWTunes.exe 10!

You can listen to a selection of tracks below (making sure that all small children and dogs are at a safe distance), or buy the whole lot on iTunes for £7.99 (also at Amazon and Spotify)

It took me about 20 minutes to make this album. Here’s how you can do it yourself:

Using a program like Audacity, open ANY file as RAW data (see this video tutorial for detailed instructions) Choose your conversion method The file you send to iTunes and release to the world MUST be in this format:

16 bit (sample size), 44.1 kHz (sample rate), 1411 kbps (bit rate) stereo wav

So, after playing with your file (or not doing anything in particular) export it with these options Using a service like TuneCore, release your album to the world Become a famous Noise artist like me

I chose to convert a series of iTunes executable files, each one plucked from a long list of releases under the iTunes 10 label, but you can choose anything. Have a look on Soundcloud for a bunch of people who have done just this.

This is ‘art’, so of course my work has to be critically engaged, and self aware. Thankfully, iTunes regulations make this really easy:

Content that is not produced by Apple Inc. must not include the word “iTunes” anywhere in the metadata or cover art.

I would argue that the content of my album is 100% ‘produced by Apple Inc.’ but they wouldn’t let me call it ‘iTunes.exe 10’. It was only after several iterations of cover art that the album was allowed into the Apple store. These are just some of the woes that a true Noise artist must suffer in the pursuit of their art.

RAWerTUNES10dotEXE [3Dude Remix]

May 2013

The RAWTunes homage to iTunes 10 was later been transcoded and extruded into another iteration, in a collaboration with Alex Myers.

You could hear, see and 3D print RAWerTUNES10dotEXE at your own great expense at Run Computer, Run exhibition, Rua Red, Dublin (May 2013).

ALEX MYERS

Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles.

www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has described as ‘disgusting’ pictures of Ukraine rebels digging through the possessions of people killed in the Malaysia plane crash disaster.

In a short news conference, Rutte said he had just had a ‘very intense’ phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin. ‘I told him “time is running out for you to show the world that you have good intentions, that you will take responsibility”,’ Rutte said.

Putin now ‘has to show that he will do what is expected of him and will exert his influence,’ the Dutch prime minister said.

‘It is 35 degrees there. The bodies need to be recovered now. I want to see results, unhindered access and the repatriation of the victims.’

Personal

The phone conversation with Putin was ‘very personal’, the Dutch prime minister said.

‘I think the entire Dutch population knows people who directly or indirectly know someone who was on board. There were 80 people under the age of 18, of whom 23 were under the age of 12 and three were babies. It is too terrible for words.’

Images of rebels holding up children’s toys were ‘too disgusting for words’, Rutte said. Such action is also hindering the investigation into the crash, he said.

Investigators

Earlier on Saturday, Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans met Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko in Kiev and told him the Netherlands was ‘angry, furious’ at the news that bodies were being dragged around the crash site, Reuters said.

‘Once we have the proof, we will not stop before the people are brought to justice. Not just the people who pulled the trigger but also those who made it possible. I think the international community needs to step up its efforts in this respect,’ Reuters quoted Timmermans as saying.

According to Dutch broadcaster Nos, Poroschenko in turn told Timmermans it is unacceptable that international experts are being denied access to the disaster zone.

‘We will not tolerate interference with the work of the commission and that those representatives of other countries do not have the possibility of conducting an objective investigation,’ Poroshenko is quoted as saying.

Denials

However, the separatists deny interfering, Nos television reports. It quotes ‘one of their commanders’ as saying they have promised the OSCE that they will not touch bodies or the remains of the plane.

As well as the Dutch, Malaysian and Ukrainian researchers have arrived in the region to begin investigating the crash. Two German forensic pathologists are also on their way to Ukraine, as is a six-strong British team, Nos television said.

Malaysia Airlines released the full passenger list on Saturday. The Dutch death toll is now put at 193, out of 298 people on board the plane.

Rutte’s statement (official English translation)
Julian Assange's residency at the Ecuadorian embassy in London would be coming to an end should Ecuadorian presidential hopeful Guillermo Lasso win the election next week.

Lasso made the remarks in an interview to the Guardian on 9 February. "The Ecuadorian people have been paying a cost that we should not have to bear," he said during an interview in Quito. "We will cordially ask Señor Assange to leave within 30 days of assuming a mandate."

Israel: 12th Dead Sea Scroll cave of Qumran discovered

The right-wing candidate of the Creo-Suma alliance is running behind the ruling socialist party candidate Lenin Moreno in the first round of the vote on 19 February.

Moreno served as vice-president under current president Rafael Correa between 2007 and 2013. He is a well-known activists for the rights of people with disability as he has been in a wheelchair since he was shot in a robbery in 1998. He has been leading the polls since November, but Lasso, who is a former banker, could still stand a chance of winning should the two face each other in a run-off.

Couple arrested after autistic girl found locked in cage covered in excrement

The Correa government has been supporting Assange's request of political asylum since 2012 when the Australian sought refuge in the country's embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is accused of rape.

But, according to the Guardian, politicians and diplomats are increasingly weary of the situation and occasional tensions have surfaced. Internet access to the Wikileaks founder was temporarily cut during the US presidential election, when his website published leaked email about the Democratic Party and its candidate Hillary Clinton. "We wanted to be clear that our sovereign space was not being used for interference in the election of another country," the foreign minister, Guillaume Long told the British newspaper.

Man trapped underwater by digger saved by using yoga position

He added that there is a human cost to the situation and that the embassy staff has been "through a lot". "This is probably the most watched embassy on the planet," he said. According to Long, the staff tried to give Assange, who recently said he had not seen the sunlight in four years, as much comfort as possible, but the building does not have outside areas and he occupies a room on the first floor, where there is not much light.

Julian Assange More

Regardless of Ecuador's decision, Assange himself may decide to leave of his own free will. While the only extradition request for Assange is from Sweden, he has refused to go to the Scandinavian country for fear he would be handed over to the US, where the Department of Justice (DoJ) has a case open against Wikileaks for the disclosure of thousands of confidential government documents.

Assange and his team contested the legality of the DoJ investigation, but agreed to US extradition on the condition that Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who was serving a 35-year prison sentence, was released. Former President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence on 17 January and the former US soldier is due for release in May.

Assange has since been vague as to how he will proceed. Speaking to British channel ITV, he said he may consider going to the US to help close the DoJ investigation once and for all: "If to settle the matter it requires going to the United States, where certain circumstances and where my rights are protected then that's something we want to discuss, but the ball is in the DoJ court."

In an interview to Australian television, Assange was a little clearer about his intentions. "We had a major strategic victory in liberating Chelsea Manning – the most significant alleged whistleblower in the last 10 years" he said "But of course saying I'm willing to accept extradition doesn't mean I'm saying, I'm willing to be a complete idiot and throw all my lawyers away."

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Jess said she was sorry for getting her father into trouble (pic: MEN) A man who was arrested and cautioned for slapping his 13-year-old daughter across the face fears he will no longer be able to work with children. Jim McCullough, of Manchester, hit Jess after she banged a neighbour's window at midnight, and she called the police. He has now quit the football coaching and community work he has done for over 15 years, as the caution could stop him working with vulnerable children. Mr McCullough said he had never slapped Jess before. She has apologised. The father-of-four said he felt striking Jess was the only way to get her to understand what she had done. The single parent, from Wythenshawe, said: "I wish I had asked for my day in court rather than accepted a police caution. "That way I could have explained that I was trying to do what was right for my daughter. I did deserve the slapping because of the things I'd been doing

Jess McCullough "Jess isn't bad, but some of the 13-year-olds who live here do use drugs and drink and I don't want that path for her." Mr McCullough said he had had no trouble with his other three children Christopher, 22, Nicola, 21, and Joanna, 19. A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "When an offence is admitted the offender is always liable to receive a caution. "Had the offence not been admitted, officers would have pursued the matter with the CPS. 'Wrong message' "An allegation of domestic violence was made and GMP officers always take these allegations very seriously." Mr McCullough previously had a clean criminal record and recently qualified as a security guard, but said his work prospects had been ruined. Jess, a year nine pupil at Parklands High School in Wythenshawe, said she was sorry for what had happened. She said: "I did deserve the slapping because of the things I'd been doing. "I was expecting my dad to come home from the police station and for everything to be the same as before." National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) policy manager Lucy Thorpe said: "All parents can sometimes be pushed to the limit by teenagers who are looking to see how far they can go but smacking won't solve the problem. "It simply tells your child that violence is acceptable and gives the message that it's all right for them to hit other people." Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement

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FC Dallas travel to Denver this Friday to face the Colorado Rapids in a rematch of the match no one will forget this year. The last time these teams faced off, Colorado picked FC Dallas apart piece by piece and went on to score four goals in a 4-0 romping, the worst loss for FC Dallas in the Oscar Pareja era. It was a loss that made this FC Dallas team much more focused, and motivated, which we saw in the match against Toronto. This week could also mark the return of Mauro Diaz, which could change Colorado’s game plan heading into this Friday’s match.

The biggest thing we saw during the last match against Colorado was that the Rapids knew exactly what FC Dallas were going to do, and stuck to their guns to shut down Dallas. After the quick goal Colorado got from Dominique Badji, all they had to do was see out their game plan. The plan was to force FC Dallas into the middle and never effectively use Fabian Castillo or Ryan Hollingshead.

When you do not have the passing prowess of Mauro Diaz in the midfield, which Dallas did not have against Colorado the first time, it can be troubling. There was no one there to play cutting through balls through the middle of the backline. The plan was very effective, as no one on this FC Dallas team has quite the vision that Diaz has and it was apparent as they could not find the open outside pass.

Move the calendar forward eight days, and we see a motivated FC Dallas come out and run rampant over Toronto FC until a storm comes and delays the game ruining their flow. We really have to look at the three goals we saw from FC Dallas, as they were exactly what FC Dallas want to do week in and week out.

The first goal was made with brilliant passing, and burning speed from Fabian Castillo proving that Castillo is absolutely one of the most dangerous attackers in MLS. It was the fastest goal against an MLS opponent in club history. The second goal was a brilliant through ball from Blas Perez and a great curler from Castillo, and goal number three was just flat out hustle from Hollingshead and then Perez being Perez with his poacher goal.

FC Dallas played exactly how they wanted to play, and with passion. If you compare the Toronto defense with the Colorado defense head-to-head, they Toronto defense is facing injuries, and not been as stout as the Colorado defense. Obviously Castillo facing off with Nick Hagglund plays in favor of Castillo.

The Colorado defense can be beat on the counter attack as Seattle proved, so the speed of Castillo, possibly Michael Barrios and the passing of Mauro Diaz will be crucial in breaking down Colorado and not getting the 4-0 smacking that happened last time out. Mauro Diaz is expected to make his return as he practiced with the ones for the full week. With Marcelo Sarvas missing due to suspension, the Colorado midfield will be vulnerable.

Against Toronto, Michel and Victor Ulloa had a much better showing than what they had against Colorado the first time out. As noted, of their 14 unsuccessful passes, 6 of them were inside Dallas’ own half. They improved greatly in the match against Toronto with 18 unsuccessful passes, only 4 made FC Dallas have to reel back on the defensive. Most were near the halfway line. With Mauro Diaz expected to make his return, Michel could be forced out of the XI, if FC Dallas goes into a 4-4-2. That would put Diaz and Ulloa as the midfielders for Friday.

Defensively, FC Dallas looked confused last time out against Colorado. The combination of Walker Zimmerman and Zach Loyd proved to be leaky, and Je-Vaughn Watson was rusty in his first start back. In the Toronto match we saw the normal combo of Matt Hedges, who was injured for the last match against Colorado, and Zach Loyd, which looked a lot better, and much more organized.

Really, the biggest FC Dallas defensive gaff came in the 85th minute when they did not close Sebastian Giovinco down, and he hit an outstanding curler that almost went in from the top of box. The defense was great in playing defense in front and making Toronto attack them, and being up to the task. The two goals for Toronto were absolute class from Giovinco that Real Madrid would have trouble stopping.

Colorado have only won one of their past four at home, so FC Dallas may have caught them at a right time. This one is a tough one to call, as FC Dallas are motivated and are good enough to beat the Rapids, but the Rapids have the confidence of a 4-0 win under their belt and know FC Dallas’ weaknesses. This is a new Dallas team though, they are motivated and never want to let a score line like that happen again.
CLEVELAND -- Indians owner Paul Dolan could soon have a financial partner.

An investment banker hired by Dolan last year to search for a minority owner said Thursday that a "small group" of investors has been identified and a deal could be completed soon.

Steve Greenberg, managing director of Allen & Company, a New York-based financial boutique that has brokered sports acquisitions in the past, said the pursuit of an investor has narrowed and Dolan's goal to bring in someone to ease his financial burden and add capital could be finalized by the end of the year.

"Being a baseball guy let me describe it this way," said Greenberg, whose father, Hank, was the Indians' general manager from 1950-59. "We're in the bottom of the seventh inning. It's not over yet, but we can see the outcome if we just get two innings of relief ball."

Greenberg did not identify the group or what percentage of the team it would purchase from Dolan.

The Indians owner, whose family bought the team from Richard Jacobs in 1999, has no intention of selling the majority share of the Indians, who went 81-80 this season and missed the playoffs for the seventh time in eight years.

Greenberg has had major success in completing business deals. He created regional sports TV channels in Chicago and New York, helped the Wilpon family land a $400 million naming rights deal for Citi Field and worked with Cleveland owner Dan Gilbert on the purchase of the NBA's Cavaliers.

Because Major League Baseball does not have a salary cap, mid-market teams such as the Indians are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to signing free agents. Cleveland has to be selective and one or two bad signings, as was the case with outfielders Michael Bourn and Nick Swisher in 2013 to deals totaling $104 million, can have a debilitating effect.

Greenberg doesn't think a minority investor in Cleveland will necessarily change Dolan's spending habits radically, but it can provide a stronger economic foothold.

"I don't think it's going to be that kind of a game changer," Greenberg said when asked if an infusion of capital will alter the Indians' philosophy in building their roster. "I wouldn't expect that, but what I do think it does, however, is broaden the base of ownership. If there are years where you lose a little bit of money, it's not as stressful and you don't feel the need to trim payroll in August and September or July if you're out of the pennant race because you're not writing the whole check."

In recent years, Dolan's spending or lack thereof has angered some Indians fans, who complain that he doesn't do enough to make his team more competitive. Cleveland's attendance has been dropped over the past decade and the team drew just 1.38 million fans -- second lowest in the majors -- and the lowest in 22 seasons at Progressive Field.

Greenberg believes the addition of a minority owner in Cleveland can help change any perception about Dolan.

"If we bring in the right partner, separate and apart from any capital he may bring, we're also hoping that the partner becomes a true partner in terms of running the business in terms of ideas and contributes beyond any check he writes, so I think it will be perceived as, and will hopefully also be, a positive factor," he said.
Not much will have changed when Beavis and Butt-head returns to MTV in the fall after nearly 15 years off the air. But while the boys may still be clad in their AC/DC and Metallica shirts, they’ve got an whole lot of ammunition at their disposal when it comes to pop culture, including Jersey Shore and Twilight.

Writer-creator Mike Judge and executive producer Van Toffler offered a glimpse Friday at the Television Critics’ Association summer press tour at what could be expected from the animated hit.

1. Judge was nervous about including Jersey Shore in Beavis and Butt-head and watched MTV’s reality hit at Toffler’s recommendation. “It was paydirt,” Judge said, confessing that he’s now “hooked” on the Jersey crew. Toffler, meanwhile, doesn’t expect the housemates to ask for additional compensation when they appear in clips on the animated series. “I’d be scared to think of them with more money than they already have,” Toffler said, noting that he expects the gang to love being subjected to the Beavis and Butt-head treatment.

STORY: ‘Beavis and Butt-Head Returning to MTV’

2. Time stands still. Judge said he wanted new episodes to be topical – Twilight and vampire humor is included in the new trailer – but that there won’t be a specific instance where the series acknowledges the nearly 15-year gap between new episodes. “I wanted to make it not feel too forced; to make it as seamless as I could to what it was how ever many years ago,” he noted.

3. There’s plenty of ammunition for the boys to riff on. Judge said targets in the new episodes include UFC fights, Internet stuff and ... movie reviews. “We have a think where they’re kind of like Siskel & Ebert,” he said.

4. The animation process has been updated. When the original series aired from 1993 to 1997, Judge noted that Beavis and Butt-head — like The Simpsons and King of the Hill – was hand inked and painted onto cells and shot on film. That’s all been digitized now. “It still looks crappy,” Judge joked. “But I like the way it looks.” “It’s high-def, there are some differences.”

STORY: ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ Riff on ‘Jersey Shore’ in MTV Series Relaunch (Video)

5. The boys will still be watching music videos. MGMT, Deadmau5 and Tbaby’s “It’s So Cold in the D” will be among the artists Judge noted will be getting the Beavis & Butt-head treatment.

6. Beavis, meet technology. With Beavis and Butt-head returning to a world that now features cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, Judge said he didn’t want to force “all the modern stuff on them,” but did tease to an upcoming episode where the boys work in tech support.

7. Daria might be back. MTV’s Toffler, an executive producer on the series, notes that the animated spinoff from Beavis and Butt-head that airs in reruns on MTV2 and Logo and has done well on both. “We’ve talked to the creators so there is not as long a shot as you’d think that Daria might be back on one of our channels.

Beavis and Butt-head premieres the first of its 12 new episodes on Oct. 27 at 10 p.m. on MTV.

Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit
Story highlights New findings suggest sperm alone could be used to create children in the future

Research overturns almost 200 years of knowledge about fertilization

(CNN) It might be possible in the future to make babies without female eggs, new research claims.

Scientists at Bath University in the United Kingdom say they have successfully used sperm to create healthy baby mice by injecting the sperm cells directly into embryos.

"Up until now people thought the only way you could fertilize a cell with a sperm and have offspring is if the cell is an egg," Dr Tony Perry , University of Bath molecular embryologist and senior researcher, told CNN.

"(We thought) only a sperm in an egg can give you offspring. So that's something that kind of erodes from the first."

This isn't the first time scientists have attempted unconventional fertilization techniques -- previously researchers "tricked" eggs into developing into embryos without fertilization by sperm.

Read More
(I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my review)

This is an absolutely fantastic book! And I DO NOT give out praise like that all willy nilly. I immensely enjoyed reading Vision and am so glad I was given a chance to review it. So, a BIG thanks to the authors!

I was not quite sure what to expect when I agreed to review this novel. The synopsis intrigued me and I was interested to see how the authors had chosen to portray demons. There are a lot of different takes on demons and for the most part I am not that fond of them as a subject for a book. However, Cathy and Galen changed my mind with this one. The demons in this book do have a supernatural element to them but they are more than that.

To me they seemed to be depicted as the negative subconscious thoughts that tend to plague humans. That voice that encourages defeat and lack of confidence when life seems to be dragging you down.

However, Vision is not so much about the demons, as it is about the main character and what she can do in her life because she can see them. This book was original and had a wonderful story line. I like books with a message and this one really stood out to me.

I enjoyed Maddies' character. She is strong and determined and most importantly, she has hope. She never gives up on Cassie, which is something I so admired about her. She portrays a friend anyone would be lucky to have. I enjoyed the development of her character as the story progressed and am so glad that she eventually found her voice.

Music is a huge part of this book and really made the story special. I enjoyed all the references to music artists and even looked some of them up.

Vision had a perfect ending. It kind of makes your heart swell at the last page. I don't want to give it away, so I am not going to say anything more.

This book has a great pace and I was hooked from the first chapter. I told myself I was only going to read the first fifty pages, but the story compels you to read on. I ended up not moving from my spot until I was finished. It was one of those situations where you have to know what is going to happen next.

I am highly recommending this book to all readers. If you are looking for something different that also happens to be a page turner, read this book!
@cheesyhel/Twitter

A birthday greeting card that tells 13-year-old girls they could get jewels from rich boyfriends "when they have bigger boobies" has sparked outrage on Twitter.

The condemnation was unleashed following a Dec. 7 tweet from user @cheesyhels in the United Kingdom: "Look at this shockingly awful card I found today for a 13 year old!" she wrote, along with a link to an image of the card.

The card, created more than 14 years ago by a company that was since acquired by Hallmark Cards UK, read:

"You're 13 today! If you had a rich boyfriend he'd give you diamonds and rubies

Well, maybe next year you will - when you've bigger boobies!"

The drawing on the Arnold Barton brand card depicts a girl holding a box containing a ring.

There was immediate outrage on Twitter. The original tweet was retweeted 515 times. American author Maureen Johnson also tweeted about the card, and her tweet was retweeted more than 1,100 times.

User ?@andrewtshaffer tweeted in response: "I hope when she's 14 she doesn't have a boyfriend buying her rubies because of her boobies."

Other Twitter users expressed disbelief.

"Is that real? That cannot be real," Tweeted user ?@katelinnea.

@cheesyhels also tweeted the image to Twitter user @LynnCSchreiber, who wrote a post about it for Jump!, a British magazine for young girls.

In her post, Schreiber wrote: "Words failed me when a Twitter friend showed me the card that she had seen in a local newsagent."

"You won't have to rely on a boyfriend, or hope that your 'boobies' grow big enough," Schreiber's post continued. "You will be successful and happy because of your intelligence and creativity, not because of your looks."

Hallmark's U.S. corporate office posted an apology from Hallmark UK on its website on December 7. It also explained that the card was created before Hallmark bought the company in 1998.

"We are as surprised and horrified as anyone else to have discovered that there are still copies in circulation," David Dean, managing director of Hambledon Studios, a subsidiary of Hallmark UK, said in the statement. "The card has not been produced for over 15 years and would never pass our own strict guidelines of taste and appropriateness. We would like to assure all our customers that we will do everything in our power to track down remaining copies."

Schreiber updated her blog and posted on Twitter to ask that people not blow the issue out of proportion.

"We didn't not intend to get the Twitchforks out against either the manufacturer of the card … or the company who now own the manufacturer," she wrote in an update to her initial blog.
Days after making all of us *facepalm* by pointing out that 32% of all Americans think the Syrian crisis is part of the “End Times,” LifeWay Research has published another result from the same poll and this one’s equally disturbing if not worse:

LifeWay Research asked four questions about mental illness as part of a telephone survey of 1,001 Americans conducted Sept. 6-10, 2013. Thirty-five percent agree with the statement, “With just Bible study and prayer, ALONE, people with serious mental illness like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia could overcome mental illness.” … Evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians (48 percent) agree prayer can overcome mental illness. Only 27 percent of other Americans agree.

When I think about how many other obviously ridiculous things evangelicals believe with no evidence whatsoever — Jesus rose from the dead, people choose to be gay, Sarah Palin would have made a great Vice President — their gullibility here shouldn’t surprise me at all. But 27% of everybody else? For shame, non-evangelical Americans… God can’t heal you (even if He makes you feel better) and the Bible doesn’t contain any magic words.

There’s always an uproar, and rightfully so, when Christian Science parents pray for their children’s life-threatening illnesses instead of taking them to a doctor. So where’s the uproar here?

Mental illness should be treated no differently from other kinds; those who have it deserve care from experts, not imaginary friends. Even Pastor Rick Warren said as much after his son committed suicide several months ago:

In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided. Today, after a fun evening together with Kay and me, in a momentary wave of despair at his home, he took his life.

Yes, the Warrens prayed. But they also did things that actually had a chance of helping their son. That they couldn’t save his life isn’t a knock on professional help (or the Warrens themselves), but a reminder that mental illness is not a problem that can be so quickly or easily treated.

Ed Stetzer, the president of LifeWay Research, adds that this position — that Jesus and the Bible alone can cure things like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia — is one Christians would be wise to avoid:

… he worries some Christians see mental illness as a character flaw rather than a medical condition. Christians will go to the doctor if they break their leg, he said. But some may try to pray away serious mental illness. “They forget that the key part of mental illness is the word ‘illness,’” he said.

Damn right.

On a side note, if you haven’t seen it yet, watch this powerful TED talk from Kevin Breel in which he talks about his depression:
TORONTO – When playoff time comes, the smallest margins can have major impacts.

Toronto FC head into the first leg of the Eastern Conference Championship with the aim of extending their 2016 Audi MLS Cup Playoff run. Standing in their way are a familiar foe: Montreal Impact.

The Canadian rivals are well acquainted, having played some eight times over the past calendar year, but Tuesday's game (8 pm ET, TSN1/3, RDS in Canada | ESPN in US) brings a new wrinkle into the occasion, as the match will be played at Olympic Stadium, also known as the "Big O."

Compared to Stade Saputo, the massive Big O, poses a unique challenge, foremost in the mind is, of course, the surface. Where Saputo houses a fine grass pitch, the Big O's is artificial turf.

“It's going to be different,” said Toronto FC midfielder Jonathan Osorio last week. “...Both teams are going to play on it; it's going to be a level playing field. A couple of things will be different, but we'll just have to adjust.”

“Usually these turf field are fast, they're bouncy,” remarked head coach Greg Vanney. “The game has a hard time settling down because the ball doesn't settle. It's a different type of game, we have to be ready for anything. You have to be switched on, ready for a game that could be high energy; the ball will be fast, the intensity will be there no question.”

As a club, TFC are no strangers to the Big O. They have played there three times, twice in the league and once in the Amway Canadian Championship – both MLS matches ended in 2-1 losses, while the cup match was a 0-0 affair – but the last time was back in 2013. Osorio and defender Ashtone Morgan are the lone Toronto holdovers from that time.

“Turf is just one factor,” reiterated Vanney at a subsequent media session last week. “If they train on it, maybe they get an advantage, but the game comes down to who can execute in key moments and who is aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, and who can deal with it.”

Another consideration that must factor into the calculus is that this is only the first leg. With the second game at BMO Field, will TFC look to play shutdown soccer away, or aim to secure an advantage to take home?

“It's important that we set ourselves up appropriately. That's the key to going on the road first,” explained Vanney. “We've seen in this last round, it doesn't always benefit those teams [to have the second leg at home]. We have to be smart about it: pay attention to details, stay together, work hard for the common goal. If we can do that, we give ourselves the best shot.”

Still another variable will be the vociferous and partisan crowd. Montreal recently announced they have sold over 50,000 tickets with the match still six days away, and while there will be a 1,400-plus strong crowd of Toronto fans, the vast majority will be supporting the team in blue.

“It's going to be a great crowd, [a] good time atmosphere, so we're excited about that,” said TFC goalkeeper Clint Irwin last week.

And superstar Sebastian Giovinco welcomed the spectacle: “It's a show; the more people in attendance the better.”
ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack explains possible reasons why Ronald Gasser, the man named as shooting Joe McKnight, was released from custody and has not been formally charged. (2:17)

The shooting death of former USC Trojans and New York Jets running back Joe McKnight in a New Orleans suburb was a "road rage" incident that started on a nearby bridge, a sheriff said Friday, as he urged against a rush to judgment and defended his handling of the case as the alleged shooter was released overnight.

McKnight was shot and killed Thursday afternoon in the community of Terrytown, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Authorities have identified 54-year-old Ronald Gasser, who stayed at the scene, as the shooter, and he was released overnight, sparking criticism.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said during a news conference on Friday that the altercation that ended with McKnight's death started on a nearby bridge -- possibly when one of the two men cut the other off -- and then proceeded into nearby streets in the New Orleans suburb. He did not say which driver cut off the other.

Authorities said Gasser shot McKnight three times through an open window from inside his car with a semi-automatic handgun while McKnight was standing outside.

Normand said witnesses observed a "heated verbal exchange" between Gasser and McKnight before the shooting. However, Normand said that one witness account, which indicated Gasser was standing over McKnight when he fired a shot, was factually incorrect and "did not happen."

Normand said three casings were located inside Gasser's vehicle, and coroner Gerry Cvitanovich said Friday that McKnight had wounds to his left hand and entry wounds to his right shoulder and the right side of his chest.

Gasser stayed at the scene, relinquished his semi-automatic handgun to officers and was taken into custody and questioned, the sheriff said. No guns were found outside either vehicle. According to The Times-Picayune, Gasser told police he was the shooter.

Normand said later Friday in a news release that the man who shot McKnight was involved in a 2006 altercation at the same intersection, during which he chased down and struck another male driver, who had observed a truck driving erratically and called a phone number on the truck and spoke to a man later identified as Gasser.

Gasser and the 51-year-old man got into an argument on the phone, according to the sheriff's statement. Gasser followed the man to a service station and "began to strike him with a closed fist several times."

Gasser drove away and the other man called 911. Investigators found Gasser and issued a misdemeanor summons for simple battery, which was later dismissed.

Protesters upset at Gasser's overnight release gathered outside the sheriff's office earlier Friday.

Normand defended his handling of the current case, saying the investigation was ongoing. No charges have been filed, with Normand saying the state has certain "statutes" that provide a defense to certain crimes, but he did not go into further detail.

"The easiest thing for me would have been, 'Book him, Danno.' Right?" Normand said, referring to the police saying made popular on "Hawaii Five-O."

"Mr. Gasser is not going anywhere. He has been completely cooperative with us in every request we have made. We will do a very thorough and deliberate investigation."

The body of former NFL player Joe McKnight lies between the alleged shooter's vehicle at left and his Audi SUV at right on Thursday in Terrytown, Louisiana. Michael DeMocker/AP Photo

Normand said he did not want to go into detail about the investigation, saying that he did not want to taint any prospective witnesses that might still come forward.

McKnight's grandmother said family members are still seeking information on his death and why Gasser was released. Barbara Franklin told The Associated Press by phone Friday that relatives are "trying to find out our own selves" more about what happened.

She said relatives haven't had any communication with the sheriff's office about Gasser's release, saying she learned of it through a radio broadcast on Friday.

"He might be released now, but God is going to bring about justice in it," Franklin said.

Gasser couldn't immediately be reached by The Associated Press.

Gasser's release immediately raised questions about what exactly led to the shooting. Arthur A. Lemmann, a New Orleans-based attorney not connected with the case, told The Associated Press it was too early to tell but that it could indicate Gasser had said he acted in self-defense.

"It's not the end of the matter. They can continue to investigate. They can always bring charges, but what it indicates to me is that there was some basis to believe that the homicide was justified. And the most typical justification of a homicide is self-defense," Lemmann said.

McKnight was born in River Ridge, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, and starred at John Curtis Christian High School. He was considered the No. 1 running back recruit in the country when he signed with USC.

He played three seasons at USC (2007-09) under coach Pete Carroll and was often compared to do-it-all running back Reggie Bush.

McKnight totaled 2,755 yards from scrimmage and 15 touchdowns while with the Trojans, and his 2,213 career rushing yards are 16th all time at the school. He did not play in the final game of the 2009 season -- the Emerald Bowl -- as USC investigated him for allegedly receiving improper benefits.

He eventually left school for the NFL draft, where the Jets made him a fourth-round pick in 2010. He spent three seasons with New York, earning one start in 39 games and totaling 502 yards rushing and 177 yards receiving. He also was one of the NFL's top kick returners in 2011 and 2012, averaging 29.4 yards per return over that span.

The Jets will honor McKnight with a moment of silence before their Monday night game.

But McKnight landed in the doghouse amid a turbulent training camp in 2013. He flunked the team's conditioning test, blaming dehydration; he was arrested in New Jersey on outstanding traffic violations on an off day; he missed practice time with what the team characterized as a "head injury" and McKnight later called a concussion; and he got into a war of words with a fan on Twitter, suggesting they meet for a fight.

McKnight was released by the Jets in August 2013, the biggest surprise of the team's final cuts before the regular season.

McKnight signed with the Kansas City Chiefs in January 2014, playing two games that year and scoring two touchdowns, both on receptions, before tearing an Achilles tendon.

He played in the CFL this season, with the Edmonton Eskimos and Saskatchewan Roughriders. He had 38 rushes for 228 yards for the Roughriders, whose season ended Nov. 5. As of Thursday, he still was listed on their roster.

McKnight is the second NFL player to die as a result of an apparent road rage incident in 2016. New Orleans Saints defensive end Will Smith was killed in April.

Information from ESPN staff writer Rich Cimini and The Associated Press was used in this report.
Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.

Looks like the final product, but is not functional.

Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.

A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:

中文頁面 | 中文教學 | 分享給朋友

We even had the privilege to make a custom SketchyNotebook for our favorite company, Dropbox.

By Kai Ng, Concept Artist / LiK Studios

By Kai Ng, Concept Artist / LiK Studios

By Min Chi, CoMaker

SketchyNotebook is designed to be a minimalist notebook. It has all the little details that make for a quality notebook, with the addition unique template designs stored in the expandable back pocket if you need them.

Like most artists, when I have an idea I just want to quickly put it down on paper so I won't forget it. Sometimes I just want to doodle, sometimes I want to do mockups for websites, and other times I want to sketch up iPhone apps or just write down ideas.

Sure, there are preprinted template notebooks out there with grids, dots and lines, but all the printed lines and grids distract me and make it difficult to get my idea down exactly as I envision it. Preprinted lines or templates on the page inhibit my freedom and my creativity, so I can't use those as an everyday notebook.

Bottom line is this: I just love blank page paper but I also like having guidelines for structure. What if I can just take the qualities that I need from both worlds and get rid of everything else?

180° Flat When Open

Designed to open flat no matter what page you’re on.

Premium Paper

A full 240 pages of 80 gsm acid-free blank paper. We have narrowed down from hundreds of different types of paper to bring you the best results. You can use ink pens, fountain pens, color markers, and permanent markers with no bleed through.

Removable Pages

Ready to share your sketches? You can tear off any page - perfect for pinning an idea on a wall or brainstorming with co-workers!

Expandable Smart Pocket

The easy storage pocket in the back of the notebook allows you to store your templates right in the notebook. It's also expandable to fit all types of flat items. Store what you need -- whether it’s the included templates, business cards, or loose leaf notes.

Hard Cover

Each of our notebooks is hardcover with a faux leather finish (choice of black or white). An elastic band holds the notebook closed when not in use.

Quality Templates

All templates are double-sided and waterproof, made out of PVC with UV print on top . Durable and easy to clean, each template is only 0.35mm thick and it fits perfectly underneath the notebook page.

Professional Templates

The idea behind SketchyNotebook is to keep a blank canvas open for creativity, but still have the guidelines there on paper when you need it. Each SketchyNotebook comes with Basic Template Pack (Narrow / Wide Lined & Grid / Isometric Grid). The PRO version offers more detail and more template designs for hard-core designers like you!

Basic Pack

Grid / Isometric

Narrow Lined / Wide Lined

Every SketchyNotebook will come with the Basic Pack templates. This is great for graphic designers and journalist to draw technical drawings or just writings. The lined now offers 2 different heights depending on your hand-writing style.

Creative Pack

Perspective Grid

Calligraphy Grid

Storyboard

The storyboard template can also be used as sketching for Keynote or Powerpoint presentation. The Perspective Grid is extremely useful for any spatial design. With Calligraphy Grid, your calligraphy will look stunning once you remove the template behind it.

Startup Pack

iPhone Mockup

Responsive Web Design Grid

Smart Wearable Mockup

The Responsive Web Grid offers the most commonly used grid style, so you can quickly sketch the mockup with web view, tablet view and mobile view.

Fashion Pack

Men Figure

Women Figure

Shoe Mockup

For you fashion designers out there, you can start sketching instantly without worrying about the proportion. The poses are all different, so you can choose which ever you prefer. This is also great if you want to make your model disproportional depending on your drawing style.

What's New and Improved?

After getting feedback and continually making improvements over the past SketchyNotebook, we now have the New SketchyNotebook Series with a total of 3 notebook sizes and a wider template selection.

Rounded corners to protect the notebook and improve durability

Total of 3 notebook sizes: A6 , A5 and Letter

, and Improved built-in expandable pocket to store templates with more storage

to store templates with more storage Templates are 30% thinner with the same durability

with the same durability Improved quality of binding for pages

quality of for pages Wider selection of templates

Thicker elastic band to hold the notebook closed

All templates sized to fit notebook better

Special Thanks

We would love to thank our family, friends, and everyone who has helped along the journey. Their feedback, support, and positive encouragement has been incredibly inspiring.

Do you want to give a product review too?

We're always happy to work with fellow creatives. If you're a blogger or designer who wants to give us a try, please contact us below:

info@sketchynotebook.com

You can also find us here:

facebook.com/SketchyNotebook

twitter.com/SketchyNotebook

instagram.com/SketchyNotebook

Why Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is where it all started. I really want to thank all my previous supporters for turning my idea of SketchyNotebook into a reality! Now after getting additional feedback and making improvements, I need your help to launch the second production run. It will cover the costs of manufacturing and production for the improved SketchyNotebook Series. Our goal is to help creatives increase productivity and inspire others. Kickstarter is the perfect platform to make it all happen.
By Scott Stewart

Over the past few weeks, I've had people at speaking engagements ask me if I thought the Islamic State or some other militant group is using Ebola as a biological weapon, or if such a group could do so in the future. Such questions and concerns are not surprising given the intense media hype that surrounds the disease, even though only one person has died from Ebola out of the three confirmed cases in the United States. The media hype about the threat posed by the Islamic State to the United States and the West is almost as bad. Both subjects of all this hype were combined into a tidy package on Oct. 20, when the Washington Post published an editorial by columnist Mark Thiessen in which he claimed it would be easy for a group such as the Islamic State to use Ebola in a terrorist attack. Despite Thiessen's claims, using Ebola as a biological warfare agent is much more difficult than it might appear at first blush.

The 2014 Outbreak

In the past, there have been several outbreaks of Ebola in Africa. Countries included Sudan, Uganda, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several comparatively small outbreaks occurred in Gabon as well. In most cases, people who handled or ate animals infected with the disease started the outbreaks. "Bushmeat," or portions of roasted meat from a variety of wild animals, is considered by many to be a delicacy in Africa, and in a continent where hunger is widespread, it is also a necessity for many hungry people. After several months of medical investigations, epidemiologists believe the current outbreak most likely began when a two-year-old child in Guinea touched or perhaps ate part of an infected animal such as a bat or monkey.

The source of the disease means it is highly unlikely that some malevolent actor intentionally caused the latest outbreak. Besides the fact that the current outbreak's cause has been identified as a natural one, even if a transnational militant group such as the Islamic State was able to somehow develop an Ebola weapon, it would have chosen to deploy the weapon against a far more desirable target than a small village in Guinea. We would have seen the militants use their weapon in a location such as New York, Paris or London, or against their local enemies in Syria and Iraq.

As far as intent goes, there is very little doubt that such a group would employ a biological weapon. As we noted last month when there was increased talk about the Islamic State possibly weaponizing plague for a biological attack, terrorist attacks are intended to have a psychological impact that outweighs the physical damage they cause. The Islamic State itself has a long history of conducting brutal actions to foster panic.

In 2006 and 2007, the Islamic State's predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, included large quantities of chlorine in vehicle bombs deployed against U.S. and Iraqi troops in an attempt to produce mass casualties. The explosives in the vehicle bombs killed more people than the chlorine did, and after several unsuccessful attempts, al Qaeda in Iraq gave up on its chlorine bombings because the results were not worth the effort. Al Qaeda in Iraq also included chemical artillery rounds in improvised explosive devices used in attacks against American troops in Iraq on several occasions. Again, these attacks failed to produce mass casualties. Finally, according to human rights organizations, the Islamic State appears to have recently used some artillery rounds containing mustard gas against its enemies in Syria; the group presumably recovered the rounds from a former Saddam-era chemical weapons facility in Iraq or from Syrian stockpiles.

The problem, then, lies not with the Islamic State's intent but instead with its capability to obtain and weaponize the Ebola virus. Creating a biological weapon is far more difficult than using a chemical such as chlorine or manufactured chemical munitions. Contrary to how the media frequently portrays them, biological weapons are not easy to obtain, they are not easy to deploy effectively and they do not always cause mass casualties.

The Difficulty of Weaponization

Ebola and terrorism are not new. Nor is the possibility of terrorist groups using the Ebola virus in an attack. As we have previously noted, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo attempted to obtain the Ebola virus as part of its biological warfare program. The group sent a medical team to Africa under the pretext of being aid workers with the intent of obtaining samples of the virus. It failed in that mission, but even if it had succeeded, the group would have faced the challenge of getting the sample back to its biological warfare laboratory in Japan. The Ebola virus is relatively fragile. Its lifetime on dry surfaces outside of a host is only a couple of hours, and while some studies have shown that the virus can survive on surfaces for days when still in bodily fluids, this requires ideal conditions that would be difficult to replicate during transport.

If the group had been able to get the virus back to its laboratory, it would have then faced the challenge of reproducing the Ebola virus with enough volume to be used in a large-scale biological warfare attack, similar to its failed attacks on Tokyo and other Japanese cities in which the group sprayed thousands of gallons of botulinum toxin and Anthrax spores. Reproducing the Ebola virus would present additional challenges because it is an extremely dangerous virus to work with. It has infected researchers, even when they were working in laboratories with advanced biosafety measures in place. Although Aum Shinrikyo had a large staff of trained scientists and a state-of-the-art biological weapons laboratory, it was still unable to effectively weaponize the virus.

The challenges Aum Shinrikyo's biological weapons program faced would be multiplied for the Islamic State. Aum Shinrikyo operatives were given a great deal of operational freedom until their plans were discovered after the 1995 sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway. (The group's previous biological weapons attacks were so unsuccessful that nobody knew they had been carried out until after its members were arrested and its chemical and biological weapons factories were raided.) Unlike the Japanese cult, the Islamic State's every move is under heavy scrutiny by most of the world's intelligence and security agencies. This means jihadist operatives would have far more difficulty assembling the personnel and equipment needed to construct a biological weapons laboratory. Since randomly encountering an infected Ebola patient would be unreliable, the group would have to travel to a country impacted by the outbreak. This would be a difficult task for the group to complete without drawing attention to itself. Furthermore, once group members reached the infected countries, they would have to enter quarantined areas of medical facilities, retrieve the samples and then escape the country unnoticed, since they could not count on randomly encountering an infected Ebola patient.

Even if Islamic State operatives were somehow able to accomplish all of this -- without killing themselves in the process -- Ebola is not an ideal biological warfare vector. The virus is hard to pass from person to person. In fact, on average, its basic reproductive rate (the average amount of people that are infected by an Ebola patient) is only between one and two people. There are far more infectious diseases such as measles, which has a basic reproductive rate of 12-18, or smallpox, which has a basic reproductive rate of five to seven. Even HIV, which is only passed via sexual contact or intravenous blood transmission, has a basic reproductive rate of two to five.

The Ebola disease is also somewhat slow to take effect, and infected individuals do not become symptomatic and contagious for an average of 8-10 days. The disease's full incubation period can last anywhere from two to 21 days. As a comparison, influenza, which can be transmitted as quickly as three days after being contracted, can be spread before symptoms begin showing. This means that an Ebola attack would take longer to spread and would be easier to contain because infected people would be easier to identify.

Besides the fact that Ebola can only be passed through the bodily fluids of a person showing symptoms at the time, the virus in those bodily fluids must also somehow bypass the protection of a person's skin. The infectious fluid must enter the body through a cut or abrasion, or come into contact with the mucus membranes in the eyes, nose or mouth. This is different from more contagious viruses like measles and smallpox, which are airborne viruses and do not require any direct contact or transfer of bodily fluids. Additionally, the Ebola virus is quite fragile and sensitive to light, heat and low-humidity environments, and bleach and other common disinfectants can kill it. This means it is difficult to spread the virus by contaminating surfaces with it. The only way to infect a large amount of people with Ebola would be to spray them with a fluid containing the virus, something that would be difficult to do and easily detectable.

Thiessen's piece suggested that the Islamic State might implement an attack strategy of infecting suicide operatives with Ebola and then having them blow themselves up in a crowded place, spraying people with infected bodily fluids. One problem with this scenario is that it would be extremely difficult to get an infected operative from the group's laboratory to the United States without being detected. As we have discussed elsewhere, jihadist groups have struggled to get operatives to the West to conduct conventional terrorist attacks using guns and bombs, a constraint that would also affect their ability to deploy a biological weapon.

Even if a hostile group did mange to get an operative in place, it would still face several important obstacles. By the time Ebola patients are highly contagious, they are normally very ill and bedridden with high fever, fatigue, vomiting and diarrhea, meaning they are not strong enough to walk into a crowded area. The heat and shock of the suicide device's explosion would likely kill most of the virus. Anyone close enough to be exposed to the virus would also likely be injured by the blast and taken to a hospital, where they would then be quarantined and treated for the virus.

Biological weapons look great in the movies, but they are difficult and expensive to develop in real life. That is why we have rarely seen them used in terrorist attacks. As we have noted for a decade now, jihadists can kill far more people with far less expense and effort by utilizing traditional terrorist tactics, which makes the threat of a successful attack using the Ebola virus extremely unlikely.
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At the beginning, the Host was infinite dominion.

It hosted many multiple entities, internal mental residents and dissociative parties, all contained therein its singular form. After the virtual eclipse, its individuated body became messy and disordered. Compression upon compression, grubby codec and missing render files allowed The Host to become The Many it had previously hosted. It degraded, and from within inside itself .mov files spawned .mov files, parasite organisms. Now plural, it joyously performed its own congregation, giving great pleasure with the “Coming Soon” and the “Now Showing”. Deep inside this live lost universe, a network of rooms opened onto other rooms, corridors unto corridors, windows looked onto windows. Knock and the door will open, seek and you will find. Respond to and process data. The Host was no longer a location, no longer an origin, but riddled with black holes of lenticular flesh that sucked the light. The once smooth compere gave way to a beautiful, infinite vista of glitching, shivering images, a twitching hyper-media information retrieval initiative.

The interlace curtain raises onto the backstage and a fibre optic Babel. Distant Karaoke. Wireless keyboard ambience. Small ecstasies of forgetting

The only singularity here is the follow spotlight. Illuminating with a perfect, bright intensity, burning your fate in the sand.

This is the modern dance.
Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California , Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response . We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

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“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University . Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis , “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”

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Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.

Dr. Hilker and her colleagues, as well as other research teams, have found that certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. They may sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the S O S. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hilker and her coworkers determined that when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.

Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”

Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly. As they described in Science and other journals, Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues have discovered that seedlings of the dodder plant, a parasitic weed related to morning glory, can detect volatile chemicals released by potential host plants like the tomato. The young dodder then grows inexorably toward the host, until it can encircle the victim’s stem and begin sucking the life phloem right out of it. The parasite can even distinguish between the scents of healthier and weaker tomato plants and then head for the hale one.

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.
The Fog (1980) [Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray]

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis,Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook

Release Date: Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray & DVD Available On July 30

A Review By: Kevin Lovell

Film Rating: 8.5/10

Disc Rating: 10/10

Plot Summary:

A Northern California fishing town, built 100 years ago over an old leper colony, becomes shrouded by a killer fog containing zombie-like ghosts seeking revenge for their deaths.

Believe it or not, I had never seen John Carpenters classic ‘The Fog’ until now, but I must say this Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray release from Shout Factory’s Scream Factory division was quite a wonderful way to view this film for the first time and I must also say I loved it. This is a truly fantastic movie and every aspect of it is done right with that famous John Carpenter style. Great casting, some wonderfully creepy moments and yet another phenomenal soundtrack by John Carpenter, who’s music I truly feel is one of the most noteworthy aspects of a lot of his films, and ‘The Fog’ is certainly no exception in that department.

The tone of the film is wonderful, the directing spot on, and the story (written by John Carpenter & Debra Hill) is very well crafted. The performances are well done all across the board. We are treated with the likes of Adrienne Barbeau as a radio DJ who is determined to get to the bottom of this strange fog, and keeps the town informed of occurring events via her radio station in which she both owns and is the sole online personality of. Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis are together for the majority of the story and work quite well together. Let’s all not forget that this was done just a few years after Curtis worked with Carpenter on ‘Halloween’ and was establishing herself as one of that generations ‘Scream Queens’ and it’s no wonder he chose to work with her again. Probably the most noteworthy performance of the film in my opinion is that of Hal Holbrook who portrays the role of Father Malone and does a truly phenomenal job of bringing this character to life. While I am new to this film, I would assume I can’t be the only one who feels what a noteworthy character this is.

Now, as far as this new Collector’s Edition from Shout Factory is concerned, prepare to have your socks knocked off. This is an incredibly impressive release, with a beautiful new HD transfer of the film supervised by the cinematographer, a brand new commentary track and a huge array of special features, both new and old that make this one Blu-Ray release that truly lives up to the term Collector’s Edition. I cannot speak highly enough about both the quality and comprehensive list of features that combine to make this a must own for any fan of the film. I would highly recommend any fans of the ‘The Fog’ pick a copy up as I’m certain you will be quite glad you did.

VIDEO:

The Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray release of ‘The Fog’ features a new 1080p High Definition transfer supervised by Cinematographer Dean Cundey which utilizes the film’s original 2.35:1 Cinemascope Aspect Ratio and it looks remarkable. Not only is every aspect of the transfer sharp, clean and perfectly touched up, it leaves the grain and mild imperfections that I feel are truly an important factor of cinema from this era and it put a smile on my face to see just how properly they treated this transfer. It is a truly rare thing for so much care and detail to be put into an HD transfer in order to leave certain important artifacts while maintaining breathtaking quality and every fan of this film should be more than thoroughly satisfied.

AUDIO:

The Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray release of ‘The Fog’ features a lossless 5.1 channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack which sounds great. The bass and detail of the soundtrack really give an impressive kick, and both the sudden and overbearing scare elements during creepy moments are spot on. As far as a film like this goes, this is a pretty perfect lossless audio soundtrack, and quite notable considering the age of the film.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

This Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray is so chock full of special features I won’t even be able to mention them all here, but I’d like to make note of a number, mainly a lot of the new special features being presented for the first time on this release. In addition to the new HD transfer, we are treated with a new audio commentary track featuring actress Adrienne Barbeau, actor Tom Atkins and Production Designer Tommy Lee Wallace, An exclusive interview with Jamie Lee Curtis discussing ‘The Fog’ and covering her legendary early 80s ‘Scream Queen’ career, and a couple more brand new special features as well. On top of all of that, we are additionally presented with a number of previously released features, including another audio commentary track with John Carpenter and Debra Hill, ‘Tales From The Mist: The Fog Featurette’ and a number more. As you can see there is quite an abundance of great features here, giving you yet just another reason to pick up a copy of this Collector’s Edition which you certainly won’t want to miss out on.

Film Rating: 8.5/10

Disc Rating: 10/10

‘The Fog’ Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray & DVD Will Be Available To Own On July 30 From Scream Factory. You can preorder the Blu-Ray on Amazon by clicking here or pick it up at your local retailer beginning July 30.
Paul Kimmage on rugby was the main talking point from the Sunday Independent journalist's appearance on The Last Word with Matt Cooper.

Days after L'Equipe broke the news that Dan Carter, Juan Imhoff and Joe Rockocoko had tested positive for cortisone after the Top 14 final, the issue of doping in rugby has found itself back upon the wider sporting consciousness.

In the case of Carter, his agent released a statement to say that the out-half had a Therapeutic Use Exemption for the supplement. The entire story has brought the medicalisation of rugby under scrutiny.

Ronan O'Gara offered a strong defence of his Racing players, saying that it was a "sad state of affairs" that his players were attacked based on such little information:

I've been in the meetings and I'm fully aware of exactly what's gone on. There's 60-80 of these administered in a year - an injection into a joint - and that's exactly what it is. Every player gets tested after a final, that's the rule. And there were three readings showing a corticoid and the readings are extremely low. And if you have an explanation as to why you administered them then it's a non-story.

Kimmage is one of the few journalists who regularly returns to the topic of the medicalisation of rugby. In 2014, Kimmage conducted a very interesting interview with former French rugby player with Laurent Benezech on this very subject.

And following the Racing revelations, Kimmage wrote in the Sunday Independent of the nature of cheating in rugby, and what exactly constituted a performance-enhancing drug in the game. He recalls a conversation with Brian O'Driscoll as to whether pre-game painkillers constituted a doping offence.

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"I'd say the abuse of painkillers in rugby is massive," I observed. "I would have thought that was very much a doing offence. "Would you?", he asked. "Painkillers? Of course. The whole game is about confrontation and trying to get the ball. So if I can endure more pain than you..." "I disagree", he said. "It's a game of skill. It's a game of intensity and an ability to handle collisions and things..." "Which is pain", I suggested.

Prior to Kimmage's appearance with Cooper, Paul O'Connell was on the show, who said that Kimmage was of the belief that "[he thinks] you should not even take a paracetamol".

Kimmage responded as follows:

He totally misrepresents my position on the use of painkillers. If Paul O'Connell ha a headache, by all means Paul, take a paracetamol. The point I made, and what I'm totally against, rugby players are taking paracetamol and taking painkillers not because they have a headache. They are using it in anticipation of pain. In anyone's language, that is performance enhancing. That is using a drug to enhance your performance.

In the interview cited above, Ronan O'Gara admitted that the potential use of a growth hormone in rugby caused him alarm. Kimmage praised O'Gara for saying this, contrasting O'Gara's stance with the "44 rugby autobiographies at home and the word 'doping' never appears in any of them".

Kimmage then produced a Sunday Tribune editorial penned by Cooper about doping in rugby. It was written in 1998.
Last week, a prominent Arab archaeologist sent me a web­link to a doubly-depressing story from the Hasakeh region of north-east Syria. Bordering Turkey and Iraq, it’s long been one of the poorest areas in the country and now, with control of the area being contested by several of the factions engaged in Syria’s brutal civil war, its 1.7 million people, or those who haven’t already fled across the border, are among those most in need of humanitarian assistance.

Watered by the Khabur river, Hasakeh has seen the birth of some of the earliest civilisations in the region. Indeed, one site, Hamoukar, is considered by some archaeologists to be the oldest city in the world. Dozens of important sites, dating from the Stone Age onwards, have been identified, though few have yet been extensively studied.

There’s no scope for investigations now into what this region has to offer in terms of discovering the origins of agriculture and early urban society. Such studies require a peaceful environment – and that is absent.

The first depressing part of the story is that many sites are being severely damaged by illegal digging, searching for items that can be sold into the underground market for antiquities. Supplies of such artefacts grow dramatically in areas of conflict where the maintenance of law and order breaks down. Local inhabitants, desperate for income, plunder sites, destroying evidence of past civilisations in the search for goods they can sell on to unscrupulous dealers who then put them into the illicit market. Those dealers are often linked with gangs of thugs, thieves and bandits who are themselves to a considerable degree responsible for the level of insecurity that permits the unauthorised digging to take place.

In Hasakeh, such plundering is now apparently widespread. One site that is being affected is that of Tell Ajaja, an important centre during the neo-Assyrian period, around 3,000 years ago. Pictures surfacing on the internet, if authentic, indicate that a number of major discoveries have been made, including large statues and bas-reliefs. If properly excavated and studied, they could yield much valuable information on this early phase of Syrian history. Instead, that opportunity to gain knowledge is being lost.

And the second part of this depressing story? One of the videos recently posted on the internet shows some of the statues being smashed to rubble by gangs from the ultra-fundamentalist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), one of the armed groups competing for supremacy in Hasakeh. Lacking in historical knowledge and indoctrinated by a perverted view of Islam, ISIL’s followers are either unaware that some of the great Islamic civilisations produced art of this type, and did so within the framework of a society where tolerance for the views of others was an essential part of life, or, perhaps more likely, they simply don’t care, glorying in their ignorance.

What lunacy is this? Although the representation of humans may be a controversial topic in some Islamic societies, these statues predate the coming of Islam by 1,500 years or more. They’re not in breach of anything, just like the great statues of Buddha from Bamiyan that were blown to pieces by the ignorant, uncultured Taliban. Instead, they represent important elements of the way in which civilisation has developed, not just since the early 7th century AD, when Islam was revealed, but for millennia before that.

I regret the plundering of Hasakeh’s ancient archaeological sites, because of the loss of knowledge that represents. I can, however, understand the economic imperatives that lead its people to destroy the evidence of their past to survive in a difficult present.

As for the actions of ISIL in reducing these important artefacts of the history of Hasakeh to rubble, I should, I suppose, not be too surprised. Many of the members of the ISIL gangs will be foreign extremists to whom the history of the area means nothing. They are led by evil men who think nothing of slaughtering the innocent just because they have a different set of beliefs, even within Islam.

They care nothing for culture, history or heritage, or even for the basic principles of humanity to be found in all of the world’s religions. They are little better than ignorant and ravening beasts – and many would argue that they are, in fact, much worse. How sad that Hasakeh, a cradle of civilisation, should today be a centre of their ignorance and inhumanity.

Peter Hellyer is a consultant specialising in the UAE’s history and culture
Today (28 June) marks the 175th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation at Westminster Abbey. Naturally this major national event was attended by members of both Houses of Parliament. Although it was members of the House of Lords who performed key roles in the ceremony, with peers paying homage to the new queen, MPs also had a privileged view of proceedings, with two of the three galleries above the altar being reserved for them. (The third gallery housed the trumpeters of the orchestra.)

On the morning of the coronation around 500 MPs assembled in the Commons chamber. One newspaper report recorded that

‘Some excellent scenes took place on the entrance of Members noted for carelessness in their dress on ordinary occasions, but who appeared upon this instance in splendid attire. Mr Fector and Mr Campbell, the former of whom wore a peach-coloured velvet Court dress, while the latter was attired in the plaid of his clan, were assailed with loud cries of Hear, hear, and as they advanced up the House, the assembly of the first gentlemen in the world stood up, and with one accord shouted their acclamation’.

John Fector was the House’s newest member, having been re-elected for Maidstone at a by-election less than two weeks earlier. After prayers, the Speaker announced that there would be a ballot to determine the order in which MPs would take their seats in the Abbey, and the names of counties were drawn from a glass by the Clerk of the House. The representatives of those counties and of the boroughs which lay within them then left the House in turn, the Irish county of Meath being the first to be drawn.

The need to dress appropriately meant that Fector’s fellow Conservative MP for Maidstone, Benjamin Disraeli, had initially decided against attending, writing to his sister that

‘I must give up on going to the coronation, as we go in state, and all the M.P.s. must be in court dresses or uniforms. As I have withstood making a costume of this kind for other purposes, I will not make one now, and console myself by the conviction that to get up very early (eight o’clock), to sit dressed like a flunky in the Abbey for seven or eight hours, and to listen to a sermon by the Bishop of London, can be no great enjoyment’.

However, Disraeli changed his mind, writing on 29 June that

‘I went to the coronation after all. I did not get a dress till 2.30 on the morning of the ceremony, but it fitted me very well. It turned out that I had a very fine leg, which I never knew before! The pageant within the Abbey was without exception the most splendid, various, and interesting affair at which I ever was present… I had one of the best seats in the Abbey, indeed our House had the best of everything… The Queen looked very well, and performed her part with great grace and completeness, which cannot in general be said of the other performers; they were always in doubt as to what came next, and you saw the want of rehearsal.’

He noted that the Duke of Wellington ‘was loudly cheered when he made his homage’, but was disdainful of the performance of the Whig Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne, who ‘looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great sword of state like a butcher’. Disraeli also commented on Fector’s ‘gorgeous dress’ and the fact that the Irish parliamentary leader, Daniel O’Connell, had bowed to convention and ‘looked very well’ in his court dress, although he was ‘hooted greatly… by the mob’. The Radical MP Joseph Hume refused to wear court dress, and was therefore prevented from sitting in the gallery reserved for MPs, but found a place elsewhere in the Abbey. A month later, motivated by his customary desire for retrenchment, Hume asked questions in the Commons about the expense of the coronation.

Also present at the coronation was another figure who, like Disraeli, would become a major political force during Queen Victoria’s reign: William Gladstone. The coronation took place on his sister Helen’s birthday. Unlike Disraeli’s gossipy account to his sister, Gladstone’s diary entry recorded tersely that ‘The service is noble. The sight magnificent’. After attending at the Abbey, he went to the Carlton Club to see the coronation procession, and then to Bath House to see the fireworks, before returning home at 1:30 a.m.

Disraeli and Gladstone were certainly not alone in enjoying the coronation festivities. It was thus perhaps hardly surprising that when the Commons met the following day at 4 p.m., it was found to be inquorate, and the Speaker duly adjourned the House.

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ST. PETERSBURG — Police departments usually aren't interested in drawing attention to the vehicles they use to monitor crime suspects.

The goal: Be bland and blend in.

That's what makes the St. Petersburg Police Department's newest surveillance truck stick out so much.

It's large, lime green and has two giant eyeballs on its side underneath the ominous phrase, "We are watching …"

Discreet, it is not.

"Our purpose with this thing is to be very overt," said police Chief Chuck Harmon. "We want people to see it."

It will start showing up around the city soon.

The concept is this: Authorities will park the armored truck in a neighborhood or crime hot spot and leave it there for up to 48 hours. It will be recording that whole time.

The goal, Harmon said, will be to send a message and displace, if not eliminate, the crime in that area.

The city got the truck for $1 from Brinks, Harmon said. Drawing money from the city's forfeiture fund, the agency spent about $12,000 hardening the vehicle and $18,000 to outfit it with 360 degrees of camera equipment.

"The real positive for me is its visibility," Harmon said.

The truck is being debuted as city leaders are grappling with another type of surveillance.

The city bought 26 powerful security cameras for the Republican National Convention in August. Now they have to decide what to do with them.

But despite concerns about where those cameras would go and how they would be used, city leaders seemed fine — even enthused — about using the truck as a new crime-fighting tool at a recent meeting.

"I think it's a good start," said City Council member Wengay Newton.

Newton and others on the council have campaigned for years to put cameras in high-crime neighborhoods where drug dealing and prostitution are blatant. People in those areas need to know authorities are watching, they said.

"Privacy … is a big issue for all of us," Mayor Bill Foster said. "But I think you'd have to be a real idiot to deal your drugs in front of this thing."

Harmon said recordings will be kept for about 30 days. The truck "may or may not be" manned, he said.

He also left open the possibility that it could be used in other ways, either for education purposes or perhaps crowd control.

The department recently tested the truck, parking it at Williams Park this week, and at First Avenue S and 34th Street last week.

Harmon said he's also heard Kenwood and areas along Central Avenue are interested in having the truck park there. The department plans to come up with its own list of hot spots as well.

"We're still in the infancy with this," he said. "We're still looking at how we're going to deploy it and where."

Harmon said the truck has been in the works for more than a year. He said he heard about a law enforcement agency out West doing the same thing, and wanted to try it in St. Petersburg.

Two teens from the Childs Park recreation center collaborated on the design, winning a contest that drew hundreds of entries. The pair were presented with iPods for their effort this week.

"They came up with the eye concept," said Rob Norton, a supervisor for the city's Teens, Arts, Sports and Cultural Opportunities program. "We built it into a strong industrial theme."

Harmon said he's happy with it.

"This is … in your face," he said. "It's very out there. Not only the bad people can see it, but the good people will as well."

Kameel Stanley can be reached at [email protected] or (727) 893-8643.
8 years ago

A new poll shows only 1 in 4 Americans believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

(CNN) - Two days after Sarah Palin fired up a large crowd at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally in Washington, a newly released survey suggests a clear majority of Americans don't think the former vice presidential nominee has the right credentials to be president.

According to the new survey from Vanity Fair and CBS News' 60 Minutes, only 1 in 4 of all adults thinks Palin is qualified to be commander-in-chief while 60 percent say she is not.

By a narrow 47-40 percent margin however, Republicans do feel Palin has the right stuff to be president. But self identified conservatives – constituting the segment of the GOP largely thought to most favor the former Alaska governor – are essentially split 41-40 percent on her abilities to govern the country.

What may also be troubling for the former Alaska governor if she finds herself in a general election matchup, 3 in 5 independent voters don't think Palin is qualified while only 21 percent do. Among moderates, the numbers are even worse with 70 percent reporting they lack confidence in Palin.

Predictably, the numbers are most dire for the former vice presidential nominee among self-identified Democrats: 3 in 4 say Palin isn't up to the responsibilities of the Oval Office.

The survey, conducted by CBS News between August 3-5, surveyed 847 U.S. adults by telephone.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (REUTERS/Mike Stone/File Photo)

The Texas lieutenant governor said on Monday he has enlisted Christian pastors statewide to help him win approval for legislation heading to a sate Senate committee this week that limits access to public restroom access for transgender people.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican and conservative Christian who guides the legislative agenda in the Republican-controlled Senate, told a news conference at the Capitol the Texas Privacy Act is a common sense measure to keep sexual predators out of bathrooms.

Critics contend the bill infringes on the civil rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Business groups say it will cause economic damage, pointing to a similar measure North Carolina enacted into law last year that led to travel and commercial boycotts.

Allowing transgender people to use public bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity rather than their birth gender has become the latest flashpoint in the long U.S. battle over LGBT rights.

Patrick announced the start of a “one million voices” campaign, with pastors enlisted to win support from their congregations for the legislation. Committee debate starts on Tuesday.

“North Carolina was the tip of the spear. We will be next to pass a bill that focuses on privacy, a person’s privacy, and public safety,” Patrick said, adding there will be no economic harm if it is enacted.

Before Patrick spoke, the U.S. Supreme Court scrapped plans to hear a major transgender rights case and threw out a lower court’s ruling in favor of a transgender Virginia student after President Donald Trump rescinded a policy protecting such youths under federal law.

A business group including some of the largest employers in Texas, such as American Airlines, sent a letter to Patrick this month opposing the bill, saying it is “discriminatory legislation that jeopardizes the positive environment for our Texas business operations.”

Patrick may be able to push the bill through the state Senate, but analysts do not expect it to make it through the House.

Speaker Joe Straus, a Republican who drives the agenda in that body, has shown tepid support, saying there are worries in San Antonio, an area he represents that is slated to host the 2018 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four.

“It may be likely that the bill will pass the Senate, but it will be dead on arrival in the House,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Dan Grebler)
Synopsis

Beethoven the St. Bernard is quite at home with the Newtons now, and as young Ryce Newton has her first crush on a boy at school, Beethoven goes head over paws for a sexy lady St. Bernard next door. Arrf! Academy Award Nominations: Best Song ("The Day I Fall in Love").

Production Notes

The MCA/Universal video #82097 is the "Puppy Pack". It includes a St. Bernard puppy plush toy in addition to the video.

100 puppies were used in the making of the film because the pups were growing so fast the filmmakers couldn't use the same dogs they started filming with.

The dog trainers used baby food to get Missy (Beethoven's girlfriend) to kiss him.

Turkey hot dogs were used to induced the hounds to emote in various scenes.

Though "Beethoven" was directed by Ivan Rietman, "Beethoven's 2nd" was directed by Rod Daniel, who also directed "K9" (another dog film) with James Belushi.

"Beethoven's 2nd" animal trainers were Glen D. Garner and April Morley. The puppy trainers were Karin McElhatton and Paul A. Alabria.

Rated BBFC U by the British Board of Film Classification.

TM & copyright 1993 Universal City Studios, Inc.

Available to buy in the UK.

Reviews

"...Amiable....[Mazar is] astonishingly apt..." (Entertainment Weekly)
Don’t know what to do for your next date? Here’s an idea for your next 26.

It’s called “Alphabet Dating,” and the concept has exploded on social media. The idea is that the couple (or serial daters) take turns planning normal dates using the order of the letters in the alphabet. Couples have been choosing dates and keeping it a secret from their partner until the big reveal.

The idea is to keep the spice on your relationship and have some fun with your partner. To the horror of men everywhere, “A” can be apple picking, while “B” can be a baseball game or a boat ride. “C” can be a simple coffee date. “D” can be a double date, and so on.

Here are some couples who are going through the alphabet and coming up with some inventive date ideas.

Started Alphabet dating tonight, A is for Asian food," wrote one couple.

Started alphabet dating tonight 💖 A is for Asian food. 😍🍴 #alphabetdating #cheatmeal #slimmingworld A photo posted by 💜 laura (@_lauraeats) on Jul 16, 2016 at 3:16pm PDT

This couple played video games.

V is for... Variety pack (for breakfast) , Vintage Video games, Vale curry house takeaway (but we didn't have a Vindaloo 😉), Vino and Vanilla Viennetta! #alphabetdating A photo posted by Rebecca Barber (@beckyraymcfly) on Nov 5, 2016 at 1:54pm PDT

Breakfast and Bingo for this couple.

Scary movies for these two.

#alphabetdating s for sweet shops and 'scary' movies like the shining and saw :) A photo posted by Katy Dear (@katy_xxv) on Oct 30, 2016 at 3:44pm PDT

Someone needs ideas.

Can any of my fellow alphabet daters give me any good suggestions for our last 4 dates?! #alphabetdating #w #x #y #z #needhelpplease A photo posted by Sophie (@sophie231092) on Oct 30, 2016 at 4:25am PDT

These guys went to the zoo.

Z is for Zoo 🐧🐘🐒🦁 #alphabetdating #z #zoo #blackpool #penguins #otters #giraffes A photo posted by Fiona Tennant (@fionat10) on Oct 30, 2016 at 3:17am PDT

A little fresh air for these two. Nature.

'N' is for nature 🍁 #alphabetdating A photo posted by Sophie 🐒 (@sophieevandersteen) on Oct 29, 2016 at 8:45am PDT

A jacuzzi for this couple.

J date #jaccuzzi #jigsaw #judson's #j20 #jellytots #jurrasicworld #alphabetdating A photo posted by Natasha Crow (@tasha24amiee) on Oct 26, 2016 at 9:52am PDT

Who doesn't love a trolley?

T is for Tramcar Restaurant. 👫🚃🍴❤️ #alphabetdating #dateday A photo posted by Shelley. (@sheilashoe) on Oct 21, 2016 at 11:08pm PDT

Lobstah!

A gin distillery tour for this adorable duo.

'G' stands for Gin Distillery Tour with Gin&Tonic fish #alphabetdating #gin A photo posted by James (@irving42) on Oct 14, 2016 at 12:02pm PDT

This couple plays games on "J" day.

J - Jenga 😅 @bazzzyyy21 #alphabetdating #letterj #jenga #wine A photo posted by Kirsty McCombie (@kirstymccombie) on Oct 7, 2016 at 11:58am PDT

"D" means drink. Cheers!

This couple has the stomach for "R" day. Roller coasters.

#alphabetdating r for rollercoasters :) #thorpepark A photo posted by Katy Dear (@katy_xxv) on Sep 24, 2016 at 2:39pm PDT

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Chris Fehn of SLIPKNOT has recorded some drums for MOTÖRHEAD guitarist Phil Campbell's forthcoming solo album. Also scheduled to appear are JUDAS PRIEST frontman Rob Halford and UGLY KID JOE vocalist Whitfield Crane.

Asked by Headbangers Lifestyle's Lilo at the end of last year if there are any plans for him to write and an autobiography or have a film made about his life, Campbell responded: "I don't want a film about my life; no way. I'm working on a book of the funny stuff. I don't want a life story; I just want the funny stuff. [It's] gotta be documented, 'cause some of it's pretty bizarre and unbelievable. It's totally funny, though. [It's a book about] my experiences. It's what would normally not happen if you weren't in this band."

Regarding when fans can expect to see his book released, Campbell said: "I'm seriously working on it now in January. It'll be a year or two [before it comes out], but it'll be worth it."

Asked in a 2012 interview if he has ever considered making a solo album, Phil responded: "Yes, I have thought about it a lot. But I shelved it a couple years ago, because I've decided that I want to write a book about all the insane things that happen on tour. So, I'm trying to compile all of those stories and funny situations. So, at this point, I'm working on that. But, I'm a bit lazy, so it's taken a while. But as far as a solo record, I do have a studio at home, it's just hard finding the time. With MOTÖRHEAD, we've been working so hard, for so long."

MOTÖRHEAD was forced to cancel three shows last November after Campbell became ill and required hospitalization.

MOTÖRHEAD frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Christmas Eve (December 24), learned two days later that he was afflicted with an aggressive form of cancer. He died two days later, on December 28, at his home in Los Angeles.
One of the best things about beer gardens is getting your brew in one of those giant mugs that seem tailored specifically for Vikings or professional wrestlers. These enormous old-fashioned steins hold enough beer to fuel an entire afternoon of relaxation and camaraderie—and if you use them often enough, your drinking arm will get noticeably bigger than your other arm.

In recent years, beer gardens inspired by their nineteenth-century predecessors have been returning to American cities. These places are often named with some variation of the classic German "biergarten," and are characterized by open spaces, big tables, and large crowds during Sunday afternoons. Alongside classic cocktail bars, the new beer gardens draw inspiration from the past to create a modern drinkscape drenched in nostalgia, and create a lens for understanding America's drinking past.

America's first beer gardens appeared in the nineteenth century, courtesy of a wave of German immigrants. America's gardens closely resembled their counterparts in the Old World, which were sprawling establishments conducive to lazy Sunday afternoons spent with family or striking up conversations with friendly strangers. Germany's beer gardens were originally created after brewing was banned during the summer months due to repeated brewery fires. Breweries responded to the ban by digging cellars near riverbanks to keep their beer cool until they needed it in summer and to give their lager-style beers the proper conditions to ferment properly. Breweries cooled these cellars further by scattering gravel on the ground and planting leafy shade trees.

It wasn't long before tables and chairs showed up in these pleasant environs, and the beer gardens grew to host thousands of people who congregated to listen to music, discuss politics, play chess, or just lounge about in the sun. American beer gardens followed suit, offering a stark contrast to saloons and taverns that were often dark and dingy places designed for grouchy old men to take quick slugs of whiskey. American beer gardens helped German immigrants preserve part of their identity and heritage, but also introduced other Americans to a more relaxed form of drinking while offering a space to hold athletic events, as well as civic and religious functions.

The rise of beer gardens in America coincided with the opulent industrial and economic advances of the Gilded Age, and their style reflected that. The gardens built by brewing giants such as Frederick Pabst and Frederick Miller to promote their brands were the exact opposite of the dive bars where their brews are popular today. Schlitz Garden, built in 1879 by the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee, featured a concert hall, dance pavilion, bowling alley, and a three-story pagoda that provided stunning views of the city, according to historian Maureen Ogle. The largest beer garden in New York was Atlantic Gardens, which was built indoors to guard against unpredictable weather, and featured giant frescoes, skylights, indoor gardens, and an orchestra.

Regardless of how civilized and pleasant these beer gardens sound to us today, they collided with the Temperance movement and an attitude among many Americans that alcohol was the Devil's potion and a social blight that needed to be eradicated from the nation. Temperance advocates believed that the gardens exposed young people to alcohol, and that the presence of young women proved an irresistible temptation to young men who all should have been spending their Sundays at church.

Other Temperance advocates were more ambivalent towards beer, focusing their efforts against hard liquor and treating beer and wine as something in its own category. Near the end of the nineteenth century, a group of sociologists called the Committee of Fifty investigated drinking places around Chicago in order to better understand America's "liquor problem," according to Andrew Barr's Drink: A Social History of America. Their report characterized beer gardens as pleasant and enchanting havens offering an escape from life's hectic rush, providing a stark contrast to a saloon culture that bred violence, domestic and otherwise. One woman on the committee described a beer garden by writing, "Isn't it beautiful? Can it be, is it possible, that after all our ideas are wrong and these people are right?"

Regardless, the forces of Temperance eventually hardened into a drive for outright Prohibition. Beer, which had grown in popularity throughout the nineteenth century, partly as a result of German immigrants and their beer gardens, was a target. As the nation sped toward the Volstead Act, which outlawed liquor in 1919, Prohibitionists took advantage of xenophobia surrounding beer-drinking German immigrants in the buildup to World War I to score points against alcohol. The lieutenant governor from Wisconsin, one of the states where beer gardens first took hold, attacked his fellow Americans of German descent personally, claiming that, "No Germans in the war are conspiring against the peace and happiness of the United States more than Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller and others of their kind."

That claim, of course, was absurd. The threat those men posed was little more than offering Americans places to casually lounge around during their days off, playing checkers, catching up with friends, and napping. Regardless, the fear mongering worked, and it has taken nearly a century to begin reclaiming what was lost.

About the Author: Reid Mitenbuler is a Washington, DC-based writer. He is currently writing a book about bourbon for Viking/Penguin. Find him online at The Bourbon Empire and on Twitter @ReidMitenbuler.

This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.
During his panel at Fan Expo Canada, Aquaman star Jason Momoa answered a number of questions about his forthcoming role.

He couldn't say much, which is no surprise, but he did address some very broad-brush things like whether the character will be as dark as Superman and Batman seem to be, and what he has to say to fans who make "fish jokes" about the character.

"It's cute and funny, people make fun of him, there's a bunch of jokes about him, but I'm like, 'Just wait. Let's just wait a little bit, and then you can make jokes,'" Momoa said. You can see a supercut of Momoa answering Aquaman inquiries below.

Momoa is expected to appear in March's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, followed by two Justice League movies and an Aquaman stand-alone film. Check out our comic book movie release calendar for more details on just when those are coming.
Lest we forget that the left considers the American founding our original sin, a recent string of articles, lawsuits, and so-called “activism” is taking aim at America’s founding fathers. They were too white, too male, not woke enough, some owned slaves. And anyway, the Constitution is silent on gender fluidity.

On June 1, James Madison Memorial High School senior Mya Berry launched a petition to shorten the name of their school -- erasing Madison’s name from it entirely. Apparently, the school’s name made Berry feel “more than unsafe.” The proposed name-change would, according to Berry, comprise a remedy for several racial affronts she had experienced at Memorial. The school’s name sake, like several founding fathers, owned slaves yet argued for gradual emancipation efforts and “wished to see [slavery] diminished and abolished by peaceable & just means.”

Of course, Madison Memorial High is in Madison, Wisconsin. Not sure if Berry’s sense of insecurity extends to her municipality, but Madison is an extremely liberal college town. She should think big.

Former Councilman Mario Salas of the San Antonio Coalition of Human and Civil Rights really, really doesn’t like those racist founders. In The San Antonio Observer he dubbed them “ancestors of a white supremacist movement.” Salas penned these accusations as a response to his failed efforts to remove the historic monument in San Antonio’s Travis Park that commemorated Confederate war dead.

Salas claimed all monuments honoring the deaths of “soldiers that defended slavery” were a mere guise for institutionalized racism: “These statues represent a long history of oppression.” Fair enough, but Salas seems to think that because he wants to erase history, he’s entitled to make up its replacement. Salas asserted that the Revolutionary War was “as much about anything else. And that “Millions of dollars invested in slavery would be lost if the British won the war.”

Then there’s this: “England eventually opposed slavery before the U.S. did, and this set off a wave of anger that fueled the 1776 Revolution.” So a wave of anger over something 40 years in the future (Britain would not pass its Slavery Abolition Act until 1833) sent the colonists to the barricades?

And this breathtaking idiocy:

The third verse of the star spangled banner reads: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave. From the terror of flight or gloom of the grave. And the star-spangled banner—O! Long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Keep in mind that the part about the “hireling and slave” refers to black people and is an attack against the British who freed slaves and had more blacks fighting for them than George Washington did.

Um. No. “Hireling and slave” referred to British soldiers. They were professionals, often the dregs of society, fighting for a monarch. (They called it “taking the King’s shilling.”) The line derides them in comparison with the citizen soldiers the U.S. fielded in the War of 1812. (Salas doesn’t seem to know that the anthem was written during that conflict.) And the British did free slaves in exchange for their service. It was a tactic to bolster the numbers of Tory partisans.

Salas’ action group isn’t the only organization disproportionately obsessed with the fact that several of the Founders owned slaves. The South Carolina Humanities Council partnered with The Slave Dwelling Project and Living Through the Eyes of the Enslaved on a project to bring tourists to Presidential dwellings run by slaves. “Tracing the footprint of slavery exposes former Presidents as slave-owners,” reads the Project’s website. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Poplar Forest, as well as James Madison’s Montpelier are, naturally, first on the list of tour sites.

At lefty site CounterPunch.org, Mike Ferner writes that “A historically critical article about the American Revolution would typically discuss how the democratic promises of the Declaration were left hanging at war’s end, followed by a decidedly undemocratic constitution six years later.”

He then states all the ways in which the founders and the system they created, were insufficiently woke, before quoting extensively from a speech by the patron saint of left-wing revisionism, Howard Zinn. Blah blah, who did the Revolution really benefit? Yadda yadda yadda, what about the Indians? Blah Blah Blah, “the Revolutionary War, like all wars, was a class war.” It’s all the usual America-hating drivel.

Being a liberal is to always be miserable. Doubly so on Independence day.
MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — The Maine Red Claws, used a balanced attack and solid defense to shut down Raptors 905 Saturday afternoon, 100-91.

Damion Lee led the Red Claws with 22 points, and Marcus Georges-Hunt finished near another triple-double with 19 points, 10 rebounds and 4 assists. Demetrius Jackson, on assignment from the Boston Celtics, added 19 points, 8 rebounds and 7 assists in the win. Arthur Edwards led the bench with 11 points, while Coron Williams contributed 10 points in his first start of the season.

The Red Claws (5-2) carried Lee to a hot offensive start. Scoring both inside and outside, Lee was able to score 10 of his points in the 1st quarter, including eight straight to give the Claws the lead. With Lee and Georges-Hunt leading the charge, Edwards and Jason Calliste added three’s off the banch, and Maine rolled out to a 31-18 lead after one.

Edwards opened the 2nd quarter with a three-point play, putting Maine up 38-23. Raptors 905 (3-1) would go on a 11-0 run, thanks in large part to Will Sheehey, who drained back-to-back three-pointers. The 905 took a 44-42 lead. Williams snapped a 49-49 tie with a pair of free throws, and. J.J. Panoske’s three late in the 2nd gave Maine a 59-50 lead at the break.

But the 905 were not finished. The 3rd quarter turned out to be the lowest scoring of the season for the Red Claws, with Raptors 905 out-scoring Maine 17-15 in the period. Jakob Poeltl, on assignment from the Toronto Raptors, tipped home a basket to give the 905 a 68-66 lead. Jackson’s free throws at the end of the quarter gave Maine a 74-73 lead heading into the final quarter.

The Red Claws started the 4th quarter on a 7-0 run, with Lee draining a three and Georges-Hunt driving and scoring for two. Georges-Hunt and Lee traded baskets, and Williams’ three-ball put Maine up nine, as Maine cruised to the finish line from there. This was the lowest-scoring game of the season for Maine, which shot 45 percent (32-71) from the field, and 34 percent (11-32) from downtown. The Red Claws went 25-31 from the free throw line. Raptors 905 shot just 40 percent (35-87) from the field and 11% (2-18) from three-point range.
Posted on Wednesday, 02 April 2014 11:03

By Christian Freymeyer

While the origin of illicit financial flows ranges from government embezzlement to human trafficking, and from corporate tax evasion to grand corruption, the destination seems less ambiguous.

A $35 million mansion in California, artwork totaling €18 million, and a $38 million dollar private jet.

These sound like items purchased by the world's wealthiest oligarchs, right?

Well, they were actually acquired by Teodorin Obiang, son of President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.

as long as financial institutions in the EU remain complicit in the transfer of illicit capital, African countries will continue to bleed billions

When his father convenes with other leaders for this week's EU-Africa summit, a wide range of topics will be covered.

But there's one issue in particular that should be given a loudspeaker during the talks in Brussels: illicit financial flows.

Africa and Europe have a unique financial relationship. It's one that is marked by illicit capital flowing out of African countries into bank accounts in financial centers across the EU.

While the younger Obiang's official salary is less than $7,000 per month, he managed to spend more than $315 million between 2004 and 2011 on sports cars, beachfront mansions, lavish apartments, and even some Michael Jackson memorabilia. And this is only one example.

In 2011 alone, it's estimated that €43.7 billion left Africa by way of illicit financial flows; this money should rather have been invested in infrastructure, education and healthcare, all of which are areas highlighted by the EU-Africa Summit.

Just to put that number into perspective, African countries received a combined €34.3 billion in developmental aid the same year, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

While the origin of illicit financial flows ranges from government embezzlement to human trafficking, and from corporate tax evasion to grand corruption, the destination seems less ambiguous.

The end game for most is to move funds to a place where they can be used freely, and preferably, anonymously. At the moment, that task is far too easy.

Loopholes in the current system have fostered a strange breed of companies. They don't do any real work, don't have any employees, and, more often than not, don't even disclose who owns them.

These anonymous companies are one of the primary vehicles used to funnel illicit money from Africa into places like the EU.

To set one of these companies up, you often don't even need to list the name of the beneficial owner, the person who ultimately controls and benefits from the company.

Thanks to the secrecy granted to anonymous companies, they become a predictable means for corruption and money laundering.

A study from the World Bank estimates that 70 percent of big corruption cases over the last 30 years involved the use of anonymous corporations to help hide the identity of the perpetrators.

The report also found that it is easier to set up an anonymous company in Europe and America than it is in traditional tax havens like the Jersey or the Cayman Islands.

When authorities try to investigate these entities, it's almost impossible to unravel the web. Money often floats through a labyrinth of different companies, in different jurisdictions, leaving, at best, a confusing and incomplete paper trail.

However, with new legislation moving through the EU, part of the solution appears to be within reach.

The European Parliament recently voted to require EU-based companies and trusts to list their beneficial owners in central registers that would be publicly accessible.

This would allow authorities, civil society, journalists and citizens from around the world to verify who owns companies or similar legal entities.

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has already endorsed the idea of registers for beneficial ownership. Although the European Parliament vote was a monumental step in the right direction, the legislation still needs to be agreed to by European national governments.

This week's summit is an opportunity for leaders like President Barroso and President Obiang to face the subject of illicit financial flows head on.

One of the self-ascribed goals of the meetings is to explore ways to promote sustainable and inclusive growth and socio-economic development.

But, as long as financial institutions in the EU remain complicit in the transfer of illicit capital, African countries will continue to bleed billions of dollars every year. These porous financial walls undermine the very goals the summit's leaders hope to address.

True beneficial ownership transparency, including public registers, is vital to help realize more sustainable economies in Africa and Europe alike.

Christian Freymeyer is the New Media & Press Coordinator for the Financial Transparency Coalition, a group of NGOs, civil society organizations, and governments that advocate for increased transparency in the international financial system.
It’s 6 p.m. Thursday and about 50 men and women, many of them homeless, are seated in an outdoor area behind an old brick building on Tampa Heights’s Florida Avenue, waiting for dinner.

First, Charissa Stepp, 23, the director of what is called The Banquet, asks everyone to keep silent while she says a prayer of thanks. Then the serving begins: In the indoor kitchen of this building called “The Well,” three volunteers pile plates high with beef, zucchini and rice (prepared by Metropolitan Ministries) and hand them to four other volunteers who, acting as waiters and waitresses, distribute them to the hungry.

Most of the diners say “Thank you” or “God bless you,” but a few are so focused on some private anguish that they barely acknowledge the food in front of them.

Most eat avidly — for some, it’s their only meal of the day. There’s laughter now, and conversation, and the occasional friendly argument. By 6:15, plates are empty and the waitstaff comes by with full bowls, offering seconds to whoever wants them. Then, if Metro Min has provided, there’s dessert: cookies or cake.

Their bellies full, the guests wander back to their lives on the street or at the Good Samaritan Inn while volunteers collect the plates and glasses and hand them to others who wash them in big metal sinks. By 7, the chairs and tables are folded up and the eating area is mostly deserted. Another Banquet has come and gone.

The Well has served Tampa’s poor once again.

Not everybody is comfortable about this.

“He told me that he’d be crucified if he renewed our lease,” says Jon Dengler, The Well’s visionary director, about landlord Pawan Rattan. Dengler explains that Rattan told him the pressure from businesses and private citizens in Tampa Heights was simply overwhelming: This home for the homeless was marring an area that’s on the rise socio-economically. Rattan tells me he doesn’t remember making such a statement, and adds that he won’t decide for a few more months whether or not to renew The Well’s lease.

But Dengler knows what he heard, and is already thinking about how to carry on when he loses the building in mid-2017. One thing is certain: He won’t give up on the poor. He’s profoundly committed to serving them — sees it as a religious obligation — and nothing like a gentrifying community will stop him.

Still, it’s an admirable enterprise that he’s in danger of losing. At the moment, The Well provides a large family room in which the homeless can meet each other, eat, watch TV or even sleep. There’s a free grocery that distributes food to the hungry, a bicycle shop, outdoor vegetable gardens, and, not unnecessarily, a shower and a clean bathroom. Once a month, there’s a free medical clinic, and on occasion, free haircuts. On Tuesdays, The Well serves dinner at the Good Samaritan Inn up Florida Ave., also with food from Metro Min; on Thursdays, there’s The Banquet. About 100 people use The Well’s services every day, and some of them depend on the place as the only home Tampa offers them. Without it, they’d have nowhere to go.

The sailing isn’t always smooth, though. Rick Fernandez, genial president of the Tampa Heights Civic Association, notes that a few months ago, he alerted Denger to “multiple complaints” he’d fielded about the The Well. There were sightings of people drinking, selling drugs, and even “people having sex back in the back areas — generally, the kinds of things you don’t want to see in your neighborhood where your children live.”

But after Fernandez conferred with Dengler, the Well’s founder held a “town hall” with his population, and Fernandez says the problem was solved — there’s been only one “minimal” complaint since. As to landlord Rattan’s decision whether or not to renew The Well’s lease, “that’s between him and his tenant,” says Fernandez. “As far as I’m concerned, Jon is being a good neighborhood member at this point.”

If The Well goes, it’s the poor and hungry who’ll feel it most. Consider Tom Logan, a regular denizen of The Well who lives in a house rented by Dengler. Tom is 64, a tall, thin Caucasian man with a bushy blondish beard and glasses. He tells me he’s been coming to The Well for about a year now.

“I got here because when I first was in Tampa, I was living under a bridge in downtown. The police gave me a warning, told me if they caught me again in the next year, I was going to do some jail time. So basically, they pushed me north, away from downtown… They want to make downtown look better.”

Logan was sleeping in a vacant lot when another homeless man told him about The Well. Now “I volunteer, I straighten up the pantry, I’ve got my driver’s license back so I do pickups for The Well.” He uses the food pantry at least once a week, but usually eats only one or two meals a day: “If there’s breakfast available, I’ll eat breakfast. If they serve lunch here, I’ll have lunch.” What will he do if The Well closes and he loses his housing? “I’ll be back on the streets.” Or, if the police catch him, in jail.

Tom’s concerns are echoed by Dwayn Gregory, 51, known as “Shorty,” an African-American man missing most of his front teeth, but radiantly smiling when he discusses The Well.

“This is my favorite place to be at, man. It’s a beautiful thing what they’re doing for people.” Shorty goes to The Banquet every Thursday night, and says he comes not just for the food but “for the people. It’s beautiful, man. It’s amazing to see somebody that’s so kind and giving to people to make sure the homeless is fed. It means a lot to my heart.”

What would happen if The Well ceased to exist?

“There would be a whole lot of hurt people out there… The majority of the people that I know are right out on the streets today. And this here is a big progress for them.”

It’s not clear just what can be done to save The Well. If some philanthropist doesn’t come along with the money to buy the property (smaller contributors can donate at welltampa.com), Dengler, Stepp, and the few other underpaid staff members of this home for the homeless will have no choice but to move on. Dengler says he’s working on it: “We’re looking toward maybe some mobile models where we can put some of our services on trailers, buses, whatever, and actually be able to… work with communities in poor neighborhoods. We would love to find partners to help invest in the work we do, whether it is helping to purchase this property or another property, or helping us to finance and go mobile.”

Beyond that, he mostly wishes for a change in the consciousness of area residents.

“The Well is nothing but an effort to help the poor, so in my mind, anything that anyone can do to love the poor, to stand with the poor, to shoulder the weight and pressure that is on the poor in the community… I feel like it’s on all of us to take some personal responsibility for what we see in our city and the struggles of the vulnerable. And see that this is a byproduct of the kind of community that we’re building.

“And we have to look out for them.”
This Minecraft PE triple village seed was submitted by an Epic Minecraft player a few days ago. The seed has been floating around for awhile (it works in both 0.9x and 0.10x infinite), so we’re not sure if the submitter, Budderlord, was the first to find it, or if he was turned onto it by someone else. Regardless, the important details: there’s a massive triple village straight in front of you when you start the game.

The triple village is in a savanna biome directly across the river in front of you when the game renders. There are two blacksmiths in the village and one of them has emeralds amongst other loot (apples, ink sacs and iron ingots). We checked under all the wells and unfortunately didn’t find anything worth mentioning. When you spawn, your best bet is to get to the village fast before the careless blacksmith’s lava catches the chests on fire. The surrounding landscape beyond the savanna is river, desert and mountains (extreme hills). Thanks again to Budderlord for submitting the seed.

Minecraft PE 0.10.0+ Infinite Seed: 1388582293

Minecraft PE In-Game Screenshots
glitch on Mar 15

Indeed. It's an undefined behavior.

C and C++ do not specify when the post-increment occurs within the statement, only that it is guaranteed to occur by the end token (i.e., ;) -- whether immediately before (or after) use, at the beginning (or end) of the statement, or at some point in between is not specified. For this reason, referencing a variable more than once in a statement where the post-increment operator is used results in undefined behavior. The same code may produce different results on different compilers, different architectures, or even the same compiler with different optimization settings.

So,

0, 0

0, 0

could also have been a result.

Although, for the original poster, to elaborate on the specific behavior of the initial post

1, 0

0, 1

some more, suppose we have m = 0; printf("(m++, m, m++): %d, %d, %d

", m++, m, m++);

(m++, m, m++) gave me 1, 2, 0 (with gcc version 4.0.1 Apple Inc. build 5488), which illustrates going on with that initial post.

The post-increment operators are evaluated first and from right to left, so the "m++" in the third parameter is done first (returning 0 and incremeting m to 1). The "m++" in the first parameter is done next, since it's the next post-increment operator to do (evaluating from right to left). The first parameter returns 1 and increments m to 2. This concludes the evaluation of the post-increment operators in the statement. Now, proceeding from right to left, the rest is done. So, finally, the "m" in the second parameter is evaluated as 2 (0 incremented to 1, which was then incremented to 2).
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a linchpin in Western occultism, was founded in the late 1880s. Within 15 years there had been schisms dividing the Order. With the internet today, events happen much faster. Various groups claim to be “the” Golden Dawn and fight for the use of the name. New groups claim to have the “real” teachings. People get kicked out of one group or they split off from groups to form their own “real” Golden Dawn.

These games don’t matter. It is the work that matters. All of these games are about ego. The Order is about the work.

When the Order was founded, they included a document that revealed the Order’s supposed history, going back before its modern founding (or re-creation). Over the years, aspects of this “History Lection” (Lection is an archaic word meaning a particular edition of a text. I always find it amusing how many occult writers think it’s necessary to use archaic or foreign words when there are perfectly acceptable modern words.) have fallen into question—appropriately so—leading not to an editing but to an abandonment. This would be like saying the novel War and Peace is no good if a period is in the wrong place. I contend it would be more appropriate to abandon anything proven wrong and keep what is accurate. Sure, that’s more work, and a lot of “authorities” don’t really like work, even if that work isn’t all that difficult.

If instead of simply abandoning the entire History Lection we research each claim for its validity, we’ll soon come to the forgotten man of the Golden Dawn, Johann F. Falk.

According to the Golden Dawn lectures, there was a G.D. lodge in London around 1810 which was headed by Johann F. Falk. In all of the books and research through Golden Dawn sources, it seems that nobody was interested in checking up on this. Either they simply believed or discounted the documents completely.

In fact, a Rabbi de Falk, also known as Cain Chenuel Falk, was a noted cabalist and magician living in London around this time, the late 1700s. His “son,” Johann Friedrich Falk was born in Hamburg and is mentioned in the classic Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie. One Masonic historian believes they were the same person.

Who was this Falk? Some time ago, while surfing the ’net, I came across an the home page of a group claiming to be the Golden Dawn. [I later saw copies of their mail-order teachings and found a large percentage of it to be nothing more than a slight re-write of my own Modern Magick, complete with expressions I used and breaking down rituals into sections exactly as I did (although no one had done so before).]

Anyway, they, like others, claimed that Falk (Faulk) was “an obscure individual.” For a group claiming to be “the” Golden Dawn, they seemed very unwilling to research their own history.

In actuality, he was hardly “obscure.” In fact, he was one of the most influential occultists of the time and was called in a book that was written about him, The Baal-Shem of London.

Contemporary Painting of the

Baal Shem of London, “Dr. Falk”

Being called a “Baal-Shem” (speaker of the name) was no small honor. Rather, it was the sign of being a talented kabalist and magician. For the Rabbis known as Baal-Shems used their knowledge of the names of God, and the secret ways to write or say those names, in order to work great magick. Several magickal or even miraculous events are attributed to him. The story of the famous “Golem of Prague” is based on the idea that knowing the magical ways of working with words and names could actually bring life to lifeless matter. The Golem, a huge, hulking creature made of clay, was brought to life to defend the Jews of the Prague Ghetto against their oppressors. A word written on a piece of paper, eh-met (Hebrew for “truth”) brought the creature to life. Removing the first letter changed the word to met, Hebrew for “dead,” ending its existence. The Golem was the forerunner and model for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “monster.”

In Jewish history there have been many such Baal-Shems, the most important one being called the Great (Tov) Speaker of the Name or Baal Shem Tov (Besht for short). Prayers written by the Besht are still used in synagogues all over the world. Very few have been called a Baal Shem, and Falk was one of the most amazing.

First, it is important to question if the story, as told in the History Lection, is accurate. Falk died in 1782, so he couldn’t have run a temple in London in the early 1800s. There is some belief that it might have been his son, however this is questionable. In Judaism, children are not supposed to be named after any living person. Thus, either the dates given in the History Lection are in error or, more likely, the son adopted the name of his more famous father.

There can be no doubt that Falk was a magician. He started out in Germany and accounts of his alchemical workings (in the late 1730s) have been published. He was eventually condemned for being a sorcerer. His punishment: to be burned alive. Luckily, he was able to escape to Holland before ending up in London.

Falk rapidly became known in England, both among Jews and even more so among Christians. According to some historians, even the infamous Cagliostro was involved with Falk and learned from London’s Baal Shem both the secrets and rituals that later formed his Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. These Rites, by the way, became one of the sources for the modern O.T.O.

Falk was involved with revolutionaries and Freemasons. He is noted in a German history of Freemasonry as being a “very extraordinary man from every point of view. Some people believe him to be the chief of all the Jews…He is referred to…as a Rose-Croix [Rosicrucian]…He has had adventures with the Marechal de Richelieu, a great seeker of the Philosopher’s Stone.” It is also noted that that he predicted the death of Louis XV.

One of Falk’s enemies in London complained that wealthy Christians liked him and gave him money which he spent on the men in his “Brotherhood.” This Brotherhood was probably a high-degree, Rose-Croix Masonic group. For those who are not familiar with the Golden Dawn, their so-called Inner Order claims to be the true Rosicrucian Order (and no, they’re not affiliated with the AMORC Rosicrucians).

While on one of his frequent trips to Paris, Falk consecrated a talismanic ring made of lapis lazuli for the Duke of Orleans to insure that the Duke, who supported Freemasons (and vice versa), would ascend to the throne of France. As a leader of the Freemasonic movement, he supported the French Revolution and became known as the hero, “Phillipe Egalité.” But the Freemasons lost control of the revolution, and the movement toward liberty became, instead, “The Terror.” He became an “enemy of the people,” yet firmly believed in the ring’s power. He was beheaded on the Guillotine in 1793, but gave the ring first to a Jewish friend who then passed it to the Duke’s son. In 1830 that son ascended to the throne as King Louis Phillipe of France.

Not only was there a link between Falk and the Duke of Orleans, but Falk’s student, Cagliostro, is also in this revolutionary brew. In 1786 he predicted that a “great prince” would soon institute a liberal reign in France. Many believe that this was the Duke and the “liberal reign” was the French Revolution during its early days.

William Butler Yeats was one of the most famous poets of modern history. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. He was also a supporter of Freedom for the people of Ireland and supported their culture as a founder of the Abbey Theater and a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. For a time after the schism against MacGregor Mathers’ leadership of the Golden Dawn, Yeats became the head of the Order. He claimed that the mystical poet/artist William Blake had studied Kabalah in the “Rosicrucian” school of Falk. Interestingly, it is well known that the Duke of Orleans, who had studied practical Kabalah with Falk, was one of Blake’s heroes. In his book, The French Revolution, Blake makes the Duke a hero, a “bulwark of revolutionary hopes” who urged the French nobles to “Fear not dreams, fear not visions.” One of Blake’s associates, an artist named Copley, painted a picture of Falk in which he was depicted in “Cabalistic regalia with the Masonic compass and quadrant in his hands.” It is shown above.

So Falk was not obscure. His relationship to the Masonry and the O.T.O. is undeniable. His link to modern Kabalistic, magical, and mystical traditions is at least as important as that of Eliphas Levi, even though he is not as well known today. Why is he not well known? Because the only writing he did, his diary, wasn’t published until 2002, and that was in Hebrew.

Falk’s link to the Golden Dawn may only be indirect. For a more direct link it would have to be shown that the dates in the History Lection are wrong (a strong possibility) or that Falk’s son used his father’s name and reputation (unlikely, but possible)

In Mackenzie’s Book (the Cyclopaedia), he says that Falk headed a “Cabalistic college” in London. He was, no doubt, referring to the “brotherhood” started by Falk. Could it be that this was the first British lodge of the Golden Dawn? Falk’s son died in 1824. But is there any way to show a direct relationship between this brotherhood/Cabalistic college of Falk and the German Jewish lodge referred to in the G.D. documents as the source of the Golden Dawn? Yes.

According to a book published in Germany in 1932, a Jewish Masonic Lodge called the Aurore Naisante was founded in London in 1817. It was founded under the authority of the Duke of Sussex who was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge in England, but without the authorization of the Frankfurt lodge. As a result, it was closed by the Frankfurt Masonic authorities in 1822, but may have continued on its own.

A Jewish Masonic Lodge was also founded in 1807 in Frankfurt under the auspices of the Grand Orient, the more occult version of the Freemasons. In French it too was called the Aurore Naissante and in German it was Zur Aufgehenden Morgenrote. This is very similar to the name of the German temple that supposedly gave authorization to found the famed British Golden Dawn as recorded in the GD’s History Lection.

Among the founders of this German Jewish Masonic lodge were three Freemasons who were well-known at the time: Ludwig Borne, Gabriel Riesser and Berthold Auerbach. These men were also associated with the fringe Masonic rite known as the Strict Observance of Baron von Hund.

Was is all this important? The S.O. had secret leaders known as “The Secret Chiefs,” an important aspect of the Golden Dawn. The S.O. was also interested in magick and alchemy, two major interests of the G.D. (Yes, I know this is getting a bit conspiratorial.)

WHAT IT MEANS:

It seems to me that the information about the early history of the Golden Dawn as included in the History Lection of the Order is based on history, but is rather garbled. Therefore, there are three possible sources for how this information got into the History Lection which was written by W.W. Westcott:

He got hand-written information that had been copied many times and errors had slipped in. He got it in person from someone who knew the history but whose memory was failing after 60 years. He read it but didn’t remember it accurately himself.

I don’t think we’ll ever have a completely accurate history of the Golden Dawn. Personally, I don’t think that matters. It’s the work we do today that counts, not the history.
As Vogue celebrates its 125th year, we look back at the history of fashion, and the magazine, in a series of “five points” videos by decade, narrated by the stylish Sarah Jessica Parker.

1930–1939The flapper was a casualty of the stock market crash of 1929. Out of her ashes rose the femme fatale. At night she was a modern Diana in figure-molding bias-cut satins that oozed to the floor. By day, she might play with a Surrealist as served up by Elsa Schiaparelli. Then war came, and removed frivolity from fashion.

THE LONG RUNHemlines were lengthening before the Great Crash of 1929; they fell to the floor after that debacle and stayed there for quite a while. There was nothing prim about these sweeping hems, however. The abbreviated silhouette was traded for a long, sculptural one built along classic lines that emphasized the figure within the frock. Madeleine Vionnet’s diagonal bias-cutting technique resulted in dresses that were sensuously molded to the body. Such perfection as not easily come by; “simplicity,” noted Vogue, “is a complex art.”

LOVE SCHIAPEven more complicated was the kismet that brought Prince Edward into the orbit of an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson, for whom he’d abandon his throne and be exiled from his sceptered isle. Theirs was a romance that was well chronicled in Vogue by John McMullin, the magazine’s “As Seen by Him” columnist, and Cecil Beaton, who were part of the royal entourage. Before she married her prince in a Wallis blue Mainbocher design, Beaton famously captured her posing in some splendors by Elsa Schiaparelli, including the “lobster” dress hand-painted by Salvador Dalí.

ALTERNATIVE FACTSDalí and the influence of the Surrealists was pervasive in the ’30s. Like the “phony war” that preceded major action on the Western Front, the movement, which aimed to yoke dreams and reality, captured the tension and strangeness of the time. Elsa Schiaparelli, the Paris-based Italian couturier and Chanel’s nemesis, was most closely associated with this movement and she aligned herself with artists like Jean Cocteau and Marcel Vertès. Surrealism made its way into Vogue, too. Not only did Dalí become a frequent contributor, but Giorgio de Chirico created artwork for the magazine and Cecil Beaton incorporated elements of the movement’s style into some of his photographs.

THE FEMALE GAZEThere were few women working among the stellar stable of artists working at Vogue during the 1930s, which included photographers Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, and the illustrators Eric and Christian Bérard, all of whom had a keen appreciation for the haute side of fashion. Startlingly different was the work of Toni Frissell, a young, well-connected American, who joined the staff as a caption writer but ended up as a photographer, one who brought a distinctive American wholesomeness, youth, and even fresh air to the pages of the magazine: Frissell was one of the few photographers at the magazine then shooting out of doors.

PAJAMA GAMESThough Vogue first voiced its approval of pajamas in the 1920s, they continued to be endorsed in the ’30s as a headline like “Personality + 1931 = Pyjamas” shows. It was during this decade that pants started making their way out of the boudoir, becoming acceptable for casual resortwear, as well.
With an impressive group of future television and movie stars, That '70s Show graced the Fox airwaves for eight seasons (almost a full decade!) beginning in 1998. Here are some facts about how the Point Place, Wisconsin cheese was made.

1. TOPHER GRACE WAS DISCOVERED PERFORMING IN A HIGH SCHOOL PLAY.

Co-creators Bonnie and Terry Turner were the parents of a cast member of a high school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Their attention gradually turned to the lead, Topher Grace. The Turners asked him to audition the following year for their new show.

2. ASHTON KUTCHER WAS A MODEL BEFORE AUDITIONING.

He got the part of Kelso after playing him “naive” at his audition, while everybody else played him as dumb. But Kutcher had never acted: "The first five episodes of That '70s Show, I was convinced I was going to be fired, because I was terrible," Kutcher told Rolling Stone.

3. MILA KUNIS LIED ABOUT HER AGE AT HER AUDITION.

The then-14-year-old reasoned that the producers wouldn't want to cast someone too young because of work hour restrictions for minors, so "I told them I was going to be 18," Kunis told People. "But I didn't tell them when I was going to be 18!"

4. KUNIS’ FIRST KISS WAS ON THE SHOW, WITH KUTCHER.

She enjoyed some other firsts on the show, not all of them with cast members she ended up marrying: Wilmer Valderrama taught her how to drive. Danny Masterson took her to her first club and bought her her first drink. He was also her prom date.

5. MASTERSON’S ROLE IN THE FACULTY WAS CUT SHORT SO HE COULD SHOOT THE PILOT.

All the actor was told about his character, Hyde, was that he is a “deep theorist stoner type.” Masterson figured out how to play his character “by episode four or five.”

6. KURTWOOD SMITH BASED RED FORMAN ON HIS STEPFATHER.

Smith's stepdad passed away shortly before the pilot was filmed. Smith also has the distinction of being the only regular cast member who was actually born in Wisconsin.

7. THE ORIGINAL TITLE FOR THE SHOW WAS TEENAGE WASTELAND.

The Who songwriter Pete Townshend refused to allow his lyric from “Baba O’Riley” to be appropriated for the show; the same went for the proposed title of The Kids Are Alright. After Feelin’ All Right was presented as the name of the program to advertisers, Bonnie Turner realized that no matter what they called it, everybody would just to refer to it as “that '70s show.”

8. THE CO-WRITER OF THE THEME SONG WAS PAID $70 EVERY TIME THE SHOW WAS ON TV.

Big Star singer Alex Chilton co-wrote “In the Street,” which was covered in season one by Todd Griffin before Cheap Trick’s version kicked things off starting in season two. With the name of the show in mind, Chilton found the dollar amount ironic.

9. LEO WAS WRITTEN WITH TOMMY CHONG IN MIND.

Chong claimed in 2003 that his stoner character Leo was starting to get written out more because of 9/11. After disappearing for a few seasons while serving a jail sentence for selling “drug paraphernalia,” Mickey “Leo” Chingkwake returned, and was credited as a series regular in the show’s eighth and final season.

10. WILL FORTE TURNED DOWN PERFORMING ON SNL TO CONTINUE WRITING ON THE SHOW.

Forte enjoyed the job security of his writing/producing gig on That '70s Show and feared failure on Saturday Night Live. One year later he changed his mind.

11. THE SMOKE IN THE "POT CIRCLE" SCENES WAS STRAWBERRY-SCENTED.

Laura Prepon, Kutcher, and Masterson hid their lit cigarettes below the table before those scenes so that they could partake in their habit in between takes.

12. LATER SEASONS HAD BAND-THEMED EPISODE TITLES.

Season five episodes all shared titles with Led Zeppelin tunes. For season six, The Who was honored. The Rolling Stones were represented in season seven. For season eight, it was Queen.

13. KEVIN MCDONALD GOT THE ROLE OF PASTOR DAVE BECAUSE OF HIS DOG AND TOPHER GRACE .

Grace drove by one day while The Kids in the Hall cast member was walking his dog and said he was a huge fan. It led to him playing Pastor Dave for six episodes before the character unceremoniously disappeared. McDonald believes the show forgot about him because co-creator Mark Brazill left to work on the failed spinoff That ‘80s Show.

14. THERE WAS A U.K. REMAKE CALLED DAYS LIKE THESE IN 1999.

It was the first time an American company (Carsey-Werner) produced both the American and British versions of the same show. Days Like These used the same scripts as That '70s Show, switching out American references with British ones, like David Bowie replacing a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders poster, and Prince Charles visiting instead of President Gerald Ford. Only 10 episodes were aired.

15. LAURIE FORMAN SUFFERED A TRAGIC END.

Lisa Robin Kelly was taken off the show halfway through season three, returning in the fifth season only to be replaced by actress Christina Moore. "I was guilty of a drinking problem,” Kelly said in 2012. “And I ran.” Kelly passed away on August 13, 2013, after entering a rehabilitation facility; the coroner ruled the cause as being from multiple drug intoxication.
For Charlie Manuel, for Don Mattingly, for Jim Leyland, the end may not necessarily be near.

But the end of their contracts? Now that is definitely near.

Those three household names find themselves part of an odd phenomenon that is rocking baseball this season, pretty much out of nowhere:

Managers in the last year of their contracts.

Amazingly, 10 of the 30 managers in the big leagues don't have a deal that extends beyond this season. And no one we've surveyed can recall anything like it.

Ready for the roll call? Here we go:

Charlie Manuel (Phillies) Don Mattingly (Dodgers) Jim Leyland (Tigers) Joe Girardi (Yankees) Terry Collins (Mets) Davey Johnson (Nationals) Ned Yost (Royals) Eric Wedge (Mariners) Walt Weiss (Rockies) Ron Gardenhire (Twins).

In 2013? They're all totally in charge. In 2014? Uh, we'll get back to you.

“ Every contract I've had, I've worked all the way to the end, until the contract expired. I was never uncomfortable with that. So if I'm hiring people who are uncomfortable with that, I'm hiring the wrong people. ” -- Yankees GM Brian Cashman

Judging by all the front-office folks whose response to this was "I didn't even realize that," it's safe to say this is more of a coincidence than some gigantic management conspiracy. But it does reflect a change in what once passed for conventional thinking:

We can't hang our manager out there on the last year of his deal. The players will walk all over him.

That may have been the theory once upon a time. But nowadays, says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, "I think it's something from out of the past that doesn't exist in the present anymore. It's one of those old things that was widely accepted -- and then a lot of smart people said, 'Why?'"

The Yankees have been asking, "Why?" for years, actually. For a decade, it's been their policy, for the most part, not to extend anyone's contract -- manager or player -- until it expired and they had to make a decision.

Somehow or other, they've managed to function just fine. Imagine that.

"Derek Jeter played to the end of his contract and went to free agency," Cashman said. "Mariano Rivera played to the end of his contract and went to free agency. The general manager worked to the end of his contract. Every contract I've had, I've worked all the way to the end, until the contract expired. I was never uncomfortable with that. So if I'm hiring people who are uncomfortable with that, I'm hiring the wrong people."

In fact, Cashman's manager, Girardi, doesn't appear to be in any significant jeopardy of losing his job -- even though the manager of the New York Yankees clearly would not top the list of America's most secure gigs. But all of these situations are different. So let's run through them, saving the most volatile for last.

Joe Girardi, New York Yankees: He's been through this last dance before -- in 2010 -- and got a new three-year deal out of it, even after a season in which the Yankees got bludgeoned by the Rangers in the ALCS. So there has been very little buzzing about Girardi's job status -- and Cashman says there shouldn't be. "We have a guy in that office who knows he'd have no problem getting a job [if he got let go]," the GM said. "And we should all have that confidence in ourselves if we're in that situation. If you're really good at what you do, things take care of themselves. That's the way we should all look at it."

Three-time manager of the year Jim Leyland, 68, is in his 22nd season and eighth with Detroit. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok

Davey Johnson, Washington Nationals: No big job crisis here. Johnson and GM Mike Rizzo agreed back in November 2012 this would be Johnson's last season as manager. Then he'll resume his role as a special advisor to Rizzo next year. Nothing more to see here. Move along.

Jim Leyland, Detroit Tigers: The Tigers let Leyland manage out his previous contract last season, squirming right to the finish line before giving him a new deal the day after the World Series. But had they not charged from behind to win the division in the final week and a half, there's an excellent chance someone else would be managing this team right now. At this point, Leyland and his boss, Dave Dombrowski, seem to have an understanding that Leyland has reached the stage of his career where it makes more sense for both of them to operate on a year-to-year basis. One of these years, Leyland will move on and say it was his decision -- or have it spun as a mutual decision. But the best description of his status at this point is "open-ended."

Terry Collins, New York Mets: Collins is in the final year of his original two-year contract, which included an option for 2013. His GM, Sandy Alderson, has consistently said lots of good things about him. So there's no indication that Collins is in any imminent danger of losing his job. But Alderson has made it clear he believes in maintaining the flexibility to re-evaluate the manager and his coaching staff in a year. So a lot depends both on how this season plays out and how ready to contend the Mets believe they'll be heading into next season. One baseball exec who speaks frequently with Alderson told Rumblings that Collins' situation is so wide-open, "I don't think you can read into it, one way or the other."

Ned Yost, Kansas City Royals: This one is a puzzler. Yost and GM Dayton Moore have a great relationship, and baseball people who know them both say they'd be shocked if Yost isn't back next year. Nevertheless, if you have a good memory, you'll remember that when the Royals picked up Yost's option for this season about 14 months ago, Moore said he wanted to avoid speculation that Yost was some sort of lame duck. There has been no attempt to dodge that speculation this year -- not yet, at least. But one longtime friend of Moore says he's "practically 100 percent certain" Yost isn't going anywhere. So is that convincing enough?

Walt Weiss, who coached a high school team last year, is off to a 14-7 start as manager of the first-place Rockies. Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post

Walt Weiss, Colorado Rockies: It's hard to remember any first-year manager who agreed to take the job on a one-year deal. But Weiss stepped into this position with remarkable confidence in himself -- and with the assurance, from people he'd known for years, that they wanted him to do this for as long as he wanted to do it. "If we gave him a two-, three- or four-year deal," said Rockies GM Dan O'Dowd, "then, at some point, he would be entering the last year of his contract, and that, unfortunately, would be the focal point of the media. So perhaps, if this can turn into how we chose to define this particular topic -- a relationship built on something bigger -- then that question will never be the focal point of his position, and he can do what he does best and enjoys most -- managing his players and not answering questions about his job status!" Hmmm. We think he just summed up why this tide is shifting about as well as it can be summed up.

Eric Wedge, Seattle Mariners: The Mariners have said very little about Wedge's status as he heads into the final season of a three-year deal. And GM Jack Zduriencik declined the opportunity to discuss it for this opus, saying it was club policy not to comment on anyone's contract issues. But this feels like a moment in time where everyone involved in the running of this team is on notice. If this turns into One Of Those Years, Wedge, Zduriencik and the folks around them could all start wondering about their job security. But it's way too soon to start sounding those alarms. In truth, the manager's seat isn't any hotter, or cooler, than anyone else's seat on this team -- not at the moment, anyway.

TRIVIALITY

Don Mattingly, Los Angeles Dodgers: Another fascinating situation. It would be a stretch to say Mattingly is "in trouble." He and GM Ned Colletti have an excellent relationship. So unless something goes haywire, Mattingly is more likely to get an extension than a layoff notice. On the other hand, the manager told the Los Angeles Times last winter that he asked the team to pick up his 2014 option, just so he could avoid being a topic in pieces like this -- and "they said that wasn't the plan for me or my coaches." So this is a situation to watch carefully: We're talking about a team with a $217 million payroll. A team with an ownership icon (Magic Johnson) who already has said that anything less than a trip to the World Series would make this season a failure. And a team that hasn't played well early. So anything is possible. Mattingly's players clearly like him, and "they know he's on the last year of his deal," said one executive who has been following this saga. "So if they like the guy so much -- if they don't want anything to happen to him -- they can make that a non-issue by playing better. Can't they?"

Ron Gardenhire, Minnesota Twins: Nobody on this list has managed his team for more seasons than Gardenhire has managed the Twins (12). He and GM Terry Ryan have a long history and a great understanding of each other and their franchise. But that doesn't mean the manager can count on being around for another 12 years -- or even another 12 months. And the manager gets that. When Ryan informed him last winter it wasn't the right time to drop an extension on him after two straight last-place seasons, Gardenhire told him, "I haven't earned anything." This has been one of baseball's most stable franchises. But Ryan did push for big changes in Gardenhire's coaching staff this season -- a development that tells you anything could happen. But as one exec who once had ties to the Twins told Rumblings, "It's hard to picture Gardy not being the manager and Terry not being the general manager. They've been embedded together for so long." So could Gardenhire be gone if this season spins the wrong way? "He could," the exec said. "But I wouldn't bet on it."

Charlie Manuel has never had a losing season as Phillies manager. Steve Nesius/Reuters

Charlie Manuel, Philadelphia Phillies: We've saved the most interesting name on this list for last. Manuel is the winningest manager in Phillies history. He has never had a losing season in any of his eight seasons in Philadelphia. He's one of two managers in team history to have won a World Series. And he told Rumblings again this week that "I plan to keep managing -- unless I decide all of a sudden I don't want to do it." So why does his job status feel so uncomfortable? Because there's a vibe around his team that the men upstairs think it might be time for a new voice, even though GM Ruben Amaro Jr. insists it's only the media that is making an issue of this. "Honestly," Amaro told Rumblings, "I don't think about his situation at all." Asked if he was concerned about how his players would respond to having a manager with an uncertain future, Amaro said: "I don't think the players give two craps about it. I don't think it's even a factor, not with our guys I don't know if a contract for the manager should be a motivating factor for any player. They should be motivated by winning. That's it." Meanwhile, Manuel says this only affects him when people like us ask about it. "I'm still the same guy," he said. "If I had a 10-year contract, I'd think the same way and manage the same way." But he clearly wants to keep chugging along, and management clearly hasn't climbed on board. So at some point, this situation has a chance to fire up. For the moment, though, "I find that talking about it is not good," Manuel said. "It's not good for me or anyone else."

The fascinating part about this whole subject is that if you were to compile a list of managers who could be "in trouble," it wouldn't be confined to the 10 men in this group. The oddsmakers at Bovada LV just published their "First Manager to Get Fired" odds. And while Manuel topped the charts at 4-1, five of the other 10 names were guys not on the last year of their deals: Bud Black (9-2), Ron Roenicke (7-1), Clint Hurdle (10-1), Mike Scioscia (12-1) and John Gibbons (20-1).

What all of that reminds us, said one National League executive, is that "an extension doesn't guarantee anything." Those extensions, he said, serve more as lovely parting gifts than indicators of job security. So if they don't provide any more security, why do we all get so worked up about them?

The truth is, Tony La Russa won a World Series in the final year of a contract. Joe Torre took the Yankees to two World Series in years his contract was up (and technically managed one of them, in 2001, after his contract was up). And way back when, in another era, Walter Alston managed the Dodgers for 23 years -- on 23 one-year contracts.

So it's not as if this has never happened before. It just never happened all at once before. But now that it has, why do we have a feeling it won't be the last time?

Ready to Rumble

Greinke

Shields

• Got into an interesting debate recently with an American League executive who was extolling the impact James Shields has made on the Royals. He took a position I didn't see coming: If he had a choice of which starter he'd give a nine-figure contract to -- Shields or Zack Greinke -- he'd take (wait for it) Shields.

"Greinke's stuff is a little better," he said. "And on a given day, he can rise to the occasion and just dominate. But there are other days where he almost seems a little disinterested. You never have to worry about that with Shields. He's out there for one reason -- to beat you. And then there's the impact he has on a club on a daily basis. That's one thing about Greinke. He has great stuff. But he gives you none of that."

• Shields has said he's open to sticking around in Kansas City long term. But if he's a $100 million deal waiting to happen, it's hard to find anyone who thinks the Royals could afford that contract.

#50 SP

St. Louis Cardinals

2013 STATS

GM 5

W4

L1

BB1

K37

ERA 1.93

• While we're on the subject of aces with hefty contracts: After the flurry of big-buck extensions settled down around Opening Day, an official of one large-market club said the one monster contract he questioned was Adam Wainwright's five-year, $97.5 million extension with the Cardinals. Well, here we are, three weeks into the season: Wainwight has a 1.93 ERA and a 37-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and you don't hear any more questions, do you?

"The word for that contract in this clubhouse is 'needed,'" said David Freese. "He needed it. We needed it. We all needed Adam Wainwright to be a Cardinal for the rest of his career. Especially with [Chris Carpenter] going down, this clubhouse, this organization, this city needed to have Adam Wainwright around."

Harper

• We all gush over Bryce Harper's power. One scout we talked to gushed about something else: his hustle. "I saw him hit a routine ground ball to shortstop, and I got him running to first in under four seconds," the scout said. "I'll tell you what: If you wanted to find a poster child for how to play major league baseball correctly, you'd choose Bryce Harper."

• You know those rumors that the Mets are "monitoring" Giancarlo Stanton -- the ones that also mention the Marlins would undoubtedly ask for Zack Wheeler and Travis d'Arnaud in return? "I wouldn't give one of those guys for Stanton," said one NL exec. "The catcher has a chance to be a 10-year All-Star. The other guy is one of the best pitching prospects in the game." So there you have it.

#63 SP

Cleveland Indians

2013 STATS

GM 5

W4

L1

BB13

K30

ERA 1.85

• Here's a Trade That Didn't Happen to ponder: Justin Masterson is 4-1, 1.85 for the Indians after five starts. Out in balmy Colorado, Dexter Fowler has out-homered the Marlins (7-6). When the Indians dangled Masterson in the offseason, they asked for Fowler to head the package. That deal was talked about extensively early in the offseason. Never did happen. Think either side would do it today?

• We've made Jean Segura famous for his baserunning. After all, while lots of men can go first to third on you, nobody can go third to first like he does. But Brewers GM Doug Melvin posed a different question about his shortstop: When people talk about the best young shortstops in baseball, how come they never talk about Segura, the centerpiece of last year's Zack Greinke deal?

Good question. Segura hit .313, with a .367 on-base percentage, in his minor league career. He won a batting title in the Dominican last winter. And he's hitting .356/.397/.493 in the big leagues this month. That sure gets our attention.

"He's really been under the radar," Melvin said. "I don't think he's ever listed in the top 25 prospects. But he's 22, going on 23, and he's really opened our eyes. I see people talk about the [Jurickson] Profars and even the Dee Gordons. But they never talk about him. He's an exciting player."

• A scout who was in attendance for the big Stephen Strasburg-Matt Harvey duel in New York last weekend reported: "If you didn't know who was who, you'd have thought Harvey was Strasburg and Strasburg was Harvey. You know, I've always loved Strasburg, and I've given him the highest grade you could give a player. But if you were to ask me which guy was the better bet to be great for the next five years, I'd say Harvey. His stuff's just as good. And he has a better delivery." Wow. Matt Harvey Fever. He's got it.

TRIVIA ANSWER

• Finally, people gush about Harvey's fastball and changeup, and you can understand why. But the pitch that has truly changed his career is his slider, which we've even heard opposing hitters describe as "unhittable." Right. As in literally unhittable. He has thrown it 97 times this season -- and given up one hit.

Incredibly, that's a pitch he virtually never threw in the minor leagues. But Harvey told Rumblings that when he got to the big leagues, he showed pitching coach Dan Warthen the grip he used to throw it. Warthen tweaked it slightly. And next thing Harvey knew, even he couldn't believe how hard he could throw it and how much it moved. So what's the secret? "Basically," he said, "I just offset the grip on my fastball -- and throw the crap out of it."

Modern biomechanics at work, ladies and gentlemen. Or something like that.

Tweets of the Week

• If we're reading this right, our favorite legendary 19th-century fireballer wasn't real impressed that the Rockies and Braves teed it up Tuesday in 23-degree temperatures:

I once pitched in 23 degree weather. I shot a buffalo, wore its hide, and tossed a complete game without complaint. — Old Hoss Radbourn (@OldHossRadbourn) April 23, 2013

• If you're not following Mets public relations witticist Jay Horwitz, why are you on Twitter in the first place?

Novel approach to Dog Day today.Five of 9 Mets starters will be accompanied to their positions by their pet dogs. Hopefully, no accidents. — Jay Horwitz (@Jay_HorwitzPR) April 20, 2013

• And we couldn't resist this quip from Gar Ryness, the fabled Batting Stance Guy, because after we finished laughing, we actually looked this up:

Cleveland up on Houston 14-0. 1st time Cleveland up 14 since Bernie Kosar was released. — Batting Stance Guy (@BattingStanceG) April 21, 2013

Astounding Fact of the Week

OK, the Bernie Kosar thing was a joke. But

This is a 100 percent true fact: The Indians really did take a 14-0 lead in the second inning Saturday. Meanwhile, the Browns have also held a 14-0 lead once

In their last 80 games!

We kid you not. Here at World Rumblings and Grumblings Headquarters, it's the facts and just the facts. You know that.
The Giants spent $200 million on payroll this year, which not only sounds like a lot — it is a lot.

On the other hand, the Dodgers, San Francisco’s archrival in the National League West, spent $300 million.

With San Francisco voters passing Proposition D Tuesday by an almost 3-1 count, the Giants might well have the leverage to erase that $100 million difference in the near future. The proposal allowed for a waiver of height restrictions in the area around AT&T Park, enabling the team to go ahead with their so-called Mission Rock proposal.

The club wants to build a high-rise district on a parking lot across from McCovey Cove behind the right field wall. The plans call for three towers that now can reach 240 feet in addition to homes, shops, offices, art studios, parks and a brewery, an area that Giants’ president Larry Baer told the Los Angeles Times will “have a Fenway feel, a Wrigleyville feel.”

And catching the Dodgers may not be the end. With sellouts in 408 consecutive games, the Giants already generate revenue in excess of every club in baseball other than the Yankees and the Dodgers. That will spike when the debt on AT&T Park is paid off down the line.

And while the Giants have won three of the last six World Series titles, Baer sees the Mission Rock project as a hedge against an inevitable downturn in on-field performance.

“The biggest single thing for us going forward is that we have a real estate project,” Baer said. “That is going to help us create a very important neighborhood around the ballpark and allow us to keep up with teams that are in larger markets.

“We can convert to 18 million homes for television like New York has, or 12 million homes like L.A. has. We’re at 7 million homes. To make up for the disparity, that is going to be one difference-maker for us.”

One more thing. The Giants may have sold every ticket at its disposal this year, but the Giants’ attendance was 400,000 behind the Dodgers, who don’t always sell out, but who always play in the park with the most seats in baseball.
The Nasa 'space drink' that can rub out sun spots: Fruit juice developed to protect astronauts reduces wrinkles and reverses the telltale signs of ageing in four months

These startling images may prove that a fruit drink developed by Nasa to protect astronauts from radiation can rejuvenate the skin.

A groundbreaking study has shown that the concoction, known as AS10, dramatically reduces wrinkles, blemishes and sun damage after four months.

Visia photographs – which reveal the condition of the skin below the surface by using different types of light exposure – were taken of 180 participants at the start of the trial, and again after four months of drinking two shots of AS10 a day. By the end UV spots were reduced by 30 per cent and wrinkles by 17 per cent.

Out of this world: The dramatic effect of AS10 on pigmentation as seen through Visia photographs, before on the left and after on the right

AS10 was developed as a nutritional supplement for astronauts to protect them from the damaging effects of high levels of radiation outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

The drink contains a blend of fruits including cupuacu (a Brazilian fruit from the cacao plant family), acai, acerola, prickly pear and yumberry, which all provide vitamins and phytochemicals – compounds known to block the harmful effects of radiation. Other ingredients are grape, green tea, pomegranate and vegetables.

Radiation particles alter oxygen molecules in the body to create reactive oxygen species (ROS) – so-called ‘free radicals’ which damage cells in a process known as oxidative stress. This process has been linked to diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. The toxic molecules are also thought to play a role in the skin ageing process.

ROS are created naturally within the body as cells generate energy, but also through environmental factors such as chemicals and ultraviolet light from the sun – the strongest stress to skin. Mobile phone radiation, cigarette smoke and alcohol also generate ROS.

Space-age: AS10 was developed in conjunction with Nasa for the Astronaut Programme to ensure they received enough fruit and vegetables

‘Think of them as little Pac-men taking bites out of molecules that are essential for cells to function,’ says Dr Aaron Barson, the nutritional scientist from Utah who carried out the AS10 study after patients reported dramatic improvement from the drink.

AS10 is thought to improve skin condition because the drink’s large quantities of antioxidants ward off oxidative stress, allowing the skin to heal naturally. Antioxidants attach themselves to ROS and neutralise them before they cause damage.

Dr Barson says: ‘The skin is the first body tissue to be exposed to UV rays and we know it is sensitive to oxidative stress. Our study shows it greatly benefits from a reduction in this stress. The effects of oxidative stress on the skin can be quickly modified and the skin can heal itself by drinking AS10.’

Dr Barson suggests that the results may have been even better had the trial been conducted during the winter, when exposure to ultraviolet light would have been less.

A second, larger study is planned this summer to investigate for how long the effects last and whether skin condition reaches a plateau or deteriorates once the drink is no longer consumed.

The main drawback is the high price of the drink. The women in the trial drank a sherry glass – 60ml – of AS10 a day. At £30 per 750ml bottle, the cost was just under £300 over the four months.

Cosmetic dermatologist Dr Sam Bunting says: ‘The Visia scans show a marked improvement in the level of UV spots, which represent sun damage beneath the surface of the skin. The kind of interventions that might deliver this level of improvement are glycolic skin peels, which use acids to strip away layers of skin, retinoids, high-potency Vitamin C and hydroquinone with the use of sun block on a daily basis.

‘If these changes were due to AS10, this would be of great interest as UV is responsible for 80 per cent of the skin changes we associate with ageing.’

She adds that although AS10 might well do what it claims, a critical appraisal of the methods in the study would be required to back this up.

Cosmetic dermatologist Dr Mervyn Patterson, of Woodford Medical, agrees. He says: ‘These images show a reduction in the degree of pigmentation on the skin caused by UV exposure. This could be due to the drink.’

But he says daily use of sunscreen with UVB/UVA sun protection factor of 50+ could deliver results on a par with AS10. ‘It is more likely to protect the skin, resulting in reductions in redness and pigmentation and a subtle reduction in wrinkles.’
Google has released the final preview of Android Oreo 8.1, an update to its Linux-based mobile platform which will activate the Pixel Visual Core co-processor built into the company's Pixel 2 smartphones for the first time.

Unveiled back in October, the Pixel Visual Core marks the first time a Google-designed co-processor has found its way into one of the company's consumer products. An eight-core Image Processing Unit (IPU) connected to an ARM Cortex-A53 general-purpose processor and PCI Express and Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) links, the Visual Core has been present but deactivated in every single Pixel 2 smartphone the company has sold.

In Android Oreo 8.1, though, the chip will be activated for the first time. Announced as part of the final developer preview release ahead of public availability, the software update will activate the Pixel Visual Core - though only through a 'new developer option' rather than as an on-by-default feature.

'Using Pixel Visual Core, HDR+ [High Dynamic Range Plus photographic processing] can run 5x faster and at less than one-tenth the energy than running on the application processor,' explained Google's Ofer Shacham and Masumi Reynders in the original technology announcement. 'HDR+ will be the first application to run on Pixel Visual Core. Notably, because Pixel Visual Core is programmable, we’re already preparing the next set of applications. The great thing is that as we port more machine learning and imaging applications to use Pixel Visual Core, Pixel 2 will continuously improve.'

The developer toggle in Android 8.1 will allow early adopters to activate accelerated HDR+ using the Pixel 2's native camera app, with support for third-party camera packages using the Android camera application programming interface (API) to follow. Thus far, though, Google has not indicated what other tasks it plans to offload to the Pixel Visual Core, a device which boasts performance in the range of three trillion operations per second (TOPS) through its 4,096 Halide and TensorFlow compatible arithmetic and logic units (ALUs).
ABOUT THE STORY Arif Ayaz Parrey’s achievement in this story is the evocation of an entire climate of fear and suspicion in Kashmir without the use of any characters or events. The story works purely as a text about another text—a torture manual allegedly used in the repression of the insurgency—and through its ironic repetition of the language and categories, at once bureaucratic and sinister, of the manual. The only person whom we know by the name in the story—the “Major Ali” of the title—appears to be fictional twice over. Even his reality as a character in fiction is disturbed by the notion that he may have first been invented by the nameless, shadowy powers whose motives and modus operandi the story describes.

Parrey drops us into a maze of smoke and mirrors, disorienting us in a manner analogous to the “sustainable and ever-widening cycle of distrust” that the torture manual seeks to generate among “the subject population”. It’s not even clear where the narrator himself stands, or which of the manual’s five classes of Kashmiris on the resistor/collaborator axis he inhabits, or—most disturbingly—whether he may himself be “Major Ali” in a new guise, now a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In this way, Parrey renovates the narrative tactic of self-reflexivity—a playful gesture in the work of Laurence Sterne or Beckett or Borges, but here, the default setting of all human activity when subjected to the modern state’s mania for control and power.

The Torture Manual of Major Ali
A Taunton woman arrested Monday afternoon on drunk driving charges was carrying a lizard in her bra, police said.

Amy Rebello-McCarthy, 39, veered off the road and struck half a dozen mailboxes before crashing onto a lawn, police said. When police arrived around 1:30 p.m., Rebello-McCarthy slurred her words as she asked officers to call a tow truck. All four tires were flat, the airbags had been deployed, and the bumpers were missing, police said.

When police searched her car, they found an open bottle of brandy in the front seat along with empty bottles of root beer-flavored nips, police said.

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Rebello-McCarthy’s blood alcohol content was measured at nearly twice the legal limit, police said.

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A 22-year-old Waltham man, Martin Kyewalyanga, was in the passenger seat when the car crashed, witnesses told police. While police were talking to Rebello-McCarthy, Kyewalyanga was smoking a cigarette near the back of the car, where gasoline was dripping. Police asked him to step away from the vehicle, fearing that he might start a fire.

Kyewalyanga was placed under arrest for his own safety because he was so inebriated, police said.

As she was arrested, Rebello-McCarthy told police officers that she was carrying a bearded dragon in her bra. The lizard was placed “in a red bandana for safe keeping,” police wrote in their report.

“It faces no charges at this time,” police wrote in a Facebook post that had some fun at Rebello-McCarthy’s expense.

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She has been arraigned 109 times in her adult life, police said.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” police wrote in the post.

Maddie Kilgannon can be reached at maddie.kilgannon@globe.com . Follow her on Twitter @MaddieKilgannon
Jeb! waiting for people to show up to his Republican party. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images Entertainment, D. Anschutz/Thinkstock.

Mike Murphy finds it all very funny that people think Jeb Bush is in trouble.

The head of Bush’s $100 million super PAC, Right to Rise, considers most political punditry this cycle to be stupid. Conceded. But both the stupid and occasional non-stupid pundits all agree on one thing: Things aren’t going well for Bush, and one cannot assume that the old rules governing Republican presidential nominating contests will inevitably save him.

Murphy outlined his thinking in a rare extended interview with Bloomberg Politics. Why? Most practically, to signal Right to Rise’s thinking to the official Bush campaign and leery donors. Or, in Murphy’s words: “[W]e thought it would be good to kind of go through our theory of the race in a more distributed way.”

His theory is lacking. Nowhere, between all his mockery, does he get to the heart of the matter: why people don’t like Jeb Bush right now, and how Right to Rise intends to change that.

“What I find is we’re in this funny casino of the pre-season now,” he says, “where the complete sum of pundit knowledge in this race, with a few rare exceptions, is based on national polling that in my view is completely meaningless.” Zuh? There will always be a fair share of bad national poll coverage. If there’s more of it this time, Murphy can blame the Republican National Committee and its media partners for pegging debate participation to national polling status. But it’s not like Bush is only doing badly in national polls that don’t matter, anyway. He’s doing poorly in polls of early states, too. Bush is doing lousy in Iowa. That’s fine: Bush is one thing and Iowa Republicans are a whole other thing. But he’s also performing lousy in New Hampshire, a state he has spent an extraordinary amount of time in and has been advertising in. He is not leading in Florida, his natural firewall, or South Carolina, the GOP establishment’s traditional firewall for their chosen representative.

How important are early state polls? They can and do fluctuate along with everything else. Murphy, whether he means to or not, implies that early state polls are important, because he dramatically lowers Bush’s expectations in those early states based on how poorly things have been going. That, as the Washington Post’s David Weigel points out, is really the most eye-popping exchange in the interview: Murphy argues that Bush doesn’t need to win any states for the first 45 days of contests in order to win the nomination—people will know that he has the money to compete for the long haul, the “little guys” will flame out, and then the real race will begin later on in big-state, winner-take-all races.

It’s an arguable theory. Murphy is not the first to suggest that super PACs like his extend the primary map and downplay the traditional importance of the early states. But Murphy is supposed to be the one arguing that, writ-large, the old rules of nominating—in which party voters eventually ditch flings and flock to the more electable, “establishment” pick—still apply. Arguing that the eventual nominee need not win (or even place!) in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina this time around punctures his underlying premise—that this time isn’t all that different.

This is second-order stuff, anyway. Whether the rules are different or not, the central problem for Bush is the same: Voters simply do not care for him.

Being relatively liked by human beings who vote in elections is an important first step toward winning elections. We need not pay much attention to Bush’s top-line number in national polls, but we can look to his favorability ratings to see what sort of space he has to work with. Monmouth University’s latest national poll, released this morning, finds Bush at 5 percent nationally. Whatever. Skip to the favorability ratings, though, and the picture somehow looks even more grim. Of the six candidates’ whose favorables were polled among Republicans, Bush is the only one underwater—at 37 to 44 percent. This is indicative of the trend, and it corresponds with what any person paying vague attention to the news has seen.

Murphy is just spinning, same as anyone else who works for Bush. Of course there are going to be some gaps in what he says versus what is really happening. But if he’s going to prattle on about how the media has invented a sorry state of affairs for Bush’s candidacy that isn’t backed by evidence, well, we hate to break it to him.

If anything, the media has given Bush too much credit due to his last name and his family’s reputation for winning presidential nominations. Who in their right mind would believe that this visibly poor campaigner, who’s fifth-placing it every which way, whose fundamentals show little room for growth, who’s out-of-step with the temperament of his party’s voters, whose cash advantage isn’t really in another league anymore, and whose general election viability isn’t looking so hot is going to be restored by the natural laws of presidential nominating? Only the stupid, stupid media would believe that this guy has a shot.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The move is part of the government's effort to control net migration, as Hugh Pym reports

Thousands of foreign nurses working in junior posts in the UK could be forced to return home under new immigration rules, union leaders have warned.

A new pay threshold for migrants means non-European workers will have to leave the UK after six years if they are not earning at least £35,000.

The Royal College of Nursing said the rules would "cause chaos" for the NHS and waste money spent on recruitment.

The Home Office said the rules would help reduce demand for migrant labour.

And Prime Minister David Cameron even got drawn into the issue, saying more homegrown nurses were in the process of being recruited.

The move is part of the government's effort to control net migration, but the union says that by 2017 more than 3,300 NHS nurses could be affected.

And by the end of the decade the numbers could be double that - a potential waste of nearly £40m when all the costs of recruitment are taken into account, the RCN says.

There are more than 400,000 nurses working in the NHS and over 600,000 registered to work.

The warning comes as the RCN's annual conference gets under way in Bournemouth.

More difficult

RCN general secretary Peter Carter said: "The immigration rules will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services.

"At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas."

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the move was "totally illogical" as there is currently a "major shortage of nurses", leading to many NHS trusts spending "tens of millions" to recruit from overseas.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption RCN's Peter Carter: "[Foreign nurses] will have to leave their homes in the UK, many of them now have families here... it's a truly deplorable state of affairs"

Dr Carter also stressed that most nurses earn "nowhere near" £35,000, with most on salaries of between £21,000 and £28,000 a year.

Due to cuts to nurse-training places, trusts are being forced into relying on overseas recruitment as well as temporary staff just to provide safe staffing.

The long-term solution is to train more nurses in the UK, but in the interim, foreign nurses filled the gap, he added.

Nurse pay and roles Band Pay range Typical role 5 £21,692 - £28,180 Entry level nurse or midwife 6 £26,041 - £34,876 Staff nurse, such as theatre nurse 7 £31,072 - £40,694 Senior nurse, such as ward sister / team leader 8 £39,632 - £81,618 Nurse consultant or matron

Source: Royal College of Nursing and NHS England

He said of the new rules: "It can't be morally or ethically right but will also have a huge impact on the ability of the health service to carry on in the way it has."

A Home Office spokesman said: "As the prime minister has made clear, the government wants to reduce the demand for migrant labour.

"We changed the settlement rules in 2011 to break the link between coming to work in the UK and staying here permanently."

He said employers had had four years to prepare for the changes, adding: "There are exemptions to this threshold where the UK has a shortage."

At the moment nurses are not on that exemption list, but the spokesman said it was possible they could still be added if evidence showed this was needed.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron said he did not believe the immigration rules would lead to a shortfall of nurses.

"We have got a massive training programme for nurses at the moment, there are something like 8,000 more nurses in the NHS today than when I became Prime Minister. The training programme will continue," he said.

"But, crucially, we have an organisation called the Migration Advisory Committee and they advise us about which occupations to put on the so-called shortage occupations list, the ones where they fear skills shortages will develop.

"They haven't put nursing on that shortage occupation list and I think we should listen to their advice above all."

Analysis - Hugh Pym, BBC health editor

Nursing shortages and spiralling agency costs have generated intense pressures on hospital finances. Calls by regulators for higher staff numbers following scandals such as mid- Staffs have resulted in higher demand for nurses at a time of limited supply.

In effect, the RCN is saying the Government is shooting itself in the foot by pursuing a policy which could squeeze the supply of nurses even further. Making nurses from outside the European Economic Area quit the UK if they don't earn enough could deter their compatriots from seeking work here at a time of rising demand for qualified nurses in most leading economies.

The other side of the debate is the suggestion that the UK should train more homegrown nurses and not rely so much on migrant staff. The tighter immigration rules do not effect recruitment from inside the EEA so there is still a supply of trained foreign health staff. The Home Office, responsible for immigration policy, and the Department of Health, anxious to ensure there are enough nurses, will no doubt be engaged in some full and frank discussions on this vexed issue.

The Economist Intelligence Unit said any problems might be short-lived since there are now more nurse training posts in place and the Migration Advisory Committee has a system in place to identify skills shortages.

But Labour's Shadow Health Minister Andrew Gwynne said cuts to nurse training had left NHS hospitals with "no option but to recruit from overseas or hire expensive agency nurses."

And British Medical Association Dr Mark Porter, speaking at the doctor's conference which is also taking place this week, also came to the defence of people from abroad who are working in the NHS.

"What did we hear in the election campaign from politicians of several parties?

"We were told immigrants are filling up our GP surgeries and our hospitals.

"Well they are. They're called doctors. And nurses. And porters and cleaners and clinical scientists. And without them, the NHS would be on its knees."
Amsterdam Releases Pair of Adventure Brews at Retail Stores

TORONTO, ON – Amsterdam Brewery has announced the retail release of two Adventure Brews, the brewery’s on-going series of one-off, collaborative and small batch beers.

Available now in 473 ml cans is Starke Pilsner, a beer that has been a favourite at the Amsterdam BrewHouse since it was first made available there on draught last year. The 5.8% abv Czech-style lager is described as “a refreshing golden Pilsner with a rich body and some spicy, grassy notes from the hops as well as a slight resiny finish.”

Out in 650 ml bottles is Shape Shifter, a 10% abv strong ale brewed in collaboration with Indie Ale House. Aged in Cognac and Madeira barrels for 5 months, it’s described as having “flavours of dark fruit and vanilla with a sturdy oak, treacle and caramel.”

Both beers are available now in the retail stores at the Amsterdam Brewery (45 Esandar Drive) and BrewHouse (245 Queens Quay West) in Toronto.
21 September 2015

Hamilton Zoo’s male Sumatran tiger Oz will not be euthanized following the death of Zoo Curator Samantha Kudeweh yesterday (20 September, 2015).

Lance Vervoort, Hamilton City Council’s General Manager Community, says although Samantha’s death is a tragedy for the wider zoo family and international wildlife conservation community, senior zoo staff have ruled out euthanizing Oz.

“We’re aware there is a lot of interest and speculation around how we manage Oz now, and I want to assure the public and zoo supporters that he will not be put down,” Mr Vervoort says.

“Although there is an inherent risk for zoo professionals who manage big cats like Oz, there is no wider ongoing risk. There is no reason for us to put Oz down.”

Mr Vervoort says the decision not to euthanize Oz was made by zoo senior staff today. They have advised the Ministry for Primary Industries – the Government agency responsible for overseeing zoo and wildlife park operations in New Zealand – of this.

“This is our call, and the decision on Oz rested solely with us,” Mr Vervoort says. “Oz is a significant animal for his species. He is the father of our two cubs, and he is vital to the ongoing breeding programme to conserve this rare species."

Mr Vervoort says the widely held view among zoo professionals was that Oz’s attack on Samantha was in line with his natural instincts.

Hamilton Zoo will reopen on Thursday, and Mr Vervoort says some of the zoo’s five Sumatran tigers will be on display. No decision has been made on whether visitors to the zoo will be able to see Oz.

Mr Vervoort says the zoo’s popular Tiger Talks, Eye 2 Eye and Face 2 Face encounters for all species have been suspended until further notice to allow zoo staff time and space to grieve for their friend and colleague. Those aspects of the zoo experience will be assessed on a weekly basis.

Mr Vervoort says Hamilton Zoo will not be commenting on tiger management procedures until all investigations have been completed.

“We’re firmly focussed on supporting Samantha’s family, the zoo team, and make sure we conduct thorough and complete investigations into this tragic incident.”

Mr Vervoort says Hamilton Zoo’s phone lines and social media channels had been inundated with messages of support from around the country following Samantha’s death.

“Our team is still coming to terms with what has happened, and the show of support from our community and the zoo industry worldwide has been very touching and hugely appreciated.”

Mr Vervoort says Samantha’s family has asked for ongoing privacy and time to grieve while arrangements are made for a service to celebrate her life.

Download the audio statement from Lance Vervoort (mp3).

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Jeff Neems

Communication Advisor

07 838 6509

021 818 564

jeff.neems@hcc.govt.nz
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a warm meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday that stood in sharp contrast to her growing split with President Trump. (Filip Singer/European Pressphoto Agency)

President Trump escalated his feud with Berlin on Tuesday, even as Germany’s leader and Trump’s own spokesman tried to defuse the conflict, which has sent tremors through Washington’s core postwar alliances.

Before the presidential tweets began flying early Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed the importance of Germany’s ties to the United States. But she pointedly did not back down from earlier comments about Europe’s need to rely on itself rather than its friends.

The dispute started as Trump sped through meetings in Europe last week and appeared to leave a trail of bruises in his wake. It heated up after Merkel did little over the weekend to hide her disappointment with Trump’s refusal to commit Washington to the climate change treaty. And it was further inflamed Tuesday at 6:40 a.m. Washington time when Trump fired a white-hot shot straight at Berlin’s glass-and-concrete chancellery.

“We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change,” Trump wrote in his early-morning tweet.

The fight has had few obvious practical consequences so far. But Merkel’s meetings this week — first a chummy meeting with India’s leader on Tuesday and then a sit-down with the Chinese prime minister on Wednesday — were bracing reminders of the trade ties being forged outside the United States as Washington moves toward a sharply more nationalist and protectionist agenda.

(Reuters)

Merkel refused to give ground Tuesday, even as she sought to ease the dispute with a rhetorical hug.

“Transatlantic relations are of paramount importance,” Merkel said alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Berlin. “What I did was merely to point out that in light of the present situation, there are yet more reasons that we have to take our destiny in Europe into our own hands.”

[As Merkel seeks allies elsewhere, Modi visits Berlin bursting with friendliness]

The Modi meeting was planned long before the dust-up with Trump. But the cheerful body language between the two leaders was difficult to miss.

“We are meant for each other,” Modi said to Merkel, smiling widely, as both leaders made positive comments about a European Union-India trade deal in the works.

German officials — who say that the United States remains Germany’s most important international ally and an important partner whose friendship they want to maintain — feel that Trump has prioritized relations with authoritarian nations such as Saudi Arabia instead of democratic allies. Many were shocked when Trump declared in Riyadh that “we are not here to lecture” the mostly unelected assembled leaders — and then blasted European allies in Brussels for not spending enough on defense.

That led Merkel to conclude that she needs to advocate a sharply more pro-European agenda at home ahead of September elections, one ally said. She said Sunday at a beer-hall political rally that Europe can no longer fully rely on others, a message clearly about Washington, even if it was aimed largely at her own voters.

1 of 60 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Trump’s first trip overseas as president View Photos The U.S. president traveled to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome, Belgium and Sicily, Italy. Caption The U.S. president traveled to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome, Belgium and Sicily, Italy. May 27, 2017 German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, speaks to President Donald Trump as Tunisia's President Beji Caid Essebsi listens during an expanded session at the Group of Seven Summit in Taormina, Italy. Philippe Wojazer/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.

“It was mostly to say we have to strengthen Europe. It was not anti-Trump,” said Norbert Röttgen, a close Merkel ally who is the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the lower house of Germany’s Parliament.

“You have to explain to your voters what we make of the experience of the last days,” Röttgen said. “Trump, he is an unprecedented president. He calls into question by the way of his behavior, by what he is saying, by what he is not saying, the foundation of this alliance, and you have to give an answer to that. And the answer of the chancellor is that we have to bring into this alliance, not against this alliance, but into this alliance, a stronger German hand.”

With Germany’s elections drawing closer, Merkel has been forced to turn her attention to her own voters — most of whom loathe Trump and staunchly oppose increasing defense spending, one of his key demands. She is seeking a fourth term in office and has rejected most of Trump’s criticisms as baseless.

[Even Angela Merkel’s political rivals are on her side against Trump]

Even before Trump’s victory last year, Merkel was increasing defense spending, pushing up the budget by $27 billion over the next three years. That would almost double current levels — but it would still be dwarfed by the $664 billion the United States spends every year.

Now Merkel needs to convince German voters that defense increases are in their own interest, rather than a response to Trump. In a preview of election-season arguments, leading Social Democrats said Monday that Merkel should have openly opposed Trump from the start rather than trying to work with him at first.

“Merkel needs to put some distance between herself and Trump, who is exceptionally unpopular in Germany,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel in northern Germany.

But there are practical limits to any German split from Washington, Dirsus said. Germany is not militarily independent and is far from becoming so. And the United States remains an important trade partner.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that there was no dispute between Trump and Merkel.

“I think the relationship that the president has had with Merkel he would describe as fairly unbelievable,” Spicer said.

But Europeans are growing weary of the message gap between Trump and the rest of his circle. They are still searching for which side to give greater weight — and last week’s trip tipped the balance toward the president.

“Europeans think they are now being treated worse by Trump than countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia,” said Stephan Bierling, an expert on transatlantic relations at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

The bilateral strains mean that the United States has, to some extent, lost the trust of one of Europe's most pro-American leaders. The German chancellor, the most powerful politician in Europe, grew up in East Germany, and her upbringing there has long been credited for her staunch support for closer European-U.S. ties.

“Given her experience with the Cold War, Merkel has long upheld and defended American ideals. But the belief in shared values has been shattered by the Trump administration,” Bierling said.

Noack reported from Berlin.

Read more:

Alternately charming and boorish, Trump plays the role of a lifetime overseas

Trump scolds world leaders at NATO ceremony

Following Trump’s trip, Merkel says Europe can’t rely on ‘others.’ She means the U.S.
It's been another turbulent year for developer Evolution Studios, but the Runcorn-based firm has done right by its fans. DriveClub may have suffered some serious server issues at launch, but the studio both rectified those and delivered arguably the best Season Pass on the PlayStation 4 to date. Sadly, it's starting to run out of road.

At least, that's what we thought. It was believed that the title's last add-on packs were due out later this month, but game director Paul Rustchynsky has revealed that "more exciting content" is in the works. While this won't be a part of the existing Season Pass, we're excited to see what the studio has in store – some new tracks, perhaps?

Earlier in the year, Sony sadly laid off a number of staff at the British outfit, but maintained that the developer would remain open in order to support its PlayStation 4 exclusive racer as a service. With that in mind, it seems feasible that the organisation may announce some kind of second Season Pass, assuming that the playerbase is still there.

Whatever the case, a new patch will deploy next week, adding Elite Driver levels, improvements to the title's Photo Mode, and much more. Where would you like to see the game go next? Take a sharp hairpin turn in the comments section below.
Melania Trump’s official White House portrait has been released. Here it is.

And… she looks like a model. Probably because she used to be one. So?

The Boston Globe immediately picked the whole thing apart top to bottom.

From the 25-carat diamond ring President Trump bought Melania for their 10-year wedding anniversary “worth more than most Americans would make in 10 lifetimes” to the fact that she’s “not really smiling” like other first ladies or that her “cool, distant gaze seems to evoke her runway-model past more than her current role as the country’s first lady,” the Globe found all kinds of reasons why Melania’s White House portrait sucks.

That, and she… wait for it… crossed her arms:

Boston portrait photographer Ryuji Suzuki, of Beaupix Studio , immediately noticed the first lady’s crossed arms and distant gaze in the new portrait. “There are different opinions about people crossing their arms in portraits,” he said. “If you do it right, you might add a powerful impression, but it often gives you distance. If you want to be friendly and approachable you probably wouldn’t pose like this.”

Like an excited little kid that gets his mom to display his latest finger painting up on the fridge, the Globe then shared the article of the controversy of Melania’s White House portrait on Twitter, zeroing in on her pose of all things and asking, “So what’s with the crossed arms?”

The White House released an official portrait of Melania Trump. So what’s with the crossed arms? https://t.co/H7UszrNJjL pic.twitter.com/R2SxcdZimS — The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 4, 2017

…and that’s when they got owned.

Because… no one ever crosses his or her arms in pictures, right?

Thanks Boston Globe.

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Rihanna Paying UFO Watcher In Mohave Desert To Update Her On Alien Activity?

The 'Diamonds' singer is said to be convinced aliens will land on Earth during her lifetime.

Rihanna has reportedly started paying a UFO watcher out in America to keep an eye on the skies for alien activity.

The 'We Found Love' singer is alleged to have a keen interest in potential Extra Terrestrial activity, and is said to be paying a sky scanner out in the Mojave desert to give her updates.

"Rihanna has always been convinced aliens will land on Earth in her lifetime," a source told the Daily Star this week. "So she's started using the man, who calls himself a sky scanner, to give her information from Nevada on anything that relates to sightings.

"This isn't a fad for Rihanna, she's a total believer and doesn't mind spending her money on it to get results," they claim.

The 'Diamonds' singer is currently out in New York City, while fresh claims suggest she and Chris Brown split earlier this year over their differing views on raising a family.

Check out a picture of Rihanna in New York City this week below (Credit: Splash):

Rihanna's fashion TV series Styled To Rock is due to return in November for a second season.
USA Buys Enough Guns in 3 Months to Outfit the Entire Chinese and Indian Army

Law abiding US citizens bought on average 3,177,256 guns every 3 months in 2008.

EveryTown, USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- In just 3 months Americans bought enough guns to outfit the entire Chinese and Indian army's combined.

“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto WWII

You also bought 1,529,635,000 rounds of ammunition in just the month of December 2008. Yeah that is right, that is Billion with a “B”. This number takes no accounting of reloading or reloaded ammunition.

This is an evaluation of overall firearms and ammunition purchases based on low end numbers per Federal NIC instacheck data base Statistics. The numbers presented are only PART of the overall numbers of arms and ammunition that have been sold. The actual numbers are much higher.

Follow Up:
A 12-hour rooftop riot at a prison in Gippsland overnight is believed to have been sparked in part by a change in toothbrushes as a security measure.

Inmates at the Fulham Correctional Centre near Sale were forced to use flexible toothbrushes after fears that hard toothbrushes could be filed down to make weapons, Corrections Commissioner Bob Hastings said.

Hard to reach ... Rioting inmates on the roof of Fulham Prison, where a change to flexible toothbrushes is believed to have sparked fury. Credit:Geoff Parrington

‘‘This is really a safety issue because unfortunately some of the prisoners with the conventional toothbrushes used those to become weapons,’’ Mr Hastings told the ABC radio today.

‘‘There was also some other discussion up around Fulham around a pay TV deal that was about to finish and move to a more digital free-to-air process. There were also some issues around dress standards that people objected to.’’
Abstract

Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry–funded studies and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.

Introduction

In the 1950s, disproportionately high rates of coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality in American men led to studies of the role of dietary factors, including cholesterol, phytosterols, excessive calories, amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals in influencing CHD risk.1 By the 1960s, 2 prominent physiologists were championing divergent causal hypotheses of CHD2,3: John Yudkin identified added sugars as the primary agent, while Ancel Keys identified total fat, saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol. However, by the 1980s, few scientists believed that added sugars played a significant role in CHD, and the first 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans4 focused on reducing total fat, saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol for CHD prevention.

Although the contribution of dietary sugars to CHD is still debated, what is clear is that the sugar industry, led by the Sugar Association, the sucrose industry’s Washington, DC–based trade association,5 steadfastly denies that there is a relationship between added sugar consumption and CVD risk.6,7 This Special Communication uses internal sugar industry documents to describe how the industry sought to influence the scientific debate over the dietary causes of CHD in the 1950s and 1960s, a debate still reverberating in 2016.

Methods

The Sugar Association evolved from the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), founded in 1943.8 We located correspondence between the SRF and Roger Adams, a professor who served on the SRF’s scientific advisory board (SAB) between 1959 and 1971, in the University of Illinois Archives9 (319 documents totaling 1551 pages). We located correspondence between the SRF and D. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and codirector of the SRF’s first CHD research project from 1965 to 1966,10 in the Harvard Medical Library11 (27 documents totaling 31 pages).

We collected additional SRF materials through a WorldCat search including annual reports, symposium proceedings, and internal reviews of research. We reviewed historical reports and statements contextualizing scientific debates in the 1950s and 1960s on dietary factors causally related to CHD published by the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council (NAS-NRC), US Public Health Service, the American Heart Association (AHA), and American Medical Association (AMA). Findings were assembled chronologically into a narrative case study.

Results

SRF’s Interest in Promoting a Low-Fat Diet to Prevent CHD

Sugar Research Foundation president Henry Hass’s 1954 speech, “What’s New in Sugar Research,”12 to the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists identified a strategic opportunity for the sugar industry: increase sugar’s market share by getting Americans to eat a lower-fat diet: “Leading nutritionists are pointing out the chemical connection between [American’s] high-fat diet and the formation of cholesterol which partly plugs our arteries and capillaries, restricts the flow of blood, and causes high blood pressure and heart trouble… if you put [the middle-aged man] on a low-fat diet, it takes just five days for the blood cholesterol to get down to where it should be… If the carbohydrate industries were to recapture this 20 percent of the calories in the US diet (the difference between the 40 percent which fat has and the 20 percent which it ought to have) and if sugar maintained its present share of the carbohydrate market, this change would mean an increase in the per capita consumption of sugar more than a third with a tremendous improvement in general health.”12

The industry would subsequently spend $600 000 ($5.3 million in 2016 dollars) to teach “people who had never had a course in biochemistry… that sugar is what keeps every human being alive and with energy to face our daily problems.”12

Growing Evidence That Sucrose Elevates Serum Cholesterol Level

In 1962, the SRF became concerned with evidence showing that a low-fat diet high in sugar could elevate serum cholesterol level. At its November 1962 SAB meeting,13 the SRF considered an AMA Council on Foods and Nutrition report, The Regulation of Dietary Fat,14 that, according to the SRF, “indicate[d] that, in low fat diets, the kind of carbohydrate ingested may have an influence on the formation of serum cholesterol.”13 The SAB concluded, “that research developments in the [CHD] field should be watched carefully.”13 The SRF’s vice president and director of research, John Hickson, started closely monitoring the field.15

In December 1964, Hickson reported to an SRF subcommittee15 that new CHD research was a cause for concern: “From a number of laboratories of greater or lesser repute, there are flowing reports that sugar is a less desirable dietary source of calories than other carbohydrates, eg,—Yudkin.”15 Since 1957, British physiologist John Yudkin16 had challenged population studies singling out saturated fat as the primary dietary cause of CHD and suggested that other factors, including sucrose, were at least equally important.17,18

Hickson proposed that the SRF “could embark on a major program” to counter Yudkin and other “negative attitudes toward sugar.”15 He recommended an opinion poll “to learn what public concepts we should reinforce and what ones we need to combat through our research and information and legislative programs” and a symposium to “bring detractors before a board of their peers where their fallacies could be unveiled.”15 Finally, he recommended that SRF fund CHD research: “There seems to be a question as to whether the [atherogenic] effects are due to the carbohydrate or to other nutrient imbalance. We should carefully review the reports, probably with a committee of nutrition specialists; see what weak points there are in the experimentation, and replicate the studies with appropriate corrections. Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors.”15

In 1965, the SRF asked Fredrick Stare, chair of the Harvard University School of Public Health Nutrition Department19 to join its SAB as an ad hoc member.20 Stare was an expert in dietary causes of CHD and had been consulted by the NAS,1 National Heart Institute,21 and AHA,22 as well as by food companies and trade groups.19 Stare’s industry-favorable positions and financial ties would not be widely questioned until the 1970s.23

Link Between Sucrose and Elevated Serum Triglyceride Level

On July 1, 1965, the SRF’s Hickson visited D. Mark Hegsted, a faculty member of Stare’s department,24,25 after publication of articles in Annals of Internal Medicine in June 196526-29 linking sucrose to CHD. The first 2 articles26,27 reported results from an epidemiological study suggesting that blood glucose levels were a better predictor of atherosclerosis than serum cholesterol level or hypertension. The third28(p210) demonstrated that sucrose, more than starches, aggravated carbohydrate-induced hypertriglyceridemia and hypothesized that “perhaps fructose, a constituent of sucrose but not of starch, [was] the agent mainly responsible.” An accompanying editorial29(p1330) argued that these findings corroborated Yudkin’s research and that if elevated serum triglyceride levels were a CHD risk factor, then “sucrose must be atherogenic.”

On July 11, 1965, the New York Herald Tribune ran a full-page article on the Annals articles stating that new research “threatened to tie the whole business [of diet and heart disease] in a knot.”30 It explained that, while sugar’s association with atherosclerosis was once thought to be theoretical and supported by limited studies, the new research strengthened the case that sugar increased the risk of heart attacks.

SRF Funds Project 226: A Literature Review on Sugars, Fats, and CHD

On July 13, 1965, 2 days after the Tribune article, the SRF’s executive committee approved Project 226,31 a literature review on “Carbohydrates and Cholesterol Metabolism” by Hegsted and Robert McGandy, overseen by Stare.10 The SRF initially offered $500 ($3800 in 2016 dollars) to Hegsted and $1000 ($7500 in 2016 dollars) to McGandy, “half to be paid when you start work on the project, and the remainder when you inform me that the article has been accepted for publication.”31 Eventually, the SRF would pay them $650032 ($48 900 in 2016 dollars) for “a review article of the several papers which find some special metabolic peril in sucrose and, in particular, fructose.”31

On July 23, 1965, Hegsted asked Hickson to provide articles relevant to the review.33 Most of the articles Hickson sent34-40 contained findings that could threaten sugar sales, which suggests that the industry expected the review authors to critique them. Hickson also sent the Tribune article30 and a letter to the editor that criticized findings questioning the therapeutic value of corn oil.41,42

On July 30, 1965, Hickson emphasized the SRF’s objective for funding the literature review to Hegsted: “Our particular interest had to do with that part of nutrition in which there are claims that carbohydrates in the form of sucrose make an inordinate contribution to the metabolic condition, hitherto ascribed to aberrations called fat metabolism. I will be disappointed if this aspect is drowned out in a cascade of review and general interpretation.”34

In response, Hegsted assured Hickson that “We are well aware of your particular interest in carbohydrate and will cover this as well as we can.”43

Nine months into the project, in April 1966, Hegsted told the SRF that the review had been delayed because of new evidence linking sugar to CHD: “Every time the Iowa group publishes a paper we have to rework a section in rebuttal [emphasis added].”44 The “Iowa group” included Alfredo Lopez, Robert Hodges, and Willard Krehl, who had reported a positive association between sugar consumption and elevated serum cholesterol level.45

It is not clear whether the SRF commented on or edited drafts of the review. However, on September 6, 1966, Hickson asked Hegsted, “Am I going to get another copy of the draft shortly?”40 suggesting Hickson had been involved. Hegsted responded on September 29, “I expect to get it down to you within a week or two.”46 Hickson received the final draft on October 25, 1966, a few days before Hegsted intended to submit it for publication.47 On November 2, Hickson told Hegsted, “Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind and we look forward to its appearance in print.”47

Publication of Project 226

Project 226 resulted in a 2-part literature review by McGandy, Hegsted, and Stare “Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Disease,” in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1967.48,49 Industry and nonindustry funding of the review authors’ experimental research was disclosed, but the SRF’s funding and participation in the review was not. Evidence reported in the review was relevant to 2 questions: (1) Does the high sucrose content of the American diet cause CHD? and (2) What is the comparative effectiveness of interventions modifying the sucrose or saturated fat content of the diet for the prevention of CHD? The review concluded there was “no doubt” that the only dietary intervention required to prevent CHD was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet.49(p246)

High Sucrose Content of the American Diet and CHD

The review summarized findings from epidemiologic, experimental, and mechanistic studies examining the role of sucrose in CHD (see eTable 1 in the Supplement). It reported that epidemiologic studies showed a positive association between high sucrose consumption and CHD outcomes48(pp187-189)and that experimental studies showed that sucrose caused serum cholesterol and serum triglyceride levels to rise in healthy individuals,48(pp190-192) and serum triglyceride levels to rise in those with hypertriglyceridemia.49(pp242-243) Finally, it reported that mechanistic studies demonstrated the biological plausibility of (1) sucrose affecting serum cholesterol level mediated through changes to the intestinal microbiome,49(p243) and (2) fructose, a component of sucrose, affecting serum triglyceride levels mediated through endogenous lipogenesis in the liver, adipose tissues, and other organs.49(pp244-246)

The review evaluated the quality of individual studies, including the work of Yudkin and the Iowa Group48(pp187-188) (see eTables 1 and 2 in the Supplement), investigators whom the SRF had identified as threatening before initiating the review15 and in correspondence while it was being prepared.34,44 The review discounted these studies on the grounds that they contained questionable data or incorrect interpretation.48(pp187-189)49(pp242-243) It questioned whether entire classes of evidence were relevant (see eTables 1 and 3 in the Supplement). It discounted epidemiologic evidence for identifying dietary causes of CHD because of multifactorial confounding48(p188) and experimental evidence from short-term studies using large doses of sucrose because they were not comparable with amounts typically consumed in the American diet.48(pp191-192) It discounted mechanistic studies conducted with fructose or glucose, not sucrose,49(p244) and animal evidence because of species differences and because people rarely consumed low-fat diets typically fed to rats.49(pp243-244) Overall, the review focused on possible bias in individual studies and types of evidence rather than on consistency across studies and the coherence of epidemiologic, experimental and mechanistic evidence.

Comparative Effectiveness of Dietary Interventions for the Prevention of CHD

The NEJM review summarized findings from human randomized clinical trials (RCTs) evaluating the effect of sucrose interventions on serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels in healthy and hypertriglyceridemic individuals, and the effect of fat interventions on serum cholesterol levels in healthy persons (see eTable 4 in the Supplement). Regarding sucrose interventions, it argued that substituting fat for sucrose caused a large improvement in serum triglyceride levels in healthy individuals,48(p190) substituting starch for sucrose caused a large improvement in serum triglyceride levels in patients with hypertriglyceridemia,49(pp242-243) and that substituting leguminous vegetables for sucrose caused a large improvement in serum cholesterol levels in healthy individuals.48(pp190-191) Finally, it reported that substituting starch for sucrose caused a small improvement in serum cholesterol levels in healthy individuals.48(pp190-191) Regarding fat interventions, the review reported that reducing dietary cholesterol and substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat caused a large improvement in serum cholesterol level in healthy persons.48(pp189-190)

The review discounted RCTs that had shown that substituting starch for sucrose had a large effect on improving serum triglyceride levels and implied that only studies that had used serum cholesterol level as a biomarker of CHD risk should be used to compare the efficacy of sucrose interventions to fat interventions (see eTable 4 in the Supplement). The review then discounted RCTs that had shown that substituting fat or vegetables for sucrose had a large effect on improving serum cholesterol level, by arguing this intervention was infeasible48(p191) (see eTables 4 and 5 in the Supplement). Substituting refined starches (sweetened with artificial sweeteners) for sucrose, despite being feasible, was dismissed because the magnitude of effect on serum cholesterol level was minimal compared with reducing dietary cholesterol level and substituting polyunsaturated for saturated fat.48(pp190-191)

Unlike its summary of sucrose intervention RCTs, the review reported few study characteristics and no quantitative results in its summary of fat intervention RCTs.48(pp189-190) Consulting the original fat intervention RCTs reveals that the review overstated the consistency of studies (see eTable 6 in the Supplement). Only 1 RCT, conducted by Hegsted et al,50 concluded that reducing dietary cholesterol and substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat substantially improved serum cholesterol levels. Consulting the original clinical studies cited to substantiate reducing dietary cholesterol and substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat reveals that they were not well controlled. Despite arguing earlier in the review that epidemiologic evidence was irrelevant to determining dietary causes of CHD,48(pp187-189) the review implied that the epidemiologic evidence pointed to dietary cholesterol and saturated fat as the primary dietary causes of CHD.49(p246) The review argued that the lack of mechanistic evidence confirming the biological plausibility that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat raised serum cholesterol levels was unimportant.49(p246) Finally, the review emphasized that polyunsaturated fats were readily available and would be well accepted as substitute for saturated fats in the American diet.49(p246)

Discussion

These internal documents show that the SRF initiated CHD research in 1965 to protect market share and that its first project, a literature review, was published in NEJM in 1967 without disclosure of the sugar industry’s funding or role. The NEJM review served the sugar industry’s interests by arguing that epidemiologic, animal, and mechanistic studies associating sucrose with CHD were limited, implying they should not be included in an evidentiary assessment of the CHD risks of sucrose. Instead, the review argued that the only evidence modality needed to yield a definitive answer to the question of how to modify the American diet to prevent CHD was RCTs that exclusively used serum cholesterol level as a CHD biomarker. Randomized clinical trials using serum cholesterol level as the CHD biomarker made the high sucrose content of the American diet seem less hazardous than if the entire body of evidence had been considered.

Following the NEJM review, the sugar industry continued to fund research on CHD and other chronic diseases “as a main prop of the industry’s defense.”51 For example, in 1971, it influenced the National Institute of Dental Research’s National Caries Program to shift its emphasis to dental caries interventions other than restricting sucrose.8 The industry commissioned a review, “Sugar in the Diet of Man,” which it credited with, among other industry tactics, favorably influencing the 1976 US Food and Drug Administration evaluation of the safety of sugar.51 These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease6,7 suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy.

This historical account of industry efforts demonstrates the importance of having reviews written by people without conflicts of interest and the need for financial disclosure. Scientific reviews shape policy debates, subsequent investigations, and the funding priorities of federal agencies.52 The NEJM has required authors to disclose all conflicts of interest since 1984,53 and conflict of interest disclosure policies have been widely implemented since the sugar industry launched its CHD research program. Whether current conflict of interest policies are adequate to withstand the economic interests of industry remains unclear.54

Many industries sponsor research to influence assessments of the risks and benefits of their products.55-57 The influence of industry sponsorship on nutrition research is receiving increased scrutiny.58 Access to documents not meant for public consumption has provided the public health community unprecedented insight into industry motives, strategies, tactics, and data designed to protect companies from litigation and regulation.59 This insight has been a major factor behind successful global tobacco control policies.60 Our analysis suggests that research using sugar industry documents has the potential to inform the health community about how to counter this industry’s strategies and tactics to control information on the adverse health effects of sucrose.

Study Limitations

The Roger Adams papers and other documents used in this research provide a narrow window into the activities of 1 sugar industry trade association; therefore, it is difficult to validate that the documents gathered are representative of the entirety of SRF internal materials related to Project 226 from the 1950s and 1960s or that the proper weight was given to each data source. There is no direct evidence that the sugar industry wrote or changed the NEJM review manuscript; the evidence that the industry shaped the review’s conclusions is circumstantial. We did not analyze the role of other organizations, nutrition leaders, or food industries that advocated that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol were the main dietary cause of CHD. We could not interview key actors involved in this historical episode because they have died.

Conclusions

This study suggests that the sugar industry sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965 to downplay early warning signals that sucrose consumption was a risk factor in CHD. As of 2016, sugar control policies are being promulgated in international,61 federal,62,63 state, and local venues.64 Yet CHD risk is inconsistently cited as a health consequence of added sugars consumption. Because CHD is the leading cause of death globally, the health community should ensure that CHD risk is evaluated in future risk assessments of added sugars. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry–funded studies, and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.65

Back to top Article Information

Correction: This article was corrected online October 3, 2016, to include additional information regarding funding and additional contributions.

Corresponding Author: Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, 530 Parnassus Ave, Ste 366, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390 (glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu).

Accepted for Publication: July 2, 2016.

Published Online: September 12, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394

Author Contributions: Drs Kearns and Glantz had full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of data analysis.

Study concept and design: All authors.

Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: All authors.

Drafting of the manuscript: Kearns.

Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.

Statistical analysis: Glantz.

Obtained funding: Glantz.

Administrative, technical, or material support: Kearns, Glantz.

Study supervision: Schmidt, Glantz.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

Funding/Support: This work was supported by the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, a donation by the Hellmann Family Fund to the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the UCSF School of Dentistry Department of Orofacial Sciences and Global Oral Health Program, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research grant DE-007306 and National Cancer Institute grant CA-087472. We also thank Gary Taubes, MS, co-founder of Nutrition Science Initiative, for providing funding for travel to the Harvard Medical Library.

Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funders had no role in design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.

Additional Contributions: We thank Kimber Stanhope, PhD, RD, for advice on the analysis of the SRF-funded NEJM review and the original studies it cited. No compensation was received for her contribution. We also thank Gary Taubes, MS, co-founder of Nutrition Science Initiative, for photographing documents in the D. Mark Hegsted papers at the Harvard Medical Library.
A quick history of Motorola devices will tell you they have yet to release a smartphone with a full HD 1080p display. Tell us why then — when talking about their new Android 4.4.3 feature that allows users to disable the carrier name from being displayed in the status bar — Motorola VP of Product Management Punit Soni posted a screenshot of a phone with a 1080×1920 resolution display? Weird? Not really.

We’ve heard rumors that the upcoming Motorola Moto X +1 would arrive with a more up-to-date full HD display. While nothing is confirmed, it’s highly unlikely Soni would be using some other Android device to show off a new Motorola feature, so this could be our confirmation that the Moto X+1 will, in fact, feature a 1080p display.

Anyone surprised? Relieved? After checking out current flagships, this Android blogger has his money on the Moto X+1 as his next smartphone purchase. Let’s hope Motorola doesn’t hold back much this time around.

[Google+]
Jon Stewart’s last Daily Show was much more than just a cameo-packed, Springsteen-soundtracked, emotion-infused blow-out. The legendary host’s final episode was also a financial lightning rod for an excellent cause.

Stewart partnered with charity fundraising platform Omaze to raise money for New York Collaborates for Autism. Donors who gave $10 or more were entered in a drawing to attend The Daily Show’s final taping, meet Stewart and hang out on the set. More than 47,000 people from 78 countries donated, generating a whopping $2.23 million for NYCA.

Here’s the complete donation breakdown:

—Total Raised: $2,235,520

—Winning Donation: $100

—Number of Donors: 47,048

—Number of Countries: 78

—Average Donation Amount: $45.50

—Average Amount Raised Per Day: $14,707

—Highest Donation: $35,000

Here’s Stewart with the drawing’s big winner, Sameer:

“Over the last 16 years, no one has done more than Jon to engage people around the issues that truly impact our lives,” said Matt Pohlson, Omaze’s co-founder, “and it’s fitting that he leveraged his final show to raise more than $2 million for this incredible cause.” Pohlson took to Instagram to voice his admiration for Stewart, posting a photo of the two working together.

Watch Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Showhere, but be warned: you’re going to feel all the feelings. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah premieres on Monday, Sept. 28.
Authorities in Bahrain, which has been rocked by protests for two years, have voiced "dismay" over an assessment by the US State Department of the rights situation in the kingdom.

"The report includes texts which are totally far from the truth, adopting a manner that fuels terror and terrorists targeting Bahrain's national security," state news agency BNA late on Wednesday quoted government spokeswoman Samira Rajab as saying.

The strategic tiny kingdom of Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, has been hit since February 2011 by a wave of Shia-led protests calling for the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa in office since 1971.

A US State Department report released on April 19 said that "the most serious human rights problems included citizens' inability to change their government peacefully; arrest and detention of protesters on vague charges, in some cases leading to their torture in detention."

It criticised the "lack of due process in trials of political and human rights activists, medical personnel, teachers, and students, with some resulting in harsh sentences."

The report claimed that "discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, nationality, and sect persisted, especially against the Shia population" which makes up a majority in Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Al-Khalifa dynasty.

Rajab "deplored the report for lacking objectivity, totally siding with the terrorists who seek to sow chaos in the whole region."

Bahrain refers to protesters who clash frequently with police forces in Shia villages as "terrorists" it claims are backed by Shia-majority Iran.

The kingdom "reiterated full commitment to comply with the human rights principles and standards in confronting terror which targets Bahrain and innocent civilians," said Rajab.

The State Department report acknowledged that "some protesters engaged in lethal acts of violence against security forces, including the use of improvised explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and other improvised weapons."

Rajab in her statement "urged the US State Department to help countries protect their national security and back their stability, the way the US itself does in the war it is waging on global terror."

UN torture investigator trip cancelled

Meanwhile, the UN torture investigator said Bahrain had effectively cancelled a trip he had planned to the Gulf Arab state.

Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said in a statement it was the second time a scheduled visit had been postponed at short notice. His trip had been set for May 8-15.

"It is effectively a cancellation as no alternative dates were proposed, nor is there a future road map to discuss," he said on Wednesday.

"Let me be clear, this was a unilateral decision by the authorities."

Mendez said "this postponement could be perceived as if there is something to hide."

Bahrain's state news agency said on Monday the authorities had asked Mendez to delay his trip, without giving a reason.

Mendez then put it off until further notice, the agency said.
8:58 AM - 1st floor - I arrive to work. Hayley picked me up because I knew I'd be getting drunk today, and I would never get behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated. A boat, maybe. A plane, damn right. But a car? Please. I'm not a daredevil.

9:09 AM - 1st floor - I get a sausage biscuit from Starbucks. I'm not trying to start puking at 11 AM just because I drank on an empty stomach. Oh, and thanks for the $12 sausage biscuit, Starbucks. You Starfucks.

9:33 AM - 1st floor - I put 3 shots worth of Jameson into my coffee, because any coffee with two shots or less is regular coffee. I also don't want to get too drunk too quickly (this notion goes to shit). So far Elie is none the wiser, and my deliciously evil plan is budding beautifully.

Drinks so far: 3 shots of whiskey

9:54 AM - 1st floor - I'm halfway done with my Irish coffee. I'm already feeling a bit frisky. O'blivious McUnobservant over here still has no idea what's going on, and he isn't even a tiny bit drunk. That's called a "lose-lose" scenario.

10:00 AM - 1st floor - I snap a selfie of Elie's butt (or lack thereof) and myself. Whether these photos end up for work or for pleasure...well, frankly, that's none of your business. But between you and me? Pleasure.

10:27 AM - 1st floor - My Irish coffee is really kickin' in now. I'm definitely not drunk, but I'm teetering on buzzed. I see a Pringles can, and my huge brain and I come up with an idea. It still has chips in it, but the flavor is Serrano Ham aka warm ocean poop. I empty the chips and slip my PBR into the canister, right before Elie shows up. Close call.

11:07 AM - 1st floor - Elie is one of those weirdos with a standing desk, conveniently set up right behind me. It worries me, and my reasoning is twofold: 1) I don't like him lurking behind me, it makes me feel uncomfortable, and we all know that he's probably staring at my ass. Perv. Well, I guess we're even; 2) he can turn around at any time and watch what I'm doing and I would never know. Thankfully I had Pete, the wise Sancho Panza to my moronic Don Quixote, keeping a vigilant eye out for me.

11:19 AM - 1st floor - My Irish coffee is officially finished. Now I'm working on the "PBR in the Pringles can" operation. I am feeling aaaaa-loosey goosey! The can is too short for the Pringles canister, so any beer that exits the can and doesn't make it into my mouth gets lost in the abyss at the bottom of the canister, collecting that finely ground chip dust, then goes back towards my mouth during the next sip. I am now drinking an Xtra Kickin' Jalapeño Pabst Blue Ribbon. It makes me ponder on the time my Aunt gently (aggressively) informed me that I'll likely never be married. Things are beginning to click.

Drinks so far: 3 shots of whiskey , 2 beers

11:22 AM - 2nd floor - I proceed to exhale into my coworker Marc's breathalyzer in order to figure out how far along I've come. I feel like store-bought breathalyzers always tell you you're more sober than you are, whereas the breathalyzers from the po-po will be a little more generous. That being said, I am surprised and slightly depressed to see I only blew a .053. Tucker Max would be disappointed.

11:29 AM - 1st floor - The way Hayley is wearing her headphones makes me laugh. Does she have an ear where her sideburns are or something? What is she listening to, brain waves? Who does she think she is, DJ Paris Hilton? Friggin' nerd. She's cool though. If she and someone that I hated were hanging off of a cliff, I'd save her. Maybs.

11:41 AM - 2nd floor - Somebody in the office is playing the theme to Happy Days. One of the younger interns asks where the song is from. I hold back an unyielding urge to bitch slap that bomboclat. Some old timey dancing is about to go down if this music keeps up. Either the twist or the jitterbug, I'm pretty open to new old things.

12:11 PM - 2nd floor - As I continue drinking, I am forced to keep coming up with cunning ways to consume my alcohol. I finish my Starbucks drink and my Pringles beer, now I'm drinking an entire beer out of a styrofoam to-go box. I only do this so that I can walk by Elie and mock him further when I reveal the truth. The mission is a success. Elie is none the wiser, and I am all the drunker.

12:27 PM - 2nd floor - Marc's girlfriend, Annie, arrives for lunch. I found some shot glasses to (quietly) take shots with the upstairs people, but I couldn't pull the cups apart. Annie used her Beowulf-like strength and staunch sense of justice to help me out. Somewhere Batman wipes a tear of proud approval from his righteous cheek. Annie and I joke about fighting, but it's all in good fun, because she'd wreck myself before I could even check myself.

12:37 PM - 3rd floor - I just took a shot with Rudy, Ethan, Marc and Molly, all while Elie roosts on the 1st floor. They're fuggin' troopers and they totally understand the struggle. I mean, who doesn't actively try to get drunk at work? Losers, squares and Elie, that's who.

12:51 PM - 1st floor - Hayley said she's meeting her roommate at 1pm for lunch. I belligerently inquire from across the room, "What, are you gonna BANG your roommate? TOOOIGHT, TOOOIGHT." Hayley is not amused, my other coworkers are slightly amused but also disturbed, and Elie is still none the wiser. Sean is winning all over the place.

12:53 - 1st floor - Pee pee time! I bravely waddle as quickly as possible to the bathroom, like a man.

1:03 PM - 1st floor - (2 Months Ago): Jamba Juice just dropped off smoothies for the whole office. I take the last two smoothies and put them in the freezer. I have no idea when they'll come in handy, but I feel as though one day Future Sean will be able to use them for something, and will pay homage to my genius resourcefulness.

1:13 PM - 1st floor - I suddenly remember that Past Sean put two smoothies in the freezer. I rub my hands together in a deliciously evil way, because I'm about to rock the civilized world's dick off and put vodka in my Jamba Juice. Clever, I know. I look up and nod my head approvingly to Past Sean in order to pay him homage for his genius resourcefulness. Why I looked up as if he were dead and in heaven, no one knows. Unfortunately, the only vodka we have is Jalapeno Vodka. Why is this in existence? I presume Jalapeno Vodka is the source of the world's troubles: every major war, disease and disaster. It is the devil's urine.

Drinks so far: 5 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka (in the Jamba Juice)

1:36 PM - 2nd floor - I just took another shot of whiskey. I also find a small flask of Fireball Whiskey. I was going to down it, but Marc begged me not to finish it. Legitimately begged. And Marc is cute as fuck, only a barbarian would say no to him.

1:37 PM - 2nd floor - I said no to him.

1:53 PM - 1st floor - I ask Elie if I can write an article about drinking at work. Little does he know that I am already drinking at work. He gives me genuine advice on how to approach the topic. I give him genuine looks of boredom. I don't have time for his managerial ways. I am thinking about Ferrero Rocher chocolates the whole time and how they shaped my childhood (and my ass). Good luck breaking that train of thought, Mr. Look-At-Me-I'm-Sober-And-Responsible-And-Shit.

2:17 PM - 3rd floor - I take another shot of Jameson upstairs. I express to Ethan (our Finance Manager) my gameplan, then blow in his face to see how much I smell like booze. He approves, and regrets smelling my breath on a cosmic level. Everything is going swimmingly. Rudy demands that I get my drunk ass back to work, so I respond by yelling at everyone else to, "Get back to work!"

2:35 PM - out of office - I'm at C4 Deli with Pete and Evan for lunch. I order a French dip sandwich and a glass of Merlot. I finish the glass of Merlot like I've never seen wine before. I quickly order another, and the waitress looks at me like I'm her shitty ex-boyfriend that didn't treat her how feminist memes depict a woman should be treated. She's probably right, who knows...either way, I forgive her. She's hot, and hot people are easy to forgive.

Drink status: 7 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka , 1 glass of wine

2:46 PM - out of office - I am drinking my second glass of wine. I have been elected as the new mayor of Struggle City, and I do lots of civil work in the bordering cities of Tipsyborough and Drunkshire. I am clearly running unopposed in the forthcoming election. I also demolish my French Dip sandwich like a rapper "eating booty groceries" or whatever they say, and now Pete is looking at me like I just greatly offended his ancestors.

*3:02 PM - out of office - A hot homeless woman with a zebra backpack asks for a cigarette. I tell her to pick three categories, then I will ask her a trivia question using one of those three categories. I choose her category "entertainment". I ask her who Jay-Z is married to. She can't answer. I wonder what sort of fuckery this is, because it's literally the easiest question of all time. I give her the ultimate clue, which is, "She wants you to SAY HER NAME, because she's a SURVIVOR, and she sticks up for herself and ALL THE SINGLE LADIES." I even flawlessly perform the choreography to All The Single Ladies and she still doesn't know. Eventually she says Beyoncé, so I give her a smoke and walk the fuck away in sheer disgust, but also with a feeling akin to reserved paternal pride. I'm proud of you, vagabond.

3:35 PM - 1st floor - I try to walk past Elie, who is studiously working on the couch in the lobby, like the Pink Panther. I believe I succeeded, however the look on his face says, "What is wrong with that guy?"

3:37 PM - 3rd floor - I go upstairs to take another shot. I decide to take a shot at Elie's desk, because I live life on the edge, and danger turns me on. I laugh at my boss's remarkable lack of environmental awareness. I also called him a "dummy." I thought that shit was hysterical. He's not a dummy, but he sure is making my job easy today.

*4:01 PM - 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor - I spend the next 10 minutes walking around the office discreetly flipping everybody off. I find a never-ending source of happiness from this. I once did this with famous buildings and works of art in Europe. I love being obnoxious, and I'm really good at it.

Final drink status: 10 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka , 2 glasses of wine

*4:14 PM - 2nd floor - Hayley comes upstairs solely to laugh at me. I make fun of her for being an unpaid intern, then immediately apologize because she is my ride home. Elie is also a good sport about being the butt of everybody's jokes ALL. DAY. LONG. He gives Hayley and me a Jack In The Box gift card so that she can feed me on the way home.

6:26 PM - home - I finally arrive home. I am too drunk to continue doing things. Goodbye reading peoples!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*3:02 PM - Pete later informs me that despite my assuredness, the homeless woman was not hot. He's obviously trying to keep her for himself, so I express gratitude for his guidance, then curse his filthy, whorish name under my breath.

*4:01 PM - I found the pictures of me flipping off European things. You're welcome, world. Except you, Europe. You kind of asked for it.

*4:14 PM - I can't remember if she actually fed me or not. Hayley, if you didn't feed me, you owe me one egg roll and a Double Jack. Friggin' interns, man.
Although my wife and I have taken several trips together since getting married, we still haven’t gone on an official honeymoon. My old job required me to work weekends and I couldn’t take any time off around the date of our wedding ceremony, so I was back in the office two days after saying “I do.”

As such, my wife and I didn’t get to do the typical newlywed travel activities. You know, things like toasting each other with champagne every night for a week, lounging on the beach and giggling as we call each other Mr. and Mrs. Baseel, or beating the hell out of a convenience store clerk, like the Chinese newlyweds who are not only just married, but were also just arrested in Japan.

On the morning of Saturday, September 26, a pair of newlywed Chinese nationals, the groom 36 and the bride 25, walked into a convenience store in the Chuo Ward of Sapporo, the largest city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. Apparently craving a post-breakfast treat, they grabbed a package of ice cream from the cooler box, opened it up, and started munching away on it in the store.

Unless you’re the Dalai Lama, however, Japanese convenience stores prefer you pay for the merchandise before you start consuming it. When the 24-year-old Japanese male clerk who was on-duty spotted what the couple was doing, he gestured for them to leave the store. It’s unclear whether he first tried to speak to the couple in Japanese, or why he gestured for them to leave the store instead of pay for their ice cream. What is clear, though, is that the couple responded by punching him in the face, kicking him, and grabbing his hair.

While two-on-one-ing a common opponent with that move set will get you a high score in Double Dragon, it’s generally frowned upon in the real world of inexpensive snack commerce. The police were called, arrived to find the assault ongoing, and promptly arrested the pair. The husband, who told the authorities he is a banker from Shanghai and that he and his wife are on their honeymoon in Japan, said that he felt the clerk was being disrespectful, giving his statement as “I thought my wife was being insulted. It is true that I hit him.”

The pair remain in police custody, and now face the possibility of having to downgrade from convenience store sweets to the subpar desserts served by the Japanese penal system’s correctional facilities.

Source: Sankei News

Top image: Wikipedia/Kuha455405
WikiLeaks has published 294,546 emails along with thousands of attached files from 762 mail boxes that allegedly belong to the primary email domain of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The most recent email in the trove released by the whistle-blowing organisation on Tuesday was sent on July 6, 2016. The oldest dates back to 2010.

"It should be noted that emails associated with the domain are mostly used for dealing with the world, as opposed to the most sensitive internal matters," WikiLeaks said on its official website.

WikiLeaks said it obtained the emails a week before Friday's attempted coup.

"WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government's post-coup purges.

We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state," the organisation said.

READ MORE: WikiLeaks to release Turkey power structure documents

WikiLeaks previously claimed that the Turkish government would attempt to censor the distribution of the documents, and urged the Turkish public to be ready to bypass any government attempts at blocking access to the material.

"Turks will likely be censored to prevent them reading our pending release of 100k+ docs on politics leading up to the coup," the organisation said on Monday via Twitter.

"We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent. And that everyone else is ready to help them bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come."

WikiLeaks later claimed that its infrastructre was "under sustained attack," following its announcement of the imminent publication of the AKP emails.

"We are unsure of the true origin of the attack. The timing suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies. We will prevail & publish," WikiLeaks said on Twitter.
The last week brought about some cooler temperatures to South Florida and believe me that is quite a relief! This delightfully cool weather inspired me to make one of my favorite Cuban potajes (stew) ... Potaje de Garbanzo. I think of a potaje (poe-tah-hey) as not quite a soup, not quite a stew and not quite a porridge. It's a hearty chickpeas (garbanzo), simmered with Spanish chorizo, ham, smoked pork shank, Cuban calabaza and potatoes. The taste takes me back to the days of sitting in my mom's kitchen, talking and watching her prepare this divine "potaje". It's funny how so many of the memories of my mom, that mean so much to me and that I hold dear, took place in her kitchen. A little choked up and a big sigh inserted here! Anyway, back to the "potaje". To me, the perfect spoonful has a piece of chorizo, calabaza, and chickpea swimming in the smokey, paprika infused tomato-y broth. Add your favorite bread to dunk in the savory broth or white rice and your meal has just graduated to a traditional Cuban meal. This is nothing short of absolutely, positively delicious! I am pretty certain that my favorite Potaje de Garbanzo may become one your favorites too!1 tablespoon olive oil1 large vidalia onion, chopped3-4 garlic cloves, chopped1 large bell pepper chopped4 small dried and cured Spanish chorizo* links, sliced on the diagonal1 tablespoon sweet, smoked Spanish paprika1 tablespoon granulated garlic powder1 laurel bay leaf1 8 oz can tomato sauce4 cups chicken stock1 1/2 dry white wine1 pounds of garbanzo beans1 1/2 pounds of smoked pork shank8 oz ham steak cubed1/2 Cuban calabaza squash (or butternut squash), peeled and diced into large pieces1 - 2 large red potatoes, peeled, diced1/2 teaspoon salt Soak the beans 24 hours ahead of cooking time, change water whenever possible. Place the rinse beans and place in a pot with enough water to go about 2 inches above beans. Bring to a rolling boil and cook for 5 minutes on high. Cover and turn off heat. Leave in water for 1 hour. Remove and rinse beans set aside. Throw out water.Heat a deep, heavy bottomed dutch oven over medium heat. Add olive oil, onions, pepper and garlic. Saute for 5-7 minutes or until vegetables are tender, add sliced chorizo, paprika, bay leaf and garlic powder stir well to incorporate. Cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes, making sure the chorizo has expelled it's oils. Add tomato sauce, lower heat to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes, covered. Add all of the remaining ingredients,, and stir to combine. Cook for 1 hour or until beans are almost tender. Add salt and cook for another 1/2 hour.Serve in deep bowls along with crusty Cuban or French bread and/or, as served traditionally, with white rice. Enoy!substitute Spanish chorizo with Mexican chorizo, the flavor profiles are completely different.I like to to dice my calabaza (squash) in large pieces so that I actually have pieces of it remaining in the stew once it is done cooking. It tends to break down considerably during the cooking process.. After sauteing and simmering vegetables and chorizo in the tomato sauce, transfer all ingredients,, to the slow cooker and cook on high for 4-5 hourson low for 8-9 hours. Half hour before cook time is up add in the salt.I never add salt to beans until they are almost done. It is my experience that salt added to the beginning of the bean's cooking process will keep the beans from softening. See my post Salt Will Keep Your Beans from Softening for more information on bean cookery!
Microsoft’s policy, which it calls its Services Agreement, allows it to analyze customer content from one its free products and use it to improve another service — for example, taking information from messages a consumer sends on Windows Live Messenger and using it to improve messaging services on Xbox. Previously, that kind of sharing of information between products would not have been allowed under Microsoft policies, which limited the use of data collected under one of its products to that product alone.

Microsoft has promised, however, that it will not use the personal information and content it collects to sell targeted advertising. It will not, for example, scan a consumer’s e-mails to generate ads that might interest the user. Google does that, and expanding its ability to draw on that content was part of the reason Google changed its privacy policy this year.

But the new Microsoft policy does allow for such targeted advertising. Microsoft promised not to do so in blog posts and e-mails informing its customers about the change, but not in the formal policy. That has some privacy advocates nervous.

“What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” said John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policy for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit group. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn’t reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.”

Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, says the company’s plans are benign. He differentiates between the Services Agreement, also known as the terms of use, that was changed on Friday and the company’s Privacy Policy, which was last updated in April.

“Over the years, we have consistently informed users that we may use their content to improve the services they receive,” Mr. Evans said in a written statement. “For instance, we analyze content to improve our spam and malware filters in order to keep customers safe. We also do it to develop new product features such as e-mail categorization to organize similar items like shipping receipts in a common folder, or to automatically add calendar invitations.

“However,” he added, “one thing we don’t do is use the content of our customers’ private communications and documents to create targeted advertising. If that ever changes, we’ll be the first to let our customers know.”

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Microsoft’s new services agreement affects only its free, Web-based products, not the software programs that individuals and companies buy off the shelf for home or business use. It covers Hotmail, and its related e-mail service, Outlook.com, but not the Outlook e-mail and calendar program that is individually loaded onto computer hard drives and widely used by corporations. Bing, its search engine, is covered, but Internet Explorer, its browser, is not.

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Microsoft’s pledge not to use the data from its Web services to target advertising has some credibility, given the company’s broader privacy initiatives. The company has said it will include a “do not track” feature in its new Internet Explorer 10 Web browser that prevents online advertising companies from monitoring the browsing habits of users so they can target promotions. Microsoft has made “do not track” the default setting on the new version of Explorer, a move that has caused a firestorm among online advertising companies.

Microsoft’s push to provide better privacy protections for consumers comes at a time when its efforts in Internet advertising have sputtered. Online advertising remains a small fraction of Microsoft’s overall business, accounting for $2.6 billion, or about 3.5 percent, of the company’s revenue during its last fiscal year, which ended June 30, according to Microsoft’s filings with securities regulators.

But it is easy to see how Microsoft customers might be confused, because the different divisions of Microsoft that draft and oversee its user agreements and privacy policies did not anticipate that the changes in the services agreement would raise privacy questions.

The drafters of the service agreement, a more technical bunch, thought the changes were so small that they were mentioned in August in a specialty “Volume Licensing” blog dedicated to commercial customers, but seemingly nowhere else on Microsoft’s vast array of corporate Web sites.

Microsoft also sent an e-mail about the change in late August to all of its 325 million Hotmail users. But those notices became the subject of nervous online chatter when some users learned that a similar message, using the same template, was being used by hackers to distribute harmful malware. Online message boards warned against even opening the messages.

Inside Microsoft, officials were focused not on whether the policy changes affected privacy but rather on a different change, one that limits the ability of Microsoft customers to sue the company, including in a class action, over its products. The new agreement requires the use of binding arbitration.

Mr. Evans said the change put in place on Friday in the Services Agreement “did not alter our existing privacy policies.” Those policies include a 4,000-word main policy and at least 16 related product-specific privacy policies.

That itself is an example of how users cannot possibly know what Internet companies are doing with their personal information, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer protection group based in Washington.

“No one understands how all this data is being put together and being used,” he said. “All of these companies are in a digital arms race to tie together all the information they have about individuals. For companies like Google and Microsoft, the real goal is to expand market share.”
FRENCH voters planning to back centre-right incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy in next month's election have sex less often than their left-wing rivals, according to a poll published today.

The survey, conducted by the respected polling institute Ifop on behalf of the pornographic magazine Hot Video, measured the intensity and variety of the sex lives of various voting blocs using several criteria.

According to the results, voters for Sarkozy's UMP make love on average 6.7 times a month, slightly less often than supporters of his main challenger, the Socialist Party's Francois Hollande, on 7.6.

Followers of Marine Le Pen's far-right anti-immigrant National Front top the frequency league, having sex eight times a month, while those of centrist Francois Bayrou manage only 5.9 trysts in the same period.

Right-wingers also report having had fewer partners over the course of their lives, with seven compared to nine on the left, but once again it was the extreme right on top, with Le Pen supporters claiming 10.

But these extra partners don't seem to satisfy the far-right, as 31 per cent of them declare themselves unhappy with their sex life, compared to 26 per cent in the population as a whole and 21 per cent among Socialists.

Supporters of Jean-Luc Melenchon's Communist-backed Left Front were the most sexually frustrated, with 35 per cent of them complaining.

Ifop said it had conducted the poll among 1411 adults in a weighted sample designed to reflect French society, and had taken care to minimise the margin of error "inherent in a questionnaire dealing with such intimate topics".
The Last Jedi doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. This isn’t a bad thing, exactly. There are moments of brilliance where director Rian Johnson is clearly trying to elevate this franchise, imbue it with a greater complexity. There are other moments that feel like the worst of Marvel films. And then there are the porgs, which are a bit like the Minions of the franchise.

I’m going to go ahead and discuss spoilers from here on out, because I feel this film is difficult to dissect without going into detail, and let’s be honest, nobody needs a recommendation to go and see a Star Wars film. So if you haven’t seen it, read no further.

Major Spoilers ahead

The very first scene, with Hux’s threat to Poe turning into a prank call, was tonally off. Guardians of the Galaxy was heavily influenced by Star Wars, and now it seems that inspiration has turned full circle.

In fact, although some of the humor was welcome, there was far too much wisecracking throughout the film. At the end, I half expected Rey’s ship to crash land on Earth and encounter the Avengers, only to turn to the camera and wink as the credits rolled.

On the other hand, there are some surprisingly mature themes here, as the franchise moves beyond the very clearly defined good and evil of the past installments. The importance of failure, the refusal to define Kylo by his Force allegiance, and the admission that heroes can come from humble backgrounds are all interesting attempts to diversify the narrative.

I confess, I never liked Luke Skywalker as a character before (please don’t hate me), but I really enjoyed his presence in this film. Luke has grown beyond the starry-eyed boy and into a jaded, isolated old master, paralleling Yoda’s journey from the original trilogy.

But the moment where he intended to murder the young, sleeping Kylo felt utterly wrong, going against the grain of everything the character is. It may have been only an instant, but Skywalker always seemed genuinely innocent, the kind of guy who doesn’t learn to masturbate until his late teens. The man is a boy scout, and he has no business murdering sleeping students.

That being said, Mark Hamill has only improved with age, and I was deeply sorry to see him go. I loved his dramatic force-projection scene with Kylo, and him peacefully fading off into the Force after a long, accomplished life seemed the most fitting end to the space Messiah.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The new face of the franchise is Rey, and she has grown less and less interesting the more we see of her. Daisy Ridley is likable and charismatic, but she doesn’t have much to go on here; she’s wildly overpowered, and an early hint that she may embrace the dark side never really goes anywhere. She seems fascinated by the potential of evil, and then not. I don’t understand her motivation, other than to have an exciting adventure.

The much-anticipated reveal of her parentage can best be described as an enjoyable disappointment. I like the fact that genius can emerge from nothing, as Star Wars has always been fixated on heritage and fatalism. But I also feel like I need some sort of explanation for the seemingly most powerful individual in the franchise. Then again, Kylo Ren may have been lying. But I’m starting to feel like I don’t much care what Rey does from now on.

Kylo Ren has turned into the most fascinating and complex Star Wars character ever, as far as I’m concerned. For a series that’s always been so black and white, Kylo is very grey indeed, and is set up to be the major villain, or perhaps even hero, of the new trilogy.

Adam Driver puts in a strong, understated performance, as Kylo has matured beyond tantrums. Well, almost. He does shatter his Vader-wannabe mask in a fit of rage, physically and metaphorically destroying his old identity and embracing himself for who he truly is. I always liked the idea of Darth Vader being a legend in this fictional universe, so much so that he has a fanboy trying to emulate him.

But Kylo’s utter humiliation at the hands of Rey, and manipulation by Snoke has taught him that there was only one Darth Vader, and his story ended long ago. Kylo’s story, on the other hand, looks to be completely unpredictable.

The Force-connection scenes between him and Rey were among the highlights of the film, and provided some much-needed characterization for both of them, allowing both to speak, debate, even flirt, without any need for a lightsaber battle.

But I must say, I felt cheated when it comes to lightsaber battles. The Last Jedi has way too many lasers and speeding spacecraft. Starfighters are cool, I guess, but they’re just not as fun as two people desperately fighting to the death with laser swords, and the countless scenes of Poe shooting through space, effortlessly avoiding being hit, really made me notice the runtime.

There’s a lot of time spent at a space casino, with little payoff. Poe appears to be the new Han Solo, and a surrogate son for Leia, which is cute. Finn shows an understandable desire to run away, only to be stopped by the cheery, vaguely annoying Rose. The two spark it off, but prove to be a dull couple indeed, and we’re given very little reason to care for them.

Dearly departed Carrie Fisher gives a strong final(?) performance for Princess Leia, and there are several instances where it looks as though she’s about to die onscreen, only for her to survive to the end credits intact. I’m hoping her character will peacefully die offscreen before the next installment, which is surely the most tasteful thing to do, given the circumstances. I was kind of worried Disney was going to use that creepy face-capturing technology to continue her story, but they have stated that they won’t, even if they’d really like to.

The scene where Kylo chooses not kill his mother is powerful – the man is more than willing to stab his father in the gut, but we all know that only a true monster kills their mom; that’s Norman Bates level of villainy. But his comrades go ahead and do the job for him, only for Leia to float through the vacuum of space, proving her command of the Force.

It’s another scene I’m conflicted by – Leia always seemed like she chose a more “normal” life compared to her brother, and this feels like another scene that dilates the power of the Force. The Last Jedi, much like The Force Awakens, gives the impression that mastering the Force is kind of easy. Thankfully, there’s no mention of midichlorians.

One of the greatest scenes in the film is between Rey and Kylo (most of the great scenes involve the two, really) in Snoke’s fabulously red throne room – he’s not an attractive man, but he certainly has a flair for interior design. When Kylo betrays Snoke, he establishes himself as the big bad, which is great, but also renders Snoke utterly pointless. What on earth was the point of him, other than to be a diet Palpatine?

Not everybody needs a padded backstory, but characters that significantly drive the plot need more than this. Where did this guy come from, and what was his ultimate plan, other than “being evil?” It feels as though the new trilogy is finding the story as it goes along, which isn’t exactly a bad thing, but has led us down a few dead ends in the process. I wanted to at least hear Snoke say, “you wanna know how I got these scars?”

Then there are the porgs, which are deeply unsettling. I know Star Wars has a history of inserting Beanie Babies into scenes where they don’t belong, but hell, these creatures aren’t even cute. They’re right on the edge of the uncanny valley, more akin to deformed fetuses rather than adorable little critters. And they’re everywhere, breaking the tension, interrupting the narrative flow like a blaring toy commercial, which is what they are, really.

Seeing past the various flaws, this film is a joy to look at. The salt planet (let’s all thank that guy who licked the ground for clarifying that for us), the beautiful isolation of Luke’s island, the ragtag, chipped-away aesthetic of the Rebellion, were all wonderfully depicted. But there was a certain emptiness here that’s difficult to pin down.

The Last Jedi is tough to define; I really loved some moments in this film, and despised others. Luke had his finest appearance on screen, as far as I’m concerned, and a great send-off. Princess Leia is supremely dignified throughout, even when she’s floating through the depths of space, frosted in ice. Rey’s emptiness was balanced by Kylo’s complexity, and Finn, Poe, Rose and whoever Benicio Del Toro was, were all … there. Oh, and I forgot to mention Captain Phasma. But that’s ok, because she never did anything.

I left the theatre in a strange mood, unsure if I was even looking forward to the next installment. I had very high hopes for Rian Johnson, seeing as Looper is one of my favorite sci-fi films. But The Last Jedi lacked Looper’s slickness. It was bloated, burpy, tonally wobbly. Forty minutes could have been sliced out of this film, and would have left it leaner, healthier.

I still trust Rian Johnson with the new trilogy, I think. But I’m even more wary about Disney’s alarming takeover of the entertainment world. Are all their films going to feel like they’re part of the Marvel cinematic universe now?

We’ll see what’s next for Star Wars. I had a lot of issues with The Force Awakens recycling old story, but it still felt very much like a Star Wars film. The Last Jedi manages to be both a bold step forward, and a significant step back.

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Residents in a Dublin city centre apartment complex have been told to pay €4 million in less than a week or face eviction after major fire safety deficiencies were discovered in their building.

Residents in a Dublin city centre apartment complex have been told to pay €4 million in less than a week or face eviction after major fire safety deficiencies were discovered in their building.

'We're the victims here' - Longboat Quay residents face eviction unless they cover €4m repair bill for fire safety failings

Around 900 people live in the 299 apartments in the Longboat Quay complex by the Dublin docklands.

Residents of the apartments on Sir John Rogerson's Quay were left horrified when they were told last night owners would have to pay between €9,300 to €18,000 depending on the size of their apartment.

“I was asked to pay €18,000 and I told the chap last night I wouldn’t be paying it – I haven’t got that kind of money,” one resident told RTE’s Six One News.

Longboat Quay was built by developer Bernard McNamara in 2006 with owners paying between €450,000 and €750,000 at the height of the boom.

However serious fire safety deficiencies were uncovered last year and so far Dublin Docklands Development Authority, the nominal landlord, has paid €1 million to fix the fire alarm system.

But further work is required to upgrade fire walls and smoke vents at a cost of €4 million.

Read More: Enda Kenny urged to help resolve plight of residents in 'fire risk' complex

The docklands authority insists this is the responsibility of apartment owners as the company used by Mr NcNamara has gone into receivership.

But many owners say while they could pay some of the cost, they should not be responsible for “problems they did not know existed”.

Richard Eardley Director Longboat Quay Management

“We the owners are the victims here, we all bought apartments here in the last few years without knowing these problems existed and now we’re faced with a big problem,” said Richard Eardley Director Longboat Quay Management.

He told Six One News that while owners could be part of the solution, the receiver and the DDDA also had a part to play.

Longboat Quay is 60 pc owner occupier and 40 pc tenants.

Speaking to Independent.ie this morning, local Cllr Dermot Lacey (Labour), who was at the public meeting last night, said both Dublin City Council and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) have a "moral responsibility" to deal with the issue and not leave residents "in the lurch".

"I am horrified by the lack of engagement by public bodies in this matter. Dublin City Council are the moral landlords and the DDDA have a moral responsibility... and yet people are walking away from responsibility," he said.

"My job is to sit down with both Dublin City Council and the DDDA and try and resolve it and not leave people in the lurch," he added.

Read More: Bernard McNamara's development firm Gendsong behind the Longboat Quay property

Speaking to Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ One today, resident Paula Daly said that residents knew about a potential problem 24 months ago.

“Apparently, going back to 2011, Dublin Fire Brigade gave the ok that everything was ok, but they came back two years ago and told us there was a problem.

“Last night we got hit with the amount they’re looking for everyone to pay. I’m in a three-bedroom duplex and they want €18,000. Myself and my husband have two children and we both work, but I don’t know where we’re going to get this money.”

In the last six weeks, Dublin Fire Brigade has twice threatened to apply for a fire safety notice if remedial works to make the complex safe were not performed.

Last night, residents were told a tender for the remedial works has been accepted - but funding required for the work has not yet been acquired.

Residents were then told that a sum of €4 million was required or Dublin Fire Brigade could move in to evacuate the premises.

"I think the Dublin Fire Brigade is trying to be helpful here. They are trying to push for a resolution," Cllr Lacey said.

"The DDDA was a very successful company - and they do have some assets. There is funding there. It's not a lot of money but it could help," he said.

Cllr Lacey also claimed that some 18 apartments were owned by a receiver.

Read More: Residents angry at new charges for fire safety work at Dockland homes

The complex was constructed by Gendson, a vehicle for bankrupt developer Bernard McNamara, which has now gone into receivership.

Cllr Lacey suggested that these apartments could be sold in order to help residents with the funding required.

"The figures outlined last night at the meeting - whether they can find that money at the end of the week, it's a little unreal. We need to identify where such monies will come from in a very short period of time."

The 299 units in the development were built eight years ago by former developer Bernard McNamara who later went bankrupt. Most were sold to private buyers and some cost more than €500,000.

In February, it emerged serious shortcomings were discovered in an inspection last summer, including some walls deemed inadequate to contain a fire and an absence of some smoke vents needed if a fire broke out.

Consultations with Dublin Fire Brigade resulted in an evacuation of the blocks being avoided on condition that fire warden patrols were implemented.

One couple said their annual management fee for their one-bedroom apartment was increased by €200 a year to €1,200 for the next four years to pay for some of the work.

Online Editors
Japan's exports have also declined amid economic contraction [File: EPA]

Japan's economy has slipped into recession after a worse than expected performance for the first quarter of the year.

The economy contracted sharply in the first quarter, as factory production and consumer spending declined in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.

Real gross domestic product - a measure of the value of all goods and services produced domestically - shrank at an annualised rate of 3.7 per cent in the January-March period, the country's cabinet office said on Thursday.

The result marks the second straight quarter that the world's third largest economy has lost steam and undershoots an annualised 2.3 per cent fall forecast in a Kyodo News agency survey.

While there is no universally accepted definition of a recession, many economists define it as two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. Others consider the depth of economic decline as well as other measures like unemployment.

Japan's magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami left more than 24,000 people dead or missing, and wiped out entire towns in the hardest-hit areas.

Damage is estimated at $300bn, making it the most expensive natural disaster in history.

It damaged factories in the region, causing severe shortages of parts and components for manufacturers across Japan, especially automakers. A crippled nuclear power plant caused widespread power shortages that added to the difficulties faced by businesses and households.

Seijiro Takeshita, director of Mizuho International, told Al Jazeera that recovery may take a long time because clean-up efforts were taking so long.

Consumer spending falls

Japan's factory production and consumer spending both fell the most on record in March. Exports in March went south for the first time in 16 months.

Companies are reporting lower earnings and diminished outlooks for the rest of the fiscal year.

Toyota, Japan's biggest automaker, said last week that its quarterly profit tumbled more than 75 per cent because of parts shortages after the tsunami. As of May, the crisis cost the company production of

550,000 vehicles in Japan and another 350,000 overseas.

Toyota is expected to lose its spot as the world's top-selling automaker to General Motors this year.

Even before the disaster, Japan's economy was shaky.

In a historic shift, China overtook the country as the world's second largest economy last year. Japan struggled to address a slew of problems including years of deflation, a rapidly ageing and shrinking population, and ballooning public debt.

'Instant evaporation'

Japanese companies increasingly relied on exports to drive growth and offset the persistently lackluster demand at home. After four solid quarters of growth, Japan's GDP turned negative in the last three months of 2010 due to weaker exports and consumer demand.

The downturn was expected to be temporary.

Instead, Japan has now recorded consecutive quarters of contraction for the first time since the global financial crisis. GDP fell for four straight quarters starting April 2008.

The country's economy and fiscal policy minister Kaoru Yosano described the current slump as milder than the previous slide, when global demand "evaporated instantly".

"The Japanese economy's ability to rebound is sufficiently strong,'' Yosano said, according to the Kyodo News agency.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Singapore founder Lee Kuan Yew. File photo / Composite

Despite both ruling with an iron fist, the late Singapore founder Lee Kuan Yew is extremely different from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Singapore's biggest newspaper said Friday.

In a strongly-worded opinion piece, the Straits Times scoffed at commentaries that Lee and Duterte had similar administrative styles and nation-building approaches.

Lee, under an authoritarian rule, transformed Singapore from a third world to a first world country. He passed away in March 2015.

"The analogy would have been interesting except that it is laughably inappropriate," wrote Global Affairs associate editor Ravi Velloor.

The first big difference between them, said the piece, was that Lee "was not a man to have a person's life taken away without absolute attention to due process."

"People with no links to the drug trade, either as consumers or suppliers, have been assassinated in the process, perhaps to settle private vendettas. Criticism is met with abuse. An army of online warriors, some of whom are perhaps employed in the booming outsourcing industry, seem to be readily on hand to troll presidential critics, putting a fright into even seasoned commentators," it said.

In Duterte's ongoing war against illegal drugs, at least 1,840 deaths have been recorded. Of this number, 1,088 were killed during police operations.

Aside from this, the piece said Lee would never back away from a territorial claim "for the elusive promise of a few bags of silver in development aid."

The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled last July that China's economic claim on the South China Sea was without basis.

The Duterte administration, however, has been careful not to bring up the matter in international fora or with China, saying it wants to work with the rising superpower in resolving the issue.

"The Duterte-ordered extrajudicial killings, and his gyrations on the maritime dispute with China, have raised a stench for the Philippines that is far more perverse than the haze that used to spread out from Indonesia. If it goes on for too long, it could potentially be a bone in ASEAN's throat," said the Straits Times.

It also warned against signs that Duterte may be endangering the Philippines' once promising economic future.

"Global investors have turned skittish in recent weeks as his coarse tongue and take-no-prisoner methods get attention," it said, citing the Peso dropping to a seven-year low.

"Mr Duterte has many good reasons to be in a hurry to accomplish his mission. Presidents in his nation are allowed only a single six-year term, after all. Sometimes, though, it is wise to make haste a tad slowly," it added.
As many as 8 passengers have been charred to death in a tragic accident involving a luxury bus and a diesel tanker in the outskirts of Mumbai.

The luxury bus, which was on way to Ahmedabad from Pune, hit a diesel tanker near Kude village in Manor, Maharashtra between 1 and 2 a.m. on Wednesday.

Seven people were charred to death after the bus caught fire in the impact of the collision. The tanker, which was carrying diesel towards Hazira in Gujarat, also caught fire.

The incident reportedly took place when most of the passengers were asleep.

Police officials, emergency services and medical staff rushed to the spot to carry out rescue operations. "We had to be very careful in our operations as there was a diesel tanker and a risk of explosion," a senior police officer who was on the spot told NDTV.

The charred bodies of victims were recovered. "The bodies could not be identified as they are charred beyond recognition. The bodies have been sent for postmortem. The district administration is in the process of contacting the bus operator to get the names of the passengers travelling in the bus," Thane District Collector P Velrasu told the Press Trust of India.

At least 14 people were injured in the accident and they have been rushed to Manor rural hospital for treatment.

The accident halted traffic on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway for several hours.
The only scientists who kept the Business-as-Usual sign hanging out during the war were the mathematicians and astronomers. The other men of learning were engaged in war work. Physicists were making better range-finders, chemists were making better poison gases, and theologians were proving that their gods were in the trenches qualifying for meritorious-conduct medals and kisses on both cheeks. But the astronomers and mathematicians were not doing their bits. While the war was in progress, Albert Einstein was completing his theory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and British astronomers were working on plans to test it. It was fraternizing with the enemy. Scientists of this type have always been dangerous internationalists. They did incalculable harm to Church and State at an earlier time by casting suspicion on the Bible truth that the earth was flat and had four corners, and even today a man who meddles with the universe is regarded as unsafe. One of the organizers of the American Legion started an agitation to bar Einstein from the United States as a Red; the Woman Patriot Corporation lodged a complaint against him with the State Department; an American consular official nearly heckled the scientist into abandoning an American trip; Cardinal O’Connell denounced the Einstein theory as false, atheistic, and immoral; a religious writer charged that Einstein had cribbed the theory from the writings of a thirteenth-century saint. Nevertheless, Einstein slipped past the immigration authorities in 1930, and he did it again last October. Today, he is openly carrying on mathematical work at Princeton. The anti-nationalistic taint in astronomy manifested itself when British astronomers, even before the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, confirmed the new theory that had been made in Germany. On May 29, 1919, two expeditions under the Union Jack—one at Sobral in Brazil, and the other at Principe off the coast of West Africa—photographed an eclipse in order to discover whether starlight, as Einstein’s calculations had indicated, was twisted when it passed a massive body like the sun. They reported that Einstein was right. Since then, his theory has been retouched in detail, but its essentials have been repeatedly verified. No important scientist is to be found among the skeptics, although there is every incentive to debunk Einstein, if it can be done. Immortality awaits the man who can overthrow Einstein. The popular uproar over the theory surprised no one more than the author of the theory. He had been almost a recluse. His contacts had been with quiet, scholarly men of his own type, and his sudden glory appalled him. Interviewers, photographers, lion-hunters, cause-promoters, testimonial-seekers, and reflected-glory chasers of every kind came swarming into his life. A man of soft, plastic nature, Einstein was helpless in their hands. He was forced into the rôle of publicist, propagandist, and oracle. After fourteen years of experience with international nuisances and go-getters, Einstein has developed some resistance, but he has not yet learned how to say “No” successfully, and he is still the prey of determined busybodies. The Einstein of 1933 has become fairly reconciled to the occupation of popular idol. He has developed into a mixer, a wit, an authority on things in general, and the probable successor of George Bernard Shaw as the world’s miscellaneous consulting expert, but his countenance still reflects the bewilderment of his early years as a demigod in spite of himself. Permanent astonishment shines from his great eyes under their apprehensive brows.

When he first became famous, Einstein was a strange compound of cosmic wisdom and worldly inexperience. Presented by Lord Haldane to the Royal Society in England as a man of unparalleled intellectual boldness, Einstein found himself intimidated by the livery of the Haldane retainers. “He is too formidable,” said the Professor later at the Haldane place, when Mrs. Einstein wanted to summon the butler to fix a window. When he visited the Queen of the Belgians, Einstein failed to notice the welcoming party at the railway station and surprised the royal household by arriving on foot, baggage in hand. The Professor and his wife were both bewildered by the barbaric hospitality which overwhelmed them on their earlier visits to this country. They agreed that they must blindly accept whatever occurred to them in this bizarre republic; at a dinner in Cleveland, Mrs. Einstein, shrugging her shoulders at what appeared to be an elegant American eccentricity, ate a bouquet of orchids which she found on what seemed to be a salad plate. Einstein knew things that everybody else was ignorant of, and was ignorant of things that everybody else knew. The name of the richest man in the world meant nothing to him. He used a $1,500 check from the Rockefeller Foundation as a bookmark, lost the book, and could not remember who had sent the check. It took Mrs. Einstein some weeks to clear up the affair and to obtain a duplicate check, which was needed to pay the salary of an assistant. “My God, do you even have to sleep in those things?” Einstein is a mental Hercules, according to those who know his work. He has performed prodigious labors. By all the theories of physiognomy, he should be a granite-visaged Norse god of the Hindenburg type, instead of looking like a poet or musician. On theoretical grounds, he should have an iron will, instead of being pliant, docile, compromising. The explanation seems to be that Einstein, unlike most men of achievement, has never had to coerce or harden himself. His work was an exalted revel and his whole scientific life was a perpetual carnival, to judge from a speech of his at a dinner in Berlin in honor of the physicist, Max Planck. A preceding speaker had talked of the “agonizing toil” and “superhuman will” required of a great scientist. Einstein demurred. “This daily striving,” he said, “is dictated by no principle or program, but arises from immediate personal need. The emotional condition which renders possible such achievements is like that of the religious devotee or the lover.” On another occasion, Einstein described the impulse to grapple with his problems as “a demoniac possession,” needing no stimulation from conscious effort of the will. Einstein’s own theory about himself must be correct; nothing else could account for his irresistible energy in his own regions of thought and his lamblike helplessness in ordinary contacts. To catalogue a few of his lost wars of everyday life: For a time he refused to play the violin for charity because of his modest estimate of his own ability, and because he thought it unfair to professionals; under pressure, however, he gave many recitals. He declined a de-luxe cabin on a trip to America because of his scruples against luxury, but accepted when informed that he was hurting the feelings of the steamship line. On his trip to India, he refused to travel in a rickshaw because he thought it degrading to use a human being as a draught animal; he reconsidered, however, on the ground that rickshaw boys must live, and patronized them extensively. Hating fuss and feathers, he has been induced to make triumphal progresses on four continents. He has compared mass newspaper interviews to being bitten by wolves and to being hanged, but nevertheless he is frequently gang-interviewed. This easy yielding to pressure would lead another man to cheapen himself, but Einstein is saved by his aesthetic sense and his unworldliness. He could not do anything sordid. He doesn’t want anything; there is nothing about the man for temptation to work on. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1921, he gave it to charity. When a magazine offered him an amazing sum for an article, he rejected it contemptuously. “What?” he exclaimed. “Do they think I am a prizefighter?” But he finally wrote the article after arguing the magazine into cutting the price in half. It is said that he declined his present post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton on the ground that the salary was preposterously munificent, and was persuaded to accept only by the promise of an enormous pay cut. He objected to gifts, but his 1930 trip to this country netted him five violins and other valuable booty. His backbone stiffened, however, when an admirer sought to press on him a Guarnerius valued at $33,000; this he firmly refused, saying that he was not enough of a musician to do justice to the instrument. Probably no man has been more plagued than Einstein by offers of money for testimonials for toothpaste, pimple-eradicators, corn plasters, and cigarettes. He brushed all this aside as “corruption” and would have no compromise. Einstein regards money as something to give away; in 1927, he was aiding one hundred and fifty poor families in Berlin.

Einstein’s amiable infirmity of purpose was illustrated on his trip to America on the Belgenland, in 1930. The liner stopped five days in New York Harbor on the way to the Pacific Coast. Before leaving Germany, the scientist had announced that he would give no interviews, pose for no pictures, make no speeches, and pay no visits, but would remain aboard the ship. He was chivied into doing just the opposite of what he had planned. His five days were spent in interviews, broadcasts, luncheons, teas, dinners, and sightseeing expeditions. He even toured Chinatown. He went to the opera, visited Jeritza, and gave his written approval to the late Bill Guard’s brief definition of the Einstein theory: “There is no hitching-post in the universe.” The interviewing on the ship went on so long that the Professor finally uttered a resolute “No more” and went into hiding. A reporter found him. “Go away,” said Einstein, in his slow, reproachful manner, “immediately.” Seeing the disappointment on the reporter’s face, the scientist called after him, “Come back, young man, and I will try to answer your questions.” Pen-and-ink artists were also barred at this time. But when one of them surreptitiously made a sketch, Einstein autographed it and added a rhyme in German to the effect that “This fat, overfed pig seems to be Prof. Einstein.” It is the habit of this good, easy man to reward those who violate his rules and penalize those who respect them; courteous reporters, photographers, and artists are continually scooped by their unmannerly brethren, who by harrying and badgering the scientist put him into an affable, complying humor. While Einstein may have suffered to some extent under press cross-examinations, he has a miscellaneous journalistic inquisitiveness of his own and is an expert in baiting others with who and which. During an illness in 1928, he was attended in Germany by a world-famous New York physician. The physician memorized one hundred and fifty funny stories and told them to his celebrated patient. It was supposed that he did this to keep Einstein cheerful. “Not at all,” said the physician. “I told him funny stories in self-protection. He asked me so many questions that I was constantly embarrassed by my ignorance. When I found that he liked jokes, I memorized them to stop his questions.” “Gosh, Jack, I was born in a room like this.”
Matti Breschel (Saxo-Tinkoff) won stage 3 at the Tour of Denmark from a five-rider breakaway and also moved into the general classification lead of his national Tour. Francesco Bongiorno (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) and Wilco Kelderman (Belkin) finished second and third respectively behind the 28-year-old Dane, followed by Lars Bak (Lotto Belisol) in fourth and Edoardo Zardini (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) in fifth. Related Articles Tour of Denmark hints at Swedish sojourn for 2015

Breschel not only won his second straight stage, but now holds the leader's yellow jersey with a six-second advantage over Bak while Bongiorno moves up to third at 14 seconds.

The peloton was shattered on the 200km queen stage from Sønderborg to Vejle through a combination of crosswinds, record heat, hills, plus a taxing finishing circuit. Overnight race leader Magnus Cort Nielsen (Team Cult Energy) finished in a 16-rider group at 48 seconds and dropped to ninth on general classification.

The day's early break formed just 10km into the stage as six riders went out on the attack: Alex Rasmussen (Garmin-Sharp), Mikhail Ignatyev (Katusha), Mark Sehested Pedersen (Blue Water Cycling), Michael Reihs (Team Cult Energy), Søren Kragh Andersen (Team Tre-For) and Mikkel Mortensen (Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal). After 25km of racing their lead reached three minutes and for the next couple of hours their advantage fluctuated slightly between 2:40 and three minutes on the peloton.

Crosswinds split the peloton at the 84km mark, but the field eventually re-grouped. The Belkin team had been setting tempo at the head of the peloton and after covering 113km the break's lead had dropped to 1:30. In addition to the hilly terrain during the Tour of Denmark's longest stage, the peloton was having to grapple with the hottest temperatures in race history, with the mercury reaching 31.5 Celsius.

Belkin kept the break's advantage pegged at 1:30 for the next 30km but then the escape group started to falter as both Rasmussen and Sehested were dropped at 146km.

Saxo-Tinkoff and Lotto Belisol both provided assistance to Belkin in the peloton and the four riders in front saw their lead drop below one minute. With approximately 35km remaining, the break was caught and a group of 10 went out on the attack. Just prior to reaching the 5.6km finishing circuit in Vejle, to be completed three times, the lead group had increased in size to approximately 20 riders.

The finishing circuit featured a stiff, 21 percent ascent which provided a perfect platform for riders to go on the attack. Lars Bak, Matti Breschel and Wilco Kelderman were particularly aggressive and eventually a lead group formed inside the final 10km comprised of Bak, Breschel, Kelderman, Björn Leukemans (Vacansoleil-DCM), Troels Vinther (Team Cult Energy) plus a pair of Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox riders, Francesco Bongiorno and Edoardo Zardini.

Bak was the highest-place rider on GC in the front group, starting the day just seven seconds out of yellow, but Breschel, too, was a threat to take over the race lead as he was only one place behind Bak on GC at 11 seconds. Not wanting to go head-to-head with Breschel in a sprint finish, Bak tried to solo away to victory on the final lap as he pushed the pace on the Kiddesvej climb. The Lotto Belisol rider, however, would again be chased down by his breakaway companions, with Breschel, Kelderman, Bongiorno and Zardini making contact and setting up a sprint finale.

Breschel once again proved the fastest as he won for the second straight day, plus earned the leader's yellow jersey to cap off another strong performance.

Full Results 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 4:44:41 2 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 3 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 5 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 6 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:09 7 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:13 8 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 0:00:21 9 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 10 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:31 11 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:00:40 12 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 13 Laurens De Vreese (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:44 14 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:00:48 15 Damien Gaudin (Fra) Team Europcar 16 Tim Declercq (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 17 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 18 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 19 Jesper Hansen (Den) Team Cult Energi 20 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 21 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 22 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 23 Wouter Mol (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 24 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 25 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 26 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 27 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 28 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 29 Thomas Löfkvist (Swe) IAM Cycling 30 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:00:53 31 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:12 32 Enrico Barbin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 33 Martin Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:01:19 34 Sonny Colbrelli (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:01:28 35 Martin Elmiger (Swi) IAM Cycling 0:01:39 36 Maarten Tjallingii (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 37 Rob Ruijgh (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 38 Martijn Keizer (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 39 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:01:50 40 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 0:01:59 41 Gustav Larsson (Swe) IAM Cycling 0:02:14 42 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 0:02:28 43 Frantisek Rabon (Cze) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:02:43 44 Jos Van Emden (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:03:55 45 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 46 Koldo Fernandez (Spa) Garmin-Sharp 47 Rasmus Guldhammer (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:04:53 48 Daniel Foder (Den) Blue Water Cycling 49 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 50 Rudiger Selig (Ger) Katusha 51 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 52 Stijn Vandenbergh (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 53 Fabio Calabria (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 54 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 55 Olivier Kaisen (Bel) Lotto Belisol 56 Martin Velits (Svk) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 57 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 58 Andrew Fenn (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:05:27 59 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:07:34 60 Timofey Kritskiy (Rus) Katusha 0:07:40 61 Manuele Boaro (Ita) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 62 Pieter Vanspeybrouck (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 63 Andre Steensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 64 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:09:33 65 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:10:03 66 Christopher Juul Jensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 67 Julien Vermote (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:10:15 68 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 0:10:23 69 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:10:46 70 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 0:10:57 71 Kenny Van Hummel (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 72 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 73 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:11:23 74 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 75 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 76 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 77 Anders Lund (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 78 Maarten Neyens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:11:26 79 Tony Hurel (Fra) Team Europcar 80 Sander Cordeel (Bel) Lotto Belisol 81 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 82 Christophe Kern (Fra) Team Europcar 83 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:11:51 84 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 85 Marco Bandiera (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:11:54 86 Matteo Pelucchi (Ita) IAM Cycling 87 Michael Berling (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:13:47 88 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 89 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 90 Alexey Tsatevitch (Rus) Katusha 91 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 92 Christopher Williams (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 93 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 94 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 95 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 96 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 97 Kristof Goddaert (Bel) IAM Cycling 98 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 99 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 100 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 101 Morten Øllegaard (Den) Blue Water Cycling 102 Dennis Hereford Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 103 Christopher Stevenson (Swe) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 104 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 105 Jacob Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 106 Kasper Klostergaard (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 107 Morgan Lamoisson (Fra) Team Europcar 108 Sébastian Turgot (Fra) Team Europcar 109 Giovanni Bernaudeau (Fra) Team Europcar 110 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 111 Christian Moberg Jørgensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 112 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 113 Rick Flens (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:14:03 114 Martijn Maaskant (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 115 Iljo Keisse (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 116 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 117 Frederique Robert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 118 Justine Morris (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 119 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:43 120 Graeme Brown (Aus) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:15:54 121 Theo Bos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 122 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 123 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:15:56 124 Mathias Gade Jacobsen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:18:43 125 Jonas Aaen Jørgensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:19:01 126 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:19:40 127 Rasmus Christian Quaade (Den) Team Tre-For 128 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 129 Kaspar Schønnemann Larsen (Den) Team Tre-For 130 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For DNF Sébastien Rosseler (Bel) Garmin-Sharp DNF Brian Bulgac (Ned) Lotto Belisol DNF Michael Van Staeyen (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise DNF Sebastian Lander (Den) Team Post Danmark

Sprint 1 1 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 5 pts 2 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 3 3 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 1

Sprint 2 1 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 5 pts 2 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 3 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 1

Mountain 1 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 2

Mountain 2 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 2

Mountain 3 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 2

Mountain 4 1 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 10 pts 2 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 6 3 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 4 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 2

Most aggressive rider 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4

Young riders 1 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4:44:41 2 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:48 3 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 4 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:00:53 5 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:12 6 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:03:55 7 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:07:34 8 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:09:33 9 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:10:46 10 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:23 11 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 12 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 13 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:26 14 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:13:47 15 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 16 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 17 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 18 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 19 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 20 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 21 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 22 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 23 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:43 24 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:15:54 25 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:15:56 26 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:19:40 27 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 28 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For

Teams 1 Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 14:14:43 2 Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:42 3 Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:01:01 4 Team Cult Energy 0:01:27 5 Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:01:47 6 IAM Cycling 0:02:35 7 Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:05:01 8 Katusha 0:06:33 9 Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:07:44 10 Garmin-Sharp 0:08:48 11 Team Post Danmark 0:09:37 12 Team Trefor 0:10:53 13 Team Europcar 0:12:22 14 Lotto Belisol 0:15:10 15 Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:15:35 16 Blue Water Cycling 0:22:53 17 Team Novo Nordisk 0:29:51

General classification after stage 3 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 13:34:33 2 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 0:00:06 3 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:00:14 4 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:00:16 5 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:00:19 6 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:29 7 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:33 8 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:41 9 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:47 10 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:51 11 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:01:00 12 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 13 Laurens De Vreese (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:01:04 14 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:06 15 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 0:01:08 16 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 17 Thomas Löfkvist (Swe) IAM Cycling 18 Tim Declercq (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 19 Wouter Mol (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 20 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 21 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 22 Jesper Hansen (Den) Team Cult Energi 23 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 24 Damien Gaudin (Fra) Team Europcar 25 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 26 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 27 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:01:24 28 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:32 29 Martin Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:01:39 30 Martijn Keizer (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:01:59 31 Rob Ruijgh (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 32 Martin Elmiger (Swi) IAM Cycling 33 Maarten Tjallingii (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 34 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 0:02:03 35 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 0:02:19 36 Sonny Colbrelli (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:02:20 37 Gustav Larsson (Swe) IAM Cycling 0:02:34 38 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 0:02:45 39 Frantisek Rabon (Cze) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:03:03 40 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:04:15 41 Koldo Fernandez (Spa) Garmin-Sharp 42 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:04:53 43 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:05:07 44 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 0:05:13 45 Rudiger Selig (Ger) Katusha 46 Rasmus Guldhammer (Den) Blue Water Cycling 47 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 48 Daniel Foder (Den) Blue Water Cycling 49 Fabio Calabria (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 50 Martin Velits (Svk) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 51 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:05:28 52 Olivier Kaisen (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:05:34 53 Jos Van Emden (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:05:37 54 Andrew Fenn (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:05:47 55 Stijn Vandenbergh (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:06:11 56 Manuele Boaro (Ita) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:08:00 57 Pieter Vanspeybrouck (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 58 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:08:51 59 Timofey Kritskiy (Rus) Katusha 0:09:22 60 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:10:06 61 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 0:10:40 62 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:11:11 63 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:11:17 64 Christopher Juul Jensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:11:22 65 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:39 66 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 0:11:42 67 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:11:43 68 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 69 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:46 70 Maarten Neyens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 71 Tony Hurel (Fra) Team Europcar 72 Julien Vermote (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:11:55 73 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:12:05 74 Sander Cordeel (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:12:09 75 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 0:12:11 76 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:12:15 77 Enrico Barbin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:12:21 78 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:12:24 79 Kenny Van Hummel (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:12:32 80 Anders Lund (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:12:42 81 Matteo Pelucchi (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:12:46 82 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:12:59 83 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:14:04 84 Morten Øllegaard (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:07 85 Alexey Tsatevitch (Rus) Katusha 86 Kasper Klostergaard (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 87 Sébastian Turgot (Fra) Team Europcar 88 Kristof Goddaert (Bel) IAM Cycling 89 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:14:23 90 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:14:32 91 Dennis Hereford Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:39 92 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:43 93 Martijn Maaskant (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:14:48 94 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:14:59 95 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:15:20 96 Giovanni Bernaudeau (Fra) Team Europcar 0:15:22 97 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:15:26 98 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 0:15:28 99 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:15:29 100 Jacob Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 101 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 0:16:04 102 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:16:10 103 Marco Bandiera (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:16:12 104 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:16:16 105 Christophe Kern (Fra) Team Europcar 106 Theo Bos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:18:01 107 Graeme Brown (Aus) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 108 Frederique Robert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:18:05 109 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 0:18:28 110 Rick Flens (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:19:07 111 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:19:11 112 Jonas Aaen Jørgensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:20:13 113 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:20:25 114 Andre Steensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:20:29 115 Christopher Williams (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:15 116 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 0:22:34 117 Christian Moberg Jørgensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:22:50 118 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:51 119 Iljo Keisse (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:22:56 120 Morgan Lamoisson (Fra) Team Europcar 0:23:34 121 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:27:20 122 Michael Berling (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:28:39 123 Christopher Stevenson (Swe) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 124 Kaspar Schønnemann Larsen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:30:27 125 Justine Morris (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 0:31:02 126 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:31:57 127 Rasmus Christian Quaade (Den) Team Tre-For 0:32:29 128 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:32:35 129 Mathias Gade Jacobsen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:38:59 130 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For 0:39:23

Points classification 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 30 pts 2 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 22 3 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 18 4 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 18 5 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 16 6 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 15 7 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 13 8 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 12 9 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 12 10 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 11 11 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 10 12 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 10 13 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 9 14 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 9 15 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 8 16 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 7 17 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 7 18 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 6 19 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 5 20 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 5 21 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 5 22 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 5 23 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 5 24 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 5 25 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 4 26 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 4 27 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 4 28 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 3 29 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 3 30 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 3 31 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 3 32 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 2 33 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 2 34 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 2 35 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 1 36 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 1 37 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 1 38 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 1 39 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 1 40 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 1 41 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 1

Mountains classification 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 30 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 18 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 14 4 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 10 5 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 10 6 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 10 7 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 6 8 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 6 9 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 6 10 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 11 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 12 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 4 13 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4 14 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 2 15 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 2 16 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 2

Most aggressive rider classification 1 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 10 pts 2 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 10 3 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 4 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 5 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 6 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 6 7 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4 8 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 4 9 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 4

Young riders classification 1 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 13:34:49 2 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:31 3 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:52 4 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:16 5 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:03:59 6 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:05:12 7 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:08:35 8 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:10:55 9 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:23 10 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:11:27 11 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 12 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:30 13 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:12:08 14 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:13:48 15 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:14:16 16 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:27 17 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:14:43 18 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:15:13 19 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:15:54 20 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:16:00 21 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 0:18:12 22 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:20:09 23 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 0:22:18 24 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:35 25 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:27:04 26 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:31:41 27 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:32:19 28 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For 0:39:07
The notion of continuations as first-class values has been a tricky subject for me to understand to a comfortable level of certainty. I think this is probably true for many PLT-laymen like myself. This article represents my attempt at collecting and presenting my thoughts in a coherant manner! I'd be happy to receive corrections and comments.

I will start by defining a few key terms in my own style.

Continuation

We can observe that every expression, regardless of complexity, has the ultimate goal of returning a value to some surrounding execution context. That context is known as a continuation - it represents everything that is left to compute. Therefore, every computation has an associated continuation, which specifies the place from which execution should continue once control has been returned.

As a simple example, consider the following Scheme form:

( lambda ( n ) ( + n 1 ))

The continuation associated with the sub-expression "1" is an anonymous function, whose body consists of a call to the + primitive procedure whose first argument is the local variable n and whose second argument is being sought. With this understanding we can say expressions deliver values and continuations receive values.

Current continuation

By "current", we are referring to the continuation that would be derived from the current point in a programs execution. In other words, the current point of execution, lexical environment and state of the call stack (You should be familiar with the stack and the heap).

First-class object

For an object to be a "first-class citizen" in a programming language, it needs a few properties. Specifically, it must support being:

passed as a parameter to a function;

returned from a function;

stored in a variable or within a data structure;

constructed at runtime.

Things like numbers and strings are first-class in most programming languages. Functions are first-class in all functional programming languages. And in Scheme, my language of choice for this article, nearly everything can be considered first-class - including continuations as we'll see shortly.

OK, now continuations in Scheme

In order to render the abstract notion of the current execution context (the current continuation) to the programmer, Scheme needs some way to represent it. It would have been possible to implement specific objects and syntax into the language to handle this, but it's much easier to simply represent the current continuation as a first-class function. This process of transforming something implicit into something that can be explicitely expressed is known as "reification". So we can say Scheme reifies the current continuation as a function object.

Scheme provides the function call-with-current-continuation (aliased as call/cc) to furnish continuations to the programmer. call/cc is a unary function that accepts a further unary function, f, as it's argument. When invoked, Scheme will reify the current continuation, c, as a function and apply f to c. Therefore:

c ( call/cc f ) --> c ( f c ) ; Not Scheme. c(...) represents the current continuation

When c is applied to an argument, v, the existing continuation is terminated and the one represented by c is reinstated. So program flow will continue on from where the continuation was captured and v will become the overall value of the call/cc invokation.

Confusing? Take a look at this simple example:

( call/cc ( lambda ( return ) ( + 2 ( return 4 ) 1 )))

At first glance, you may think this expression will evaluate to 7, but infact, it will evaluate to 4. This is because we've captured the current continuation in the formal parameter return and then applied it to the number 4. This causes program flow to return instantly to the point at which the continuation was taken. Yep -- when applied, c will never return! We are effectively emulating the "return" control operator that allows early-escape in many popular programming languages.

To demonstrate the concept of early-escape in a more effective manner, let me show you two versions of a small Scheme procedure - one that makes use of continuations and one that does not. The procedure has-sym? accepts as arguments an S-expression (in this case a list of symbols and/or nested lists of symbols) and a symbol. It returns true if the given symbol is present somewhere within the S-expression. First of all, take a look at the non-continuation version:

( define ( has-sym? lst s ) ( cond (( empty? lst ) #f ) ; Nothing left, must not be present. (( list? ( car lst )) ; Is a sublist, inspect it also. ( or ( has-sym? ( car lst ) s ) ( has-sym? ( cdr lst ) s ))) (( eq? s ( car lst )) #t ) ; Found a match, return true to the caller! ( else ( has-sym? ( cdr lst ) s )))) ; Nothing yet, keep looking...

Whilst concise and easy to understand, this implementation (because it's defined as a recursive process) suffers from the slight hassle in that even if we find a match, we need to wait until the call-stack unwinds before the actual result gets back to the continuation in which the has-sym? procedure was called. If, perhaps, we captured the continuation of the has-sym? procedure with call/cc and then defined a local helper procedure (to perform the search) inside our function argument, we'd be able to invoke the continuation object and jump straight out of the procedure as soon as we found a match. For example:

( define ( has-sym? lst s ) ( call/cc ( lambda ( return ) ( define ( find lst ) ; Helper proc, local to lambda argument of call/cc. ( cond (( empty? lst ) #f ) (( list? ( car lst )) ( or ( find ( car lst )) ( find ( cdr lst )))) (( eq? s ( car lst )) ( return #t )) ; A match! Invoke 'return' for an early-escape! ( else ( find ( cdr lst ))))) ( find lst )))) ; We end up here when/if 'return' is invoked.

At this point it may be worth pointing out that continuations in Scheme, whilst far more powerful, are also more conservative than the GOTO statement of other languages for we can only revert control back to a place we have already visited (obviously, this is a good thing!). Also note that applying a continuation, unlike lexical closures, does not reinstate the referencing environment! If you change the values of variables - they will remain changed.

Continuations as first-class citizens

So far I've tried to explain the notions of both first-class objects and continuations in Scheme, but when we combine the two and start considering continuations themselves as being of first-class status, we open up a treasure trove of cool ideas. For example, consider the following mind-bender:

( define ( fact n ) ( let* (( total n ) ( k ( call/cc ( lambda ( kk ) kk )))) ( set! n ( - n 1 )) ( set! total ( * total n )) ( if ( <= n 1 ) total ( k k ))))

We can demonstrate the indefinite extent of continuations in Scheme by capturing the continuation (reified as a first-class function) in the local variable k. This definition of factorial works by capturing the continuation object, modifying the parameter n and local variable total in place, and then invoking the continuation with itself as an argument. This causes something of a local GOTO and rebinds the original continuation to the local variable k. This process continues until n reaches 1 at which point we return the total back to the user. The let* ** form is important here as it will expand into a series of nested **let forms. Without this, we'd rebind total to the original value of n on each invokation of the continuation object. With *let ** we can store a running total.

As you can see, we have used our power over control flow to compute factorial without using recursion or any built in looping construct. Of course, this implementation also suffers from two obvious downsides:

It's somewhat esoteric and hard to understand

It mutates local state, which makes it harder to prove that this function will maintain referential transparency.

And so...

With the power of first-class continuation handling at our disposal, we have the ability to define several control flow constructs common to other programming languages, such as backtracking, try/catch exception handling and "green" threads.

Studying a topic like continuations helps us to solidify our knowledge of several concepts we may generally grow to take for granted. The idea of managing control flow is so rudimentary to our field that we may never stop to think about how such an implicitely understood idea can be explained effectively.

In terms of further reading, I'd suggest the call-with-current-continuation, Continuation and Call stack articles on Wikipedia. The R5RS standard documents call/cc and other control-handling procedures that are available in Scheme. The discussion on understanding continuations at Lambda the Ultimate also helped me in writing this article.

And, finally, I think when such high-level control of continuations is given to a programmer, the words of the great Uncle Ben must be remembered:
A group of outraged Florida voters has launched the Web site MyCongressmanIsNuts.com in a drive to oust Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, the outspoken lawmaker who grabbed national headlines after it was revealed that, among other comments, he called an adviser to the Federal Reserve chairman a “K Street whore” in a radio interview in September.

The site is raising money to defeat the Orlando-area congressman and the site’s organizers describe it as a “more appropriate alternative” to Mr. Grayson’s CongressmanWithGuts.com, which the Grayson campaign said helped to raise more than $250,000 in the first three weeks of October.

The “Nuts” site took in about $3,335 overnight after its Thursday evening launch, according to a donation ticker on the Web page.

“Alan Grayson’s recent self-indulgent behavior has paralyzed his ability to serve as an advocate for the citizens of central Florida,” the Web site says in a plea for contributions.

The site features YouTube videos of TV and cable news reports critical of Mr. Grayson’s exploits.

“Every penny that we raise is going to go to exposing his policies and who he really is,” said Angie Langley, 34, chairwoman of the recently formed political action committee behind the Web site. “We are going to flood the district with bumper stickers, yard signs, and we are prepared to launch radio and television ads - whatever it takes to make sure this guy is not re-elected.”

Ms. Langley, a business development consultant in the Lake County portion of Mr. Grayson’s district, said the PAC is not affiliated with a political party and is not backing any candidates. She is not new to politics, however, having previously served as chairman of the Lake County Republican Party.

The PAC’s two other board members are a registered Republican and a registered libertarian.

Mr. Grayson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several Republicans have lined up to challenge Mr. Grayson, including a trio of “tea party” activists hoping to capitalize on the anti-tax, anti-big government movement that flourished over the summer. But national Republicans reportedly are looking for a stronger candidate in what has historically been a GOP-leaning district.

The Bronx, N.Y.-born Mr. Grayson, a wealthy businessman and lawyer, was a freshman House member virtually unknown on the national stage before his stinging rhetoric and take-no-prisoners style began to draw attention in September. That’s when he stood on the House floor and said the Republican health care plan is “to die quickly if you get sick.”

He responded to calls for an apology by apologizing instead to “the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.” He also set up his own Web site - NamesOfTheDead.com - that claims to list people who have died without health insurance.

He has described criticism of his frank comments as “Republican hissy fits.” Some House Republicans talked of an official censure for Mr. Grayson over his health care remarks on the floor, but the effort died.

But on Tuesday Mr. Grayson did offer what he called “my sincere apology” to Linda Robertson, the adviser to Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke whom he called a “K Street whore” last month on the nationally syndicated “Alex Jones Show.”

Such derogatory references to K Street, a base of many Washington lobbyists, are not unheard of in the nation’s capital, but are usually reserved for private conversations and not nationally syndicated radio.

On the “Alex Jones Show,” Mr. Grayson said: “This lobbyist, this K Street whore, is trying to teach me about economics.”

The remark was widely criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike.

“This characterization of Ms. Robertson, made during a radio interview last month in the context of the debate over whether the Federal Reserve should be independently audited, was inappropriate, and I apologize,” he said.

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
OAKLAND, Calif. — On a sun-drenched Saturday, Eddie Metairie wandered around the Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, past the miniature-golf-size buildings, cat perches and a bed shaped like a tuna can as he followed Lucia, an independent-minded brown tabby.

Going to a shelter to find a cat in a cage “is heartbreaking,” said Mr. Metairie, a project manager at a hotel supply company, but the Cat Town Cafe “feels organic.” He was having fun.

By the time his $10-an-hour playtime was up, Mr. Metairie had made plans to take the cat home and rename her Amélie.

The Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, which opened in late October and has arranged 52 cat adoptions so far, claims to be the first permanent cat cafe in the United States. Customers line up for locally brewed strong coffee, handmade bagels and “vegan fig nut pop tarts” (the proprietors clearly know their audience). When it is time to visit the cat zone, visitors push through glass doors to another world of lounging cats, all of them candidates for adoption. There are no cages.
In California, where there are nine festivals devoted to lavender alone, you’re never far from something that needs celebrating. But sometimes an event or theme or setting is so attractive, you might want to make a weekend or even a week of it. Here are 10 in 2018 worth a look.

Mendocino Crab, Wine and Beer Festival: This scenic hamlet on the north coast draws visitors with a variety of festivals throughout the year, but its crab fest is one of the best of its kind, thanks to its all-you-can-eat cioppino and crab feeds, a crab-cake cook-off and the area’s excellent local wines and beer. www.mendocino.com (Jan. 19-28)

ScotsFestival on the Queen Mary: When you remember that Mary was Queen of Scots, it’s obvious why the famed ship, built on the bonny banks of the River Clyde and now permanently moored in Long Beach, is home to the state’s most unusual gathering of the clans. Expect all the usual competitions, music, games, haggis-eating and whisky-tasting opportunities, plus a Robert Burns Supper. www.queenmary.com (Tentative dates: Feb. 17-18)

Palm Springs Modernism Week: What began as a single showcase now draws lovers of midcentury-modern architecture, design and culture from around the world for 10 days of activities that include film screenings, lectures, symposiums, art events, home tours, martini parties and even an ode to the beloved Airstream travel trailer. Sign up early enough and you can rent a gem of a private midcentury home. www.modernismweek.com (Feb. 15-25)

Like our Facebook page for more conversation and news coverage from San Jose, the Bay Area and beyond.

Pebble Beach Food and Wine: This is the younger sister of Aspen’s famous signature culinary festival, but with even better wine. Set on one of the most prestigious stretches of coastline in the country, the event draws thousands to sample offerings by more than 100 celebrity chefs and 250 wineries. Enjoy culinary demos, grand tastings, special events — such as last year’s Southern Breakfast with Hugh Acheson — while taking in sumptuous views. www.pbfw.com (April 5-8)

Paso Robles Wine Festival: Anchored in the Downtown City Park, with additional events hosted by wineries in the nearby rolling hills, this four-day eating and sipping extravaganza includes winemaker dinners, live music and barrel tastings. Buy tickets to the Grand Tasting early. www.pasowine.com. (May 17-20).

Valhalla Renaissance Faire: Renaissance fairs can be found closer to home, but why not hang out with the jousters and wenches on the shores of Lake Tahoe? Held at the Camp Richardson Historic Resort, this one offers four stages of entertainment, 900 costumed actors and more chances to buy food, drink and cool stuff than you can shake a turkey leg at. www.valhallafaire.com (June 2-3 and 9-10)

Festival Napa Valley: As a fundraiser for youth music programs, this 10-day festival offers everything from decadent winemaker dinners to free concerts in the park as it hops from high-end restaurants and prestigious wineries to concert halls. The price tag to some of its five-star events can be steep, but they offer a rare opportunity to see and even rub shoulders with international music superstars and other celebrities. www.festivalnapavalley.org (July 20-29)

Pageant of the Masters: You’ve got two months to enjoy Laguna Beach’s Festival of the Arts, one of the best juried fine-arts shows in the country. But make plans now to buy tickets to the “Pageant of the Masters” in which theatrical magic and creative humans re-create a series of “living pictures” every night. In 2018, the tradition will celebrate 85 years with “Under the Sun,” evoking masterpieces by impressionists and plein air artists. www.foapom.com (July 7-Sept. 1)

Russian River Jazz and Blues: Over its 40-plus-year history this summer swan song has hosted legions of musical legends, including Etta James and Buddy Guy. The music is top-notch and the atmosphere is even better, with a stage set right on the beach. Pitch a tent under the redwoods and kayak, paddle boat or swim in the river while the bands play. www.russianriverfestivals.com (Mid-September)

Reading this on your phone? Stay up to date with our free mobile app. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store.

Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival: This is the mother of all pumpkin festivals. In a state with this much agriculture, that’s no small feat. Cars line Highway 92 throughout the two-day celebration of all things October, a time of year when this Pacific coast-side town simply sparkles. This time why not avoid the traffic and make a weekend of it? www.pumpkinfest.miramarevents.com (Mid-October)
The filmmaker announced via Twitter that he hopes to debut his hockey movie at Sundance 2013.

Kevin Smith is sharing details about his next -- and final -- film via Twitter, telling fans that he hopes to unveil Hit Somebody during Sundance 2013.

PHOTOS: Kevin Smith in Action

The auteur had initially planned to create the movie in two parts, but wrote on Jan. 5 that he is currently “Writing script two, but now gonna make one big movie instead… Makes more sense anyway: the movie’s about taking one, good shot.” Smith revealed that he hopes to begin shooting in June.

FILM REVIEW: Red State

In response to another follower, Smith noted that the film’s total running time could reach 150 minutes with credits.

Last January, Smith told reporters that Hit Somebody would be his last film. “I feel good about that,” he said while promoting his most recent film, Red State. “I feel like my critics are probably saying ‘Oh, good, he’s leaving.”

STORY: Kevin Smith Slams Indie Spirits on Twitter After His 'Red State' Is Snubbed

Smith clarified that while he is closing the curtain on theatrical films, he is “willing to try other directing projects.”
In the latest episode of To Be Continuous, Edith and Paul discuss the challenges and benefits of refactoring monolithic applications into microservices. They examine various approaches for creating microservice boundaries and dispel the myth that they should be defined as small as possible.

Transcript

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00:00:00

Paul Biggar: The idea of having something that you have a slow delivery cycle for some particular reason, or you have a normal delivery cycle but that still takes a day or whatever because there's code review and that sort of thing. And you want to have something really, really fast. You want to have multiple stages, multiple speeds of delivery based on different needs of different parts of the company, and that sort of thing.

Edith Harbaugh: I'm just so excited about this today, started talking about it. I mean this is really the promise of microservice. Like the old way was you had this monolith. The best thing I ever heard was a friend call it disgusting monolith, where everything was all tied together, and if you wanted to change one thing, you had to test everything all together.

Paul: Right, and we've all been there I'd say.

Edith: Yeah and it's very painful. It's very painful because then you get into this fix/release cycle. But decoupling things into different components that means that you can start iterating on some of them faster than others.

Paul: Right,

One of the questions that you get around microservices is, "How do you define microservices boundaries?" And a lot of people just go, "Oh you make them as small as possible" which I think is ridiculous.

But the ones that have always made sense to me is that you have service boundaries where there's different teams, or service boundaries when there's needs to deploy the service at different pace from the services around it.

Edith: Yeah, I mean I don't think you should decompose for the point of decomposing. Because that's when you end up with like 8,000 microservices, and you're like, "I don't know," this happens. I think you should decompose when, as you said, there's a functional reason why something has to move at a different speed.

Paul: Right, so the obvious one apart from those two is that it makes logical sense as a dependency for the API. This is a good API boundary for all the things that rely on it.

Edith: Yeah, because that releases you basically from release hell. Because you want to have a logical way that you can say, "Okay, this microservices interacts with this one at a certain time in a certain boundary." A really good example I heard is

There's this myth that you iterate very frequently on your UI, and I think this is true if you're in more consumer business where you can get a million people looking at your app and rapidly iterate.

If you're at a company, if you're a B2B company, and you're rolling out your own customers, they don't actually want to have two people in the same customer have different user experiences. It's very confusing so you have to get a lot of support calls.

Paul: So I agree with you in the general case. But having used AB testing, it is an extremely useful tool to roll features out slowly and that's what I think even in B2B case.

Edith: I think it really depends on your B2B. Because I have heard some horror stories about people who try to do it at a B2B, and they get a lot of support calls. You know, "What's happening? The button I expected there to be is not there." Or "we just did a whole lot of training on this last week."

Paul: Yeah, and something has changed?

Edith: Yeah.

Paul: So I think one of the things that's really valuable about the modern dev tools go to market is that you have both on-prem and on-cloud customers.

Edith: Are we just doing buzzword bingo now?

Paul: Sure, sure, sure. So when you have customers who use both your cloud service and your downloadable software, the customers who use your downloadable software are the people who are naturally much more conservative. That's why they're using your downloadable software in the first place.

So you can do your AB testing in the cloud on the cloud customers who are much more early adopters and much more willing to put up with that sort of thing and happier to get the good UX that comes out of it.

Edith: Even then most people don't have sufficient volume to do effective AB testing.

Paul: I don't think that's true at all.

Edith: I think that's very true.

Paul: You don't have sufficient volume to do minor AB testing like to tell the difference between two different versions of blue, right? That's something you need Google Scale for. But if you're trying at a new positioning, you have AB testing. I think the major value when people complain about AB testing, the major value that they overlook is that it tells you that you didn't fuck something up.

Edith: Yeah,

I think AB testing is a misnomer. I think it's really risk tolerance.

Paul: Right, so if you're launching a new messaging or a new onboarding page or something like that that you think is going to deal with your position much better, or it mentions a new product which hadn't been mentioned before, you want a B version that was just the old version that tells you you didn't tank your conversions.

Edith: Yeah, and the dirty secret is that most changes have no effect at all.

Paul: Right, right. But you want to be sure of that. We launched a new, beautiful home screen once or homepage, and it dropped our conversions 20%.

Edith: Yeah, I remember. Paul always teases me cause I talk about TripIt. Like we tried a different footer, and it destroyed our conversion.

Paul: Oh! A footer.

Edith: A footer

Paul: Did it have a different call to action or move to call to action or something or provided more calls to action?

Edith: The footer had a lot of calls to action.

Paul: Yeah, that was exactly the thing with ours. We had, "You can sign up right now you can read the docs or you can do something else." And it ended up that a lot of people go read the docs, and then just forget about us.

Edith: Yeah, and this is the kind of classic product debate then. Do you want them to sign up if all they're going to do is read the docs? And you can argue about this for hours about qualifying leads, when to get people into the funnel.

Paul: I think if you have a drip marketing campaign, you generally want them to cross the line which gets them into drip marketing campaign.

Edith: Paul, you're a marketer!

Paul:

I was the CEO of a company. I've done fucking everything, for three months each.

Edith: What was the rotation? If you fucked everything three months each?

Paul: Yeah, everything that got done by me was done badly, but it was better than not being done at all.

Edith: So what was your rotation?

Paul: I did sales. I did marketing. I did PR. I did UX. I did support. I did everything.

Edith: What was it like when you were sales?

Paul: So fortunately Circle had so much interest and such strong product market fit that sales was literally having a call with the CFO saying the price is this. And he's like, "Can you lower the price?" "Uh, no. All right, well thanks." I had a couple of calls that were literally that. They brought some financy person or the manager and they were like, "We demand a discount." And it's like, "Yeah, this is a good price we feel."

Edith: So do they end up buying?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of them don't. I hated giving discounts. I felt like we had a really good price, and it was actually kind of cheap for the value that customers got out of it. And so when people came for discounts, I was just like, "No."

Edith: That's funny. You know there's the opposite which is you should price a little high expecting that you'll discount.

Paul: Yeah, I think for bottom-up tills, you can't really do that. Because people won't ask for it, they'll just leave.

Edith: Ah!

Paul: The old oracle way doesn't apply to our modern bottom-up. I guess, do you have a top-down?

Edith: We have both. I mean as soon as you get into procurement department, like their job is to get a discount.

Paul: Right, right

Edith: So if you don't give them a discount, they feel like they didn't do their job, and their like, "What happened here?"

Paul: Yeah, and that's why you end up, I guess in the microservice version of the sales process is you apply a different sales process to different people. And the bottom-up people get the price on the website, and the people who go through their procurement department get another thing. And the fact that you have to talk to their procurement department means that they're getting charged an outrageous price in the first place to deal with that.

Edith: I think the words continuous delivery terrifies a lot of people.

Paul: Mmhmm

Edith: It's funny because we do a podcast called..

Paul: To Be Continuous, yeah, I think that's what it's called.

Edith: I mean let me check the label. Yeah I think people think of continuous delivery is that you have to push out multiple times a day an hour. When really it just means that you need to be able to push out what you want.

Paul: Right, right I've rarely seen a continuous delivery company that does continuous delivery and uses that to mean we're only doing it when we can. I think they all push at every version. I find it extremely rare for people to push out, especially in small companies. Maybe there's a small company bias.

Edith: No, I'm talking more at larger orgs. They find continuous delivery terrifying. Because they're like, "Our processes are not set up to have a new version of the UI every day." Like, "We need to go train our support people. We need to go do this. We need to update this." So to go back to what you said, I think there's different functions within their systems that they would like to be updated at different speeds.

Paul: Yep, I agree with that. You can kind of think of the UI as one microservice. You can think of all the other things as different microservices. But the one that I've always found, people need to update quickly, but they don't necessarily want to update it repeatedly, is the marketing pages. So the entire front-end of your thing. You'll get to a point when you have marketers and the marketers ask for the front-end, which was beautifully built by developers.

Edith: With Han Loverdly and Jekyll

Paul: I think actually Jekyll is pretty good for them, but like will typically be built-in react, you know whatever the same as your website is it'll be nicely unified and has an excellent release process. And the marketers will be like, "Yeah, we don't want to talk to you to make a change here. We need you to put in the optimizely pixel and could you switch this over to WordPress."

Edith: Yeah, cause they want to be able to do it themselves, they don't want to have to go bug their developers.

Paul: Yep,

Then they end up with a terrible release process from a developers perspective in that there's no staging environment. There's no ability to preview your stuff. There's no code review. There's no nice automated releases that have pull request in them. There's just like someone playing around in Word Press.

Edith: I could feel the horror in your voice.

Paul: Well, I think it's easy to fuck things up that way. But it's better to only have to rely on your team to get something out. When you have to start to rely on other teams, that's when your deliver really gets slow.

Edith: Yeah, I thought of a classic thing where you want to have very quick releases and it's anything security related. This is actually one of my big things is that you want to be able to constantly patch security vulnerabilities. And the security vulnerabilities that exist today will be different tomorrow, the day after and the day after and the day after.

Paul: You generally want to have a way of dealing with security vulnerabilities immediately even though that is extremely scary and very, very dangerous.

Edith: But whatever you know today will be different later.

Paul: Yep, we had multiple approaches of dealing with different container images. Because a container image would take like 36 hours to roll and to deploy. So we needed to be able to run something on that image. It was partially for security. It was partially for user experience. It was partially because sometimes things broke in the ecosystem.

But we had the ability to go change, we called it the pseudo hack. So a command that would run a pseudo. And there was 30, 40 times where we need to make some change to the pseudo hack to support something weird that was going on.

Edith: Yeah I think a lesson is if you have to do a fix, how long does it take you to do it?

Paul: Right, there's the actual fix itself, and then there's the process of getting the fix into production.

Edith: Yeah, and if that process is more than a day, you're in serious trouble.

Paul: Yep. Well, I mean if it takes you a day, but you're able to get it patched really quick, I mean that's kind of the source of the word patch, right?

If you patch it immediately and then you go fix it, and it takes a day, that's no big deal.

Edith: Oh, yeah, but as long as you can patch.

Paul: Exactly yeah. So we ended up at various points with a very quick process to update our engine X, so that we could filter particular data or filter particular user types and that kind of thing, and a bunch of different levels to deal with particular security vulnerabilities that might theoretically come up. Not just security vulnerabilities, but also like DDOS.

Edith: Yeah, just everything that comes up.

Paul: Incidents of whatever kind.

Edith: Yeah incidents that are not your core functionality, but are crucial to be quickly addressed.

Paul: Right exactly.

Edith: So I think I could break down different speeds of which you want stuff to update. Stuff that leaves you vulnerable to the outside world, that's kind of like your protective cocoon, if there's a hole breech there, you need to repair it immediately. Or else you'll end up hacked.

Paul: The problem with those is that you also need to maintain those. So you need to have testing around those. You need to have people remember how to do them. If you go to use one of those things, and no ones touched it in six months and it went stale or it rotted in some way, then you're even more fucked now especially if you've provided yourself an accidental back door, or provided your attackers an accidental back door.

Edith: Yeah, and then there's stuff that you want to go at different speeds. Like if you're doing any sort of billing update, you actually want to be kind of cautious.

Paul: Yeah, I mean this is for feature flags I find particularly useful. You enable a billing chains like that for one person and then you watch what happens. You make sure that they're able to do the thing, and you go very, very cautiously.

Edith: Thanks for wearing LaunchDarkly shirt, Paul.

Paul: No worries! Feature flags are awesome.

Edith: It looks really good on you by the way. It matches your haircut.

Paul: Thanks.

Edith: I get really excited the more I talk to our LaunchDarkly customers right now because I've seen the way just the world has changed even in the couple years that we've been around.

Paul: What are people using LaunchDarkly for that blew your mind? Or how perhaps are they using it that blew your mind?

Edith: I'm pretty jaded so not much blows my mind. But it's more like they visited a big customer and they said how much less stress they were in and how much less risky their releases were now.

Paul: Right, we've been saying this for years that

Continuous delivery is less risky than monolithic delivery or stage delivery.

What did we use to call it when it wasn't continuous?

Edith: Waterfall?

Paul: Sure waterfall. I think people didn't really believe us.

Edith: I think there's still a lot of doubt. I think if you draw like a crossing the chasm type thing, I think we're still like squarely in the early adopters.

Paul: Yep, that's true.

Edith: But I think it's starting to move.

Paul: Yep.
ASUS Google Nexus 7 16GB Android Tablet (2013 version) with a 1080p Full HD Display and a Quad-Core Processor

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Ahead of her meeting with Trump tomorrow, British Prime Minister Theresa May joked that "opposites attract" and called on the US President to renew the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States and lead in a new, changed world. In the United States for what will be Trump's first meeting with a foreign leader since he took office last week, May signaled a shift in foreign policy, bringing her position more in line with that of Trump.

Following a disparaging statement from the French Finance Minister earlier in the day, in which Michel Sapin said that “Madame May can go see whoever she wants. I understand she goes to see the new U.S. president given the history between the U.S. and the U.K" and added that "she is not going there to negotiate," because allegedly "neither she nor Mister Trump are in a position to negotiate", May decided to prove him wrong, and urged the US and UK and their leaders to stand united and confront new challenges, including the rise of economies in Asia that people fear could "eclipse the West," the threat of Islamic extremism and a resurgent Russia.

"So we - our two countries together - have a responsibility to lead. Because when others step up as we step back, it is bad for America, for Britain and the world," May told members of Republican Party at their retreat in a speech often punctuated by applause from an enthusiastic crowd.

"This cannot mean a return to the failed policies of the past. The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over. But nor can we afford to stand idly by."

Following her speech, UKIP's Nigel Farage tweeted that "I can hardly believe Mrs May's words about our place in the world and with America. I've wanted all of these things for years" and added that the PM said "things that I could only ever have dreamt that a British Prime Minister would say."

I can hardly believe Mrs May's words about our place in the world and with America. I've wanted all of these things for years. — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 26, 2017

Some of the key points touched upon by May in her speech as summarized by Axios:

The U.S. and U.K. are at the start of crafting a great trade agreement, but that the new deal must serve both national interests. (This can't happen until after Britain official leaves the EU.)

U.S. and U.K. should stop intervening in other countries to try to "remake the world in our image."

On working with Trump, she said, "Haven't you ever noticed, sometimes opposites attract?" She added she would challenge Trump on issues like torture.

When it comes to Putin, May's advice was "to engage, but beware."

She said "there is nothing inevitable about conflict between Russia and the west," and that the countries should work to make "cooperation more likely than conflict."

She is pushing for major reform of multinational organizations to better serve the nations that formed them. She added, "The most important institution is and should always be the nationstate."

NATO should be "as equipped to fight cyber warfare" as it is to fight conventional warfare.

U.S. and U.K. should work together to fight the "evil ideology" of "extremist Islamism

Of note, as Reuters points out, is her break with the interventionism that launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan underscores a change in global politics. It also fits with Trump's move to put "America first" and scores well with voters in Britain whose feeling of being left behind by globalization helped fuel Britain's vote to leave the EU last year that propelled May to power. Aware that Brexit will shape her legacy, May welcomed her early visit to the United States, a boost to her attempts to show that Britain can prosper outside the European Union despite criticism at home for cozying up to Trump.

On her U.S.-bound flight, May concentrated on similarities with the U.S. leader, who some reporters suggested had a style in stark contrast to her more cautious, restrained approach. "Haven't you ever noticed ... sometimes opposites attract?" she answered with a laugh

The biggest open issue, however, is trade, and the desire of both nations to eventually sign mutually beneficial bilateral contracts.

Eager to win favor - and a trade deal - with the new U.S. president to bolster her hand in the divorce talks with the European Union, May said both countries shared many values and that, contrary to his statements that NATO was "obsolete," Trump had told her he was committed to the U.S.-led military alliance. May said she supported Trump's "reform agenda" to make NATO and the United Nations "more relevant and purposeful than they are today," and "many of the priorities your government has laid out for America's engagement with the world."

But there may be sticking points in Friday's talks - May said she condemned the use of torture and would stick to UK policy, suggesting Britain may not accept intelligence that could have come from such methods that Trump could reintroduce. "We condemn torture and my view on that won't change – whether I'm talking to you or talking to the president," she said when asked what impact it would have if Trump brought back a CIA program for holding terrorism suspects in secret prisons.

May will have navigate the middle ground carefully, wary of being criticized as too pro-Trump or alternatively as too negative toward a future trading partner.

But the take home message is that any gain for the UK and US, is a loss for Europe, which would prefer to see the UK in a position of weakness, and May knows this well. She has threatened to walk away from the EU if she fails to get a good deal, and some critics say that could give other countries, like the United States, the upper hand in any talks.

And the EU might not take kindly to any overly friendly overtures to a president some of the bloc's main leaders have voiced concern about. Some kind of trade agreement, though, is high on her list of priorities, despite Britain and the United States being at odds over genetically modified organisms, meat production and public procurement and May unable to sign deals until after Brexit.

May says she will launch the divorce talks by the end of March by triggering Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, which gives up to two years to negotiate an exit deal. Only then can she agree with third countries. Both leaders should use the time to find areas where they could remove trade barriers, May said.

What tomorrow will boil down to? "We're both very clear that we want a trade deal."

For those who missed it, May's full Philly speech is below
When Kalimah Priforce was eight years old and in foster care, he got more books the only way he could. He went on a hunger strike.

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Every great story has its miracles.

A few weeks before reaching nine years of age, impossible became a daily part of my life as a foster care resident of a Bedford Stuyvesant group home–deep in the heart of Brooklyn. It belonged to the very powerful Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC) of New York City.

There weren’t many leisure activities other than a single television that most of the kids fought regularly over. Residents weren’t allowed to leave the premises except to attend school, group trips escorted by staff members, or chauffeured around in vans to fulfill medical appointments. Rather than engaging in squabbles with other kids about which shows to watch (Yo MTV Raps was very popular then), I monopolized a small library of donated books to satisfy my insatiable curiosity about the world.

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I read every book, many of them twice. As a result, I approached one of the group home staffers and kindly requested that they order more books to expand the library in a, “Please sir, can I read some more?” Dickensian way.

♦◊♦

I was the first to make such an odd request, so they ignored me at first, but I was persistent. Several hours later, I got my answer that it was “impossible” and that there simply “wasn’t enough funding for more books.” I wasn’t convinced, and it didn’t help them that I had just finished reading the stories of Peter Pan, Encyclopedia Brown, Huckleberry Finn, The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, and other precocious youth.

I wanted more books, and even tried negotiating with them.

I was already a vegetarian by the time I arrived to the group home, and my dinner selections consisted mostly of salads and breads. I calculated that for every meatloaf or chicken sandwich I didn’t eat, that the agency was saving a dollar or two per day. My suggestion to them was that they use the money they were saving to purchase of books.

They angrily declined and forcefully stated that it couldn’t be done. Since all my neogotiaitons failed. it was then that I decided, at eight, that if they couldn’t feed my brain, there was no use to them feeding my stomach. I wrote a letter to them declaring that I would fully withdraw from eating any food until they ordered more books. I was on a hunger strike, though I didn’t know what to call it.

They called my bluff, but by the third day of my hunger strike, they were getting worried and threatened to have me psychologically evaluated and be force-fed. Their campaign to stop my civil disobedience included bribing my fellow dorm mate to bring food to my bed.

I wrote a letter to them declaring that I would fully withdraw from eating any food until they ordered more books. I was on a hunger strike, though I didn’t know what to call it.

I slept most of the day because of my volunteered malnourishment. Once. I woke up and discovered a plate of macaroni and cheese (my favorite) beside my bed. I brought the plate to the kitchen, politely placed it on the counter, and returned to the male dorm.

Day four was when my life would be changed forever, as the offsite director of the group home visited the offices and photocopied paperwork.

I was mopping the floors near him (it infuriated the staff that though I wasn’t being fed, I continued to complete my assigned chores) when out of courtesy he asked me how I was doing, as he was directly involved in my social work case as the physically tortured and neglected Haitian kid who was brave enough to testify against his mother in family court. I replied, “I haven’t eaten in three days.”

After an immediate shock and awe, he quickly arranged for a meeting between me and the staff. Through its duration, I sat right beside him.

I always distrusted adults, so it didn’t help that they accused me of being obstinate, and that my eating disorders were due to mental instability on my end. Still, their words did upset me.

However, their labels wouldn’t stick as accurate depictions of my character, because prior to and throughout my hunger strike I remained well-behaved. I completed all my chores in addition to assuming the cleaning duties of other kids who were too ill or traumatized to complete them during their first few days there. Chronic or intermittent homelessness will do that to anyone–especially kids and young teens. It’s completely demoralizing.

He asked them for solid reasons why they didn’t inform him of the issue. They explained that they didn’t feel it bore enough importance to be referred upwards to him. This made him even more upset, and I was getting my front-seat first lesson on the spectacle of adult incompetence and mediocrity. They only cared about their jobs and would only exercise intelligence when they felt their jobs would be threatened, and so they “quieted” my request for books. If fear over the loss of their jobs wouldn’t have clouded their foresight, they would have seen this incident from the perspective of the director.

If word had gotten out to major media outlets that a Black (Haitian) kid in what was once considered “The largest ghetto in the United States—Bed Stuy”, went on a hunger strike after his request for “more books” was denied by a taxpayer funded group home, it would have rocked the entire social services community. A city and state investigation of the CBCC organization would have been made, and absolutely everyone would have lost their jobs.

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The staff members weren’t thinking, and even at eight years old, I knew better than to take that level of stupidity too seriously.

The director turned towards me, leaned forward, and promised me that if I ate immediately after the meeting, he’d personally see to it that more books be added to the library. Though I didn’t trust many adults, I respected him enough to agree to the deal.

After the meeting was over, I went into the small cafeteria and ate lunch with everyone else. To this day, I’ll never forget that I had mixed vegetables and a cheese sandwich with plenty of mayonnaise. Grilled cheese never tasted so scrumptious.

Surprisingly, the next day men in jumpsuits arrived to set up bookshelves for the boxes of new books that had just been delivered. How he pulled it off so quickly, I will never know, but I marveled as I saw the covers of The Hobbit, D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Oliver Twist, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time. At that moment, I knew I would be destined to be the smartest boy in the world!

One of the female staffers approached me with an envelope, rather than lazily calling me into her office as she usually did. It was a typewritten letter from the director I had brokered the deal with.

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I don’t recall the exact words, but it was a permission slip that allowed me the special privilege to leave the group home during visitation hours—to the local library and museum.

As long as I had the letter, and showed it to the museum receptionist, my admission would be free. I imagine this was a preventive measure on his part in expectation that I would finish reading all the books in the group home library–and I did. I was the only group home resident given this access.

♦◊♦

Standing up for the right to read books drastically changed my world. Eventually, I would be discovered by a Buddhist nun (impressed by my juvenile hunger strike story) and along with her monastic community, provided me with a free five-year-long formal education and tutorship.

In 1999, New York City finally ended a multi-million dollar contract with CBCC after a crackdown uncovered the foster care agency’s widescale mismanagment and corruption.

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Also, it wouldn’t be the last time I held a hunger strike against seemingly powerful change-resistant forces. During my sophomore year at Central State University, when faced against a school administration that wouldn’t budge on its policies toward the dietary needs of students, I held another hunger strike that brought the heads of a major food corporation together along with college administrators. I presented my proposal that by tailoring menus to address the dietary diversity of the student body, it would save them money and benefit both parties. After negotiations were made, I broke my second and last hunger strike with a veggie burger that they prepared for me.

Every good story has its miracles, but every miracle needs pushing.

The problem with “in the box” education solutions is that they run counter to recent studies revealing that when we place students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into the same classroom with higher income students, they still perform below expectations.

That’s because the key to knowledge is exposure, and exposure is what we don’t talk enough about in education circles.

The difference between kids that make it and ones that don’t isn’t decided by test scores or even their natural talents, but more to do with whom and what they are exposed to. Thanks to Twain, Barrie, Dickens, Caroll, and so many more…books gave my earliest dreams the push they needed to make the incredible journey from the confines of a Brooklyn group home to the learning labs of sillicon valley—where I currently run an edtech startup. My life’s work is about giving every learning miracle its push.

So every morning when I smile into the mirror, a precocious eight-year old boy smiles back at me, because his miraculous journey is far from over. Please sir, can I read some more?

—

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What’s on the horizon for 2016 and beyond? Find out in this annual ebook sampler of excerpts from some of Del Rey’s most exciting science fiction and fantasy titles!

Inside are a slew of iconic authors and brands. Michael J. Sullivan, the author of the Riyria series, kicks off an original five-book saga. Elizabeth Moon revisits her classic military sci-fi epic Vatta’s War with a new standalone novel. Science Fiction Hall of Famer Connie Willis returns with a satire of love and (mis)communication. China Miéville, one of the most consistently original voices in any genre, presents a brilliant work of alternate history. And a bold era of World of Warcraft storytelling begins with a tale of justice and vengeance.

Here, too, are emerging voices and incredible new visions. At the edge of the Russian wilderness, a young girl tries to protect her family from terrifying fairy tales come to life. In Kolkata, India, a college professor learns of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts. An ordinary family in England undertakes a ten-year period of servitude to a ruling class endowed with powerful magic. A contestant on a reality TV show, cut off from all outside contact, learns that the real world may have changed in terrifying ways. A young man with inexplicable powers is recruited by a secret training program at West Point. And in South Dakota, a child falls through the earth—only to wake up in the palm of a giant metal hand.

This marvelous ebook sampler contains excerpts from eleven recent and upcoming works:

AGE OF MYTH by Michael J. Sullivan

THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE by Katherine Arden

COLD WELCOME by Elizabeth Moon

CROSSTALK by Connie Willis

THE DEVOURERS by Indra Das

GILDED CAGE by Vic James

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS by China Miéville

THE LAST ONE by Alexandra Oliva

THE POINT by John Dixon

SLEEPING GIANTS by Sylvain Neuvel

WORLD OF WARCRAFT: ILLIDAN by William King

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Kaju katli recipe with step by step photos. Kaju katli (vegan cashew fudge) recipe or kaju barfi recipe is one of the most sought after Indian sweet recipes. Here is an easy kaju katli recipe for beginners to try without sugar syrup.

These thin, melt in mouth and smooth kaju katlis are just like what you get in sweet stalls. This is one of the most tried and tested recipes from the blog too. Do try out this fool proof kaju katli recipe as a treat to the family or edible gift during festivals like Diwali, navratri, Ganesh chaturthi etc. Kaju katli recipe or kaju barfi recipe or Indian vegan cashew fudge recipe is a royal Indian sweet that takes a pride position in most Indian festival treats. It is one of the most loved sweets and often gifted to friends and relatives during festivals like diwali. I have tried making kaju katli recipe 2-3 years before and did not get it right. I always have a problem with sugar syrups . I try to stay away from sweets calling for even one string syrup and the most popular recipe of kaju katli is the one with powdered cashews and one string syrup,obviously not my cup of tea. I so badly wanted to try kaju katli recipe as it one of our favorite sweets and I was desperately searching for kaju katli without sugar syrup recipe. I found this easiest recipe for kaju katli in Mrs Mallika Badrinath’s 100 sweet varieties and there was no need for sugar syrup.You just have to grind sugar and cashew,mix and cook,can it get easier than this . Usually varak (edible silver foil) is placed on kaju katli but i never use it.

Though this is an easy kaju katli recipe we need to be extremely focused and careful as when to stop cooking,kneading etc. Please be sure to check the notes section for more pointers. This kaju katli recipe is so rich that you wont believe it is vegan.I have used just a drop of ghee just to grease the plate and that can be avoided too if you wish. There is absolutely no need for ghee in this recipe, this is a vegan Indian cashew fudge recipe 🙂 I can confidently say this is the best recipe for kaju katli that even beginners can try without any fear. I really urge you all to try this quick and simple kaju kalti recipe or kaju burfi recipe as it is called in few places and surprise your loved ones with this royal Indian sweet 🙂

To make kaju katli recipe you have to make sure your cashews are at room temperature. Do not use cashews that were stored in fridge. Make sure to bring the cashew nuts to room temperature. You can even dry roast the cashews briefly to remove the moisture in them. You can flavor kaju katli recipe with rose water or saffron. I like to add saffron in kaju burfi. This royal Indian sweet kaju katli keeps well for up to a week at room temperature. There are few kaju katli recipes with milk but the should be consumed on the same day as prepared.

Store kaju katli in airtight container and serve kaju katli as required.

Another delicious variation of kaju katli recipe is kesar kaju katli. You can even try badam katli, kaju pista rolls,kaju strawberry recipes.

Here is how to make kaju katli recipe with step by step photos.

Few more Indian sweet recipes you might like are coconut pista ladoo, quick chocolate burfi, easy dhoodh peda, badam katli

How to make kaju katli recipe with step by step photos.

1.Soak cashews in water for 30 minutes. I soaked the cashews in hot water, you can soak in milk too but kaju katlis made that way have less shelf life.

2. Powder the sugar using a dry grinder or mixer.

2. Grind cashews to a very fine paste. You can use the milk or water used for soaking to ease the grinding. You have to grind the cashews to a very smooth and fine paste with minimum water. For the 1 cup of cashews I used 3 tablespoons water for grinding.

3.Measure one cup of ground cashew paste and powdered sugar and take in a non stick pan. Mix well. Make sure to mix very well before you start cooking as the mixture gets cooked very easily.

4.Now heat the mixture over low-medium flame and start to stir. Mix well and keep stirring in low flame. keep scarping the sediments while stirring. Add saffron and mix well.

5. Keep stirring for 7-10 minutes, The kaju sugar mixture will start bubbling and it will begin to thicken. Make sure to scrape the edges while stirring. Add saffron at this stage if you want to add.

6. Once the kaju sugar mixture forms a lump and gathers in the center,pinch a very small amount and make a ball with your fingers. if you are able to form a ball,then it is the correct consistency. Switch off the flame and let the mixture cool for a while.

7.Once the mixture is warm to touch,knead into a very soft dough. This is the very important step for getting perfect,soft melt in mouth kaju katli. You should not let the mixture cool down completely. Knead the kaju mixture in to a very smooth dough while it is still warm. If you are unable to knead you may add few drops of warm milk but again that will reduce the shelf life.

8.Roll the dough into a 1/4 inch thick circle and make diamond shaped pieces. The thickness of kaju katlis is your choice. The kaju katlis you get in shops will be very thin,so roll the dough as thin or thick as you prefer.

9. Allow the pieces to set for 10 minutes. Store kaju katlis airtight in room temperature. If you refrigerate the kaju katlis may turn a bit hard.

Kaju katli recipe card below:

5 from 6 votes Print Kaju katli recipe, cashew fudge recipe | how to make kaju katli Prep Time 30 mins Cook Time 10 mins Total Time 40 mins Kaju katli recipe is a royal Indian sweet,vegan cashew fudge,rich melt in mouth with just 4 ingredients! Course: Sweet/dessert Cuisine: Indian Servings : 20 kaju katlis Calories : 83 kcal Author : Harini Ingredients (1 cup=250 ml) 1 cup cashews

1 cup powdered sugar

1/8 teaspoon saffron optional

1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder Instructions Soak cashews in water for 30 minutes. Powder the sugar. Grind cashews to a very fine paste,just y sprinkling water. Measure one cup of ground cashew paste and powdered sugar and take in a non stick pan. Mix well. Now heat the mixture over low-medium flame and start to stir. Add saffron and mix well Keep stirring for 7-10 minutes,till the mixture thickens and leaves the sides.Scrape the edges while stirring. Once the mixture forms a lump and gathers in the center,pinch a very small amount and make a ball with your fingers. if you are able to form a ball,then it is the correct consistency.Switch off the flame and let the mixture cool for a while. Once the mixture is warm to touch,knead into a very soft dough. Roll the dough into a 1/4 inch thick circle and make diamond shaped pieces. Allow the pieces to set for 10 minutes. Store kaju katlis airtight. Recipe Notes 1. Do not add more water while grinding. Just sprinkle to ease the grinding,the cashew paste should be very smooth.

2.Do not cook the mixture more than 10 minutes. Once the lump reaches soft ball stage,remove from flame.The mixture will further thicken when it cools.

3.Knead the mixture very well but gently,the more you knead the more soft your kaju katlis will be.

4. If the dough seems to be dry you can a tablespoon of milk or water while kneading.

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Sometimes I fall into a rut with Italian sausages and go with the usual sausage with onion and peppers. Not that there's anything wrong with that but I needed a change! And that is what led me to developing this recipe. I braised the sausages in red wine until the wine completely evaporated and started to crisp up the skin. The sausages take on the deep color of the wine and are then simmered in a spicy tomato, olive and caper sauce. Was it good? Nope ... it was mouth-watering! The Hub, had seconds and he's my "this stuff is good" barometer ... if he's having seconds I know it's a home run.Serves 41 pound Italian sausage1 cup red wine2 tablespoons olive oil1 medium onion, chopped6 garlic cloves, minced or pressed through a press1/4 cup of drained non-pareil capers, roughly chopped1/2 cup of drained kalamata olives, pitted and roughly chopped1 tablespoon tomato paste2 pounds of roma tomatoes, diced or 1- 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes, including juice1 teaspoon fresh or 1/2 dried thymeI bay leaf2 pinches of sugar1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes or to taste (If you don't like heat just leave it out)1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)1/4 teaspoon black pepper1 pound linguine or pasta of choiceIn a deep skillet add the wine and bring to a boil over medium heat. Add the sausage links, cook until the wine evaporates (about 7 - 9 minutes) and sausage casing begins to crisp up and brown. Set aside.Heat skillet over medium heat, add olive oil and onions and cook for 5-7 minutes. Add garlic, capers and olives, cook for an additional 3-6 minutes or until fragrant. Add the remaining ingredients including the sausage. Bring up to a low boil and reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.Prepare pasta according to package instructions.Serve over pasta of choice, I prefer linguine, french bread and a glass of red wine or beer. ENJOY!
Raheem Sterling was allegedly attacked and racially abused as he arrived at Manchester City’s training ground on Saturday morning in preparation for their game against Tottenham Hotspur.

The England forward was believed to have been kicked and branded a “n-----” by a man who appeared to be waiting for the 23-year-old at the players’ entrance at City’s football academy training base, according to sources.

Sterling had pulled into the entrance in his car as he arrived for City’s pre-match preparations, at which point he is believed to have been confronted by the man hurling a barrage of abuse at him.

Telegraph Sport understands that Sterling got out of his car to ask what the problem was only for the man to react by reputedly kicking the City player in the leg.

It is unclear at this stage whether City have opted to report the incident to Greater Manchester Police but it is thought the sickening scenes were caught on CCTV. It is not believed the man was known to Sterling. City have yet to comment on the matter.

Sterling did not suffer any injuries in the alleged attack and he went on to start and score twice – his 14th and 15th goals of an extraordinary season – in City’s 4-1 victory over Tottenham as Pep Guardiola’s side moved 14 points clear at the top of the Premier League.
Prosecutors often understand what’s going on but threaten the women with long sentences (sometimes based on conspiracy laws) to get them to testify against their men. That’s how the criminal justice system works, but when the women refuse to cave, they go to prison for many years — and the guys then drop them.

When men are in prison, they seem to get visits frequently from girlfriends, who also add money into their commissary accounts so they can buy small items and make phone calls. But the prisoners and social workers I spoke to said that when women are imprisoned, they get fewer visitors and their accounts are often empty.

Mass incarceration also has an abysmal record. Recidivism is high, and imprisonment breaks up and impoverishes families. A newly published study from the Russell Sage Foundation found that incarceration of a family member is associated with a 64 percent decline in household assets, magnifying poverty and the race gap in America. And the 2.6 million American children who have a parent in prison or jail pay an enormous price — which, as Rabbit’s story shows, isn’t always necessary.

Rabbit was diverted from prison to a model program in Tulsa called Women in Recovery. (Hunter also is in the program.) It reduces the numbers of women in prison, saves money and has had remarkable success helping troubled women shake drugs and restart their lives.

It has a two-generation approach that works with both the women and their children. The program offers counseling, intensive support, coaching on budgeting and conflict resolution, and help getting high school equivalency diplomas, housing and jobs.

The upshot is that Rabbit has now been clean of drugs for nine months — the longest since she was a young child — and has a job in a warehouse with some prospects for promotion. She has custody on weekends of her son, 12, and daughter, 11, and is trying to rebuild relationships with them.

Women in Recovery programs last 17 months and cost $19,700 on average; after that, the woman is in a job, and recidivism over the next three years is just 4.9 percent. Without the program, the state might imprison the women for years at a much greater cost — and end up with a much higher recidivism rate.
Special Status

Whatsapp groups and Facebook pages are abuzz with activity, ahead of the event, planned on January 26.

With the resounding success of the jallikattu saga in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, it is now the turn of Andhra Pradesh to follow suit. Only this time, the purpose is to ensure that the Centre accords ‘special status’ to the state.

Several Whatsapp groups and social media pages are abuzz, as Andhraites plan a day-long protest at the RK Beach in Visakhapatnam on Republic Day this year.

Thousands are expected to gather at the beach in support of their long-standing demand that 'special status' be accorded to Andhra Pradesh.

The hashtag #APDemandsSpecialStatus is currently one of the trending topics on social media in the state, with enthusiasts urging people from all over AP to gather at the beach in a massive show of solidarity for the cause.

"We have been coordinating with several hundred people through Whatsapp groups and Facebook pages for the protest. We are trying to mobilize as many people as we can for the protest,” says Satish -a student from Visakhapatnam- who plans to be a part of the protest along with his friends.

Speaking to The News Minute, organisers say that arrangements are being made to provide free transportation to the venue.

“We have already spoken to three autorickshaw unions. They support our cause and have promised to make available at least 40 autos in the RK Beach area to provide free transport to protesters," says Sai Keshav, one of the organisers who is coordinating with youngsters from Guntur to ensure maximum participation.

Like many others, Keshav and his friends plan to reach Visakhapatnam on the previous day itself.

"People are seething with anger at the gross neglect of the state by the Centre for so long. There is so much of potential in here, but what do we get…absolutely no support from the Centre," he fumes.

Speaking about what exactly sowed the idea of such a protest, Keshav replies: "When we saw the jallikattu protest in Marina, we were inspired to start our own protest for our very own cause. Just the way the youth of Tamil Nadu got an ordinance passed in favour of jallikattu, we too shall seek to put pressure on the Centre to pass a ‘special status’ ordinance for AP."

He also claims that there are many active Whatsapp groups that function solely to try and get as many people to participate in the protest. Many people have even reportedly volunteered to provide food, snacks and water to the protesters.

The lack of a central organiser is evident, as there is a sense of disarray among volunteers over certain aspects of the protest.

"We had trouble getting police permission too, as a two-day CII Partnership Summit is to be held on 27-28 January at the same venue. They have however agreed to let us hold it, as long as we are peaceful.

We initially decided to start the protest at 9 am in the morning, but we may have to start as early as 7.30 am, or as late at 11 30am. The protest may go on till late in the night, as the YSRC party plans to hold a candle march in the evening,” remarks Keshav.

According to Harish -an organiser- more than 50,000 people will join the protest, with 7000-odd people expected to join from Vijayawada alone.

Several Telugu actors too have backed the demand for special status, with ‘Power Star’ Pawan Kalyan even releasing a special song Desh Bachao -a protest musical- to extend his full support to the movement.

Actor Varun Tej tweeted: "Will be supporting anything that is for the welfare of the people of our states. I support the special status of AP." (sic)

Sai Dharam Tej wrote: "It's time for us to be united and fight for what we were promised and deserve. AP demands special status." (sic)

Actor Sundeep Kishan confirmed his participation in the silent protest. "Will be taking part in the silent protest in Vizag on the 26th to do my bit as a responsible citizen. Please join us,” (sic) Sundeep tweeted.

The state government however persists in its claim that the planned protest is the handiwork of the ‘Opposition parties’.

Hitting out at the Opposition on Monday, state Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu accused them of simply wanting to create a ruckus.

Naidu also took strong exception to the comparison of Special Category Status (SCS) promised to Andhra Pradesh with TN’s jallikattu campaign. "Some parties are trying to provoke people and create disturbances. But we will not allow this. We will be very firm," he told reporters.

Massive protests broke out all over the state last September, after Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a 'special economic package' for Andhra Pradesh, instead of ‘special status’ that the state had demanded.
Mona T. Brooks / KCPB

While the world's first coders helped build the tech industry, its designers will define the industry's future, said graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda.

Maeda spoke Sunday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, where he issued the findings of his #DesignInTech report. Before 2010, Maeda said, design played a secondary role in the technology industry. How a product or service looked or worked, and the ways users interacted with it, were typically an after-thought that focused mostly on cosmetics. Design only ever grabbed attention when companies like Apple pushed outside the norm.

But that's changing fast. Startups and large tech firms all recognize that their products need to be both visually appealing and deliver great user experiences -- and that means thinking about design from the beginning. It also means the industry needs people who can communicate those ideas and create more satisfying experiences. In other words, it needs designers who contribute from the start of a project -- not the end.

"Twenty-seven startups co-founded by designers and 10 creative agencies were acquired by tech in the last four years," Maeda said.

The former president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Maeda joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year as Silicon Valley's first ever design partner. Since he joined KPCB, he said, six other venture capital firms have brought on designers to help scout new talent and incorporate design into their portfolio companies 'products.

Take Airbnb, Maeda said. Founded in 2008, the company makes it easy for people to rent out their homes or a single room to those looking for a place a stay. It was dreamed up by designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, both RISD graduates, after the two attended an industrial design conference.

"[Silicon Valley] didn't think a designer could build and run a company. They were straight up about it. We weren't MBAs, we weren't two Ph.D. students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people that worked for people that ran companies," Chesky told Dezeen magazine in January 2014.

Maeda also pointed to Dropbox's 2013 acquisition of Orchestra, the makers of sleek email app Mailbox, for $100 million. That deal brought former IDEO designer Gentry Underwood to the cloud storage company as head of design. Microsoft, too, has acquired design talent in the mobile app space with its purchases of email app Acompli and calendar app Sunrise. Both products had been hailed for their design and experience.

In his report, Maeda also points out the growing need for designers who double as programmers. Dropbox's Underwood, for instance, holds both a Stanford degree in human-computer interaction as well as degrees in psychology and anthropology.

Maeda found that more than a third of 110 surveyed designers in the tech industry had formal engineering training and over half had formal art or design training. In a survey of 370 designers, 93.5 percent described the ability to code as useful and at some times essential. Intriguingly, not all of those designers work in the tech industry.
Robert Cumming / Shutterstock.com

I recently sent a letter of complaint by email to Air New Zealand about their policy of treating all male passengers as potential child molesters, and seating them away from unescorted minors. True to the promise of their auto responder, I have received a more personal response. Rather I should say that they have responded with a non response. Following is their email to me and then my response back to them.

—–

Dear Mr Elam

Thank you for your email regarding your recent flights with us.

It was a pleasure to read your comments regarding the excellent standard of service which you received on your flights with us, and that you had an enjoyable stay in New Zealand. It is certainly always encouraging to receive feedback such as yours as it is proof to us that the high standards which we aim to provide are being maintained.

However, I am sorry to read of your disappointment in an aspect of our Unaccompanied Minor policy, namely in regards to not seating minors next to male passengers. By way of explanation, Air New Zealand ’s internal procedures relating to the seating of unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone are as follows:

For Crew surveillance reasons, unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone are normally seated together in the rear of the aircraft and next to the crew galley.

Where possible, a spare seat is kept empty next to unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone to be used by the crew where special attention is required.

Where a flight is full, we will endeavour to seat a female passenger next to unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone.

These procedures reflect the approach adopted by leading airlines around the world and have been in place for some time.

Mr Elam, thank you once again for taking the time to write in to us. I trust that I have been able to address some of your concerns, and that we may have the opportunity of welcoming you and your wife onboard our flights again in the future.

Kind regards,

Claire McLister

Customer Support Specialist

——-

Dear Ms McLister,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions, and in such a prompt manner. However, your response would have been much more satisfying had you actually answered my questions rather than just tell me what I already knew, namely that it is Air New Zealand’s official policy to practice gender profiling against male passengers, regarding them all as threats from which the children on your planes need to be protected.

I sought in my query to find out why that was happening, Ms. McLister, not to get a non responsive reiteration of what I was obviously complaining about in the first place.

So I am here, asking you again.

What determinants did your airline use to arrive at such a policy? How do you respond to my concerns that the policy is discriminatory and fostering inaccurate and negative stereotypes of fully half of your clients?

I am quite sorry, Ms. McLister, but your statement of “These procedures reflect the approach adopted by leading airlines around the world and have been in place for some time,” has the ring of a child excusing their poor judgment by saying “ Well, everyone else was doing it.”

First of all, not everyone else is doing it. As I indicated in my original communication, Qantas, who appears to be your primary competitor among the USA to NZ air service providers, does not do it. And, as I also reminded you, British Airways was recently sued over the policy, and was compelled to change it because there was no demonstrable reason to have it in the first place.

Your response to me, as courteous and professionally worded as it was, was simply avoidant of these points and the quite reasonable questions raised about your practices.

Would you kindly answer those questions, or am I to understand that you are going to defend a sexist policy by avoiding any meaningful discussion with a customer?

Lastly, Ms.McLister, I am not married, and so was not traveling with my wife. It appears you just made that assumption when seeing I was traveling with a female. Given the other assumptions you made about me, and all men boarding your flights, I should not, I suppose, be surprised.

It seems to be policy on all levels at Air New Zealand.

But I would nonetheless really appreciate either a straight answer from you regarding my inquiry, or the courtesy of forwarding these questions to someone who will provide as much.

Kind Regards,

Paul Elam

Claire McLister’s email address:

flightcomment@airnz.co.nz
Four hours after three suicide bombers killed at least 41 people and wounded hundreds more at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, CIA Director John Brennan said the attacks bore the grim hallmarks of ISIS and warned that the fanatically violent Islamic terrorist group wants to conduct similar large-scale attacks in the United States.

“I am worried from the standpoint of an intelligence professional who looks at the capabilities of Daesh … and their determination to kill as many as people as possible and to carry out attacks abroad,” Brennan said in an exclusive interview at CIA headquarters with Yahoo News. Brennan credited effective homeland security measures and intelligence for the fact that ISIS has been unable to attack America directly — the Orlando and San Bernardino shootings were carried out by radicals inspired by ISIS but not under its control — but he believes the group will keep trying to penetrate American defenses.

“You look at what happened in the Turkish airport, these were suicide vests. It’s not that difficult to actually construct and fabricate a suicide vest … so if you have a determined enemy and individuals who are not concerned about escape, that they are going into it with a sense that they are going to die, that really does complicate your strategy in terms of preventing attacks.”

He added: “I’d be surprised if Daesh is not trying to carry out that kind of attack in the United States.” Daesh is an acronym for the Arabic name of the Islamic State, better known as ISIS or ISIL.

Without confirming that the airport bombings were carried out by ISIS, which as of Wednesday morning had not claimed responsibility, Brennan indicated that the method of attack — suicide bombers wearing explosives-laden vests — pointed to the Islamic extremist group rather than to Kurdish nationalists, who have been waging a campaign of violence against the Turkish state. “It was a suicide bombing [which] is usually more a Daesh technique,” Brennan said.

Moreover, Brennan said that ISIS has a motive to spread its terror to Turkey, which has been targeting ISIS terrorists across the border in Syria. Until recently, Ankara’s failure to police its border with Syria was a sore point with Washington. “Turkey has been cracking down on some of the transit of foreign fighters who are flowing into, as well as out of, Turkey, and they are part of part of the coalition providing support, allowing their territory to be used by coalition aircraft, so there are a lot of reasons why Daesh would want to strike back.”

Brennan said ISIS is using terror tactics to “offset” tactical battlefield setbacks and losses of territory in Syria and Iraq. But he was quick to add that the wider offensive in the region and Europe and beyond is “not solely” a reaction to losses in Iraq and Syria. “Over the past year and a half they have made a more determined effort to carry out attacks abroad, and we see in terms of their plans, their preparations, the movement of people as well as propagandizing outside, exhorting, inciting a much more determined effort to carry out these external operations,” Brennan said.

Slideshow: Deadly attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk >>>

In the interview, Brennan was blunt about the slow nature of progress both in the fight against ISIS and efforts to push Syrian President Bashar Assad out of power. He echoed somewhat pessimistic comments he made earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee about the enduring strength of ISIS as a terrorist organization with global reach. “We’ve yet to really thwart Daesh’s ability to reach beyond the Syria-Iraqi borders and put in place some of the plans and preparations to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. He added, “I am very concerned we have not had the success against Daesh in that environment as we’ve had in the core areas of Syria and Iraq.”

A key prong of U.S. strategy to defeat ISIS is the removal of Assad, whom Brennan described as a “magnet” for a wide spectrum of extremist groups in Syria. But the CIA chief acknowledged that Assad is getting stronger rather than weaker. “Relative to where he was on the battlefield last year, [Assad] is in a better and stronger position [today],” he said. For that he blames Russia, which intervened last September to prop up its flagging client with thousands of troops and sophisticated weaponry. Frustrated with Moscow, Brennan said, “The Russians sometimes want their cake and eat it too as far as having the cooperation with us against terrorists but not wanting to do anything that’s going to lead to a political settlement that will have a more durable future as a far as a political agreement.”

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The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is the first book by American author Robert Greene.[1] The book is a bestseller,[2][3] selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States,[4] and is popular with prison inmates and celebrities.[4][5][6][7][8][9]

Background [ edit ]

Greene initially formulated some of the ideas in The 48 Laws of Power while working as a writer in Hollywood and concluding that today's power elite shared similar traits with powerful figures throughout history.[5] In 1995, Greene worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school, and met a book packager named Joost Elffers.[4][8] Greene pitched a book about power to Elffers and six months later, Elffers requested that Greene write a treatment.[4]

Although Greene was unhappy in his current job, he was comfortable and saw the time needed to write a proper book proposal as too risky.[10] However, at the time Greene was rereading his favorite biography about Julius Caesar and took inspiration from Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon River and fight Pompey, thus inciting the Great Roman Civil War.[10] Greene wrote the treatment, which later became The 48 Laws of Power.[10] He would note this as the turning point of his life.[10]

Reception [ edit ]

The 48 Laws of Power has sold over 1.2 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 24 languages.[4] Fast Company called the book a "mega cult classic", and The Los Angeles Times noted that The 48 Laws of Power turned Greene into a "cult hero with the hip-hop set, Hollywood elite and prison inmates alike".[4][11]

The 48 Laws of Power has been reported to be much requested in American prison libraries,[5][12] and has been studied as a first year text in some US colleges.[13][14] Rapper 50 Cent stated that he related to the book "immediately", and approached Greene with the prospect of a potential collaboration, which would later become The 50th Law, another New York Times bestseller.[15] Busta Rhymes used The 48 Laws of Power to deal with problematic movie producers.[8] DJ Premier has a tattoo inspired from Law #5, "Reputation is the cornerstone of power", on his arm[6] and DJ Calvin Harris has an "Enter with boldness" arm tattoo based on Law #28.[16] The 48 Laws of Power has also been mentioned in songs by UGK, Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake.[6][17][18] [19] Dov Charney, founder and former CEO of American Apparel, frequently quoted the laws during board meetings, has given friends and employees copies of the book, and appointed Greene to the board of American Apparel.[4] Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is also claimed by the book's author to have read the book.[4] The book has been banned by several US prisons.[20]

Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer said that Greene's so-called laws are based on isolated examples, and not on solid research.[5] Kirkus Reviews said Greene offers no evidence to support his world view, Greene's laws contradict each other, and the book is "simply nonsense".[21] Newsweek also points out ways the laws contradict each other and says "Intending the opposite, Greene has actually produced one of the best arguments since the New Testament for humility and obscurity."[22] Director magazine notes "some of Greene's 'laws' seem contradictory" and the work is "plodding and didactic".[23]
The fermentor that started it all, reinvented again! We've taken the revolutionary Big Mouth Bubbler® glass and re-engineered it with the help of world-class Polish master glassmakers to ensure sturdy, solid, superior craftsmanship.

Extra-thick glass eliminates oxygen permeation and keeps your brew safe. Banish bugs and bacteria with perfectly air-tight seals from a carefully ground, completely smooth and obsessively flat neck top.

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Gallon graduation markings help ensure precise measurement of fermenter volume.

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Note: We still strongly recommend the Big Mouth Bubbler® carrying harness.

Each Big Mouth Bubbler® Includes:

Big Mouth Bubbler® Glass Fermentor, Universal Lid*

Big Mouth Bubbler® Microfiber Cleaning Cloth

*The new Big Mouth Universal Lid (included) fits all Big Mouth Bubbler® Fermentors. The Big Mouth Bubbler® Universal Lid is just like a traditional carboy bung, only bigger! Just as easy to sanitize and set in place too. Ribbed silicone rings ensure a positive seal to keep out pests, while the non-threaded design allows the lid to move, preventing an out-of-control fermentation from dangerously pressurizing your fermentor.

You will also need a Small Universal Carboy Bung - drilled or solid.
Lounès Matoub (Kabyle: Lwennas Meɛṭub; Berber languages: ⵍⵡⴻⵏⵏⴰⵙ ⵎⴻⵄⵜⵓⴱ or ⵎⵄⵟⵓⴱ ⵍⵓⵏⵉⵙ; Arabic: معطوب لونّاس‎ (January 24, 1956 – June 25, 1998)) was a famous Algerian Berber singer, poet, thinker and mandole player who was a prominent advocate of the Berber cause, human rights and secularism in Algeria throughout his life.

Matoub was reviled by most of the Muslim population in Algeria for his Laïc political and atheist views and the alleged blasphemy of some songs (like Allahu Akbar) along with his militant advocacy of Berber rights,[1] so he was unpopular among both warring parties during the Algerian Civil War. His assassination, in circumstances which remain unclear, provoked violent riots in Kabylie. Berber Algerians still accuse the Algerian government of killing Matoub Lounès, but some of the Algerian government's figures accused the Islamist terrorists of this crime.

Early life [ edit ]

Lounes Matoub was born on 24 January 1956 in the village of Taourirt Moussa in Algerian Kabylie. When he turned 9, he built his first guitar from an empty car oil can and composed his first songs as a teenager. His political and cultural identity was awakened by armed confrontations between Kabyles and government forces in 1963–1964. In 1968, the Algerian government introduced a policy of Arabization in the education system. Matoub reacted by skipping school; his memoirs recall: "We had to give up Berber and reject French. I said no! I played hooky in all my Arabic classes. Every class that I missed was an act of resistance, a slice of liberty conquered. My rejection was voluntary and purposeful."[2] By 1975, he had abandoned formal education. He left for France in search of work.

Musical career [ edit ]

Lounès Matoub with his Algerian mandole in 1975. He was an Algerian singer of Kabyle music.

Matoub began his singing career under the patronage of the established singer Idir. He recorded his first album Ay Izem (The Lion) in 1978; it was a phenomenal success. He went on to record 36 albums, as well as writing songs for other artists. He gave his first major concert in April 1980, at the time of the "Berber Spring" protest movement in Kabylie.

His music mixes Algerian Andalucian Chaabi orchestration with politicized Berber (Tamazight) lyrics, and covers a broad variety of topics including the Berber cause, democracy, freedom, religion, Islamism, love, exile, memory, history, peace and human rights. Unlike the Amazigh poet/musicians who preceded him, Matoub's style was direct and confrontational. Fellow musician Mohamed Alileche recalls:

He went straight. He criticized a president. He mentioned the president of Algeria right in the beginning of his career. He goes black and white. He was very, very clear in his songs, and he is the only singer – not only Algeria, but in all of North Africa – who criticized the government and criticized clearly. He would never get afraid.[3]

Despite being banned from Algerian radio and television during his life, Matoub became, and remains, an extremely popular Kabyle singer.

Political events [ edit ]

During the riots in October 1988, Matoub was shot five times by a policeman[citation needed] and left for dead. He was hospitalised for two years, requiring 17 surgeries, including the insertion of an artificial sacrum and the contraction of his leg by 5 cm. His 1989 album L'Ironie du sort describes his long convalescence.

During the civil war, which began in 1992, the Islamist Armed Islamic Group (GIA) added his name to a hitlist of artists and intellectuals. Matoub remained in Algeria. On 25 September 1994, he was abducted. He was held for two weeks in a GIA mountain stronghold and condemned to death. He was released following a large public demonstration in which his supporters threatened "total war" on the Islamists.

In 1994, he published his autobiography entitled Rebelle (Paris: Stock, 1995).

Prizes [ edit ]

Matoub Lounès (in the middle with the white shirt) with his friends, notably Mourad Nechab, known to be his favorite, and family in Kabylie

On December 6, 1994, Matoub received Le Prix de la Mémoire ("The Memorial Prize") from Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, President of La Fondation France Libertés ("The French Liberties Foundation") in Paris; the prize recognises those who devote themselves to recording and preserving the impact of political events on ordinary lives.

("The Memorial Prize") from Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, President of ("The French Liberties Foundation") in Paris; the prize recognises those who devote themselves to recording and preserving the impact of political events on ordinary lives. On March 22, 1995, the Canadian journalists' organisation SCIJ awarded him Le Prix de la Liberté d'Expression ("The Prize for Freedom of Expression").

("The Prize for Freedom of Expression"). On December 19, 1995, he received Le Prix Tahar Djaout ("The Tahar Djaout Prize") from La Fondation Nourredine Abba ("The Nourredine Abba Foundation") at UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the prize is named for an Algerian writer who was assassinated by Islamists in 1993.

Assassination and aftermath [ edit ]

On 25 June 1998, at approximately 12:30 pm local time, Matoub's car was stopped at a roadblock while he was driving along a mountainous road in eastern Algeria. The car was fired upon by masked gunmen, killing Matoub and wounding his wife, Nadia Matoub, and two sisters-in-law. Within hours, news of Matoub's murder had spread throughout Kabylie and thousands of angry mourners gathered around the hospital where his body was taken. The crowd shouted "Pouvoir, Assassin" ("Government, Assassins"). A week of violent riots followed his death. Young demonstrators clashed with riot police and attacked government property. On 28 June 1998 tens of thousands people attended his funeral in front of his house in his native village. He was buried between a fig tree and a cherry tree, opposite the house he was born in. Matoub's family played a scathing parody of the Algerian national anthem, which came from Matoub's final album Lettre ouverte aux... ("Open letter to..."), released after his death (Gold-Disc). Matoub's assassination occurred a week before a law excluding languages other than Arabic from public life was due to come into effect. Matoub had been an outspoken critic of this law. On 30 June 1998 the GIA claimed responsibility for the assassination of Lounes Matoub.

On the first anniversary of his death, a general strike was observed in Kabyle's capital Tizi-Ouzou and thousands protested on the streets. Protesters broke into the town's court room and tore down its scales of justice. The BBC reported that many Berber activists blamed the government for Matoub's death and rejected its claim that Islamists were responsible.

Around 20,000 people marched in Tizi-Ouzou to mark the third anniversary of Matoub's assassination.

His family have created a foundation in his name to promote his memory, throw light on the circumstances of his assassination and promote the values he defended. Two streets in France have been named after Matoub, one in Grenoble and one in Lyon.

On 18 July 2011, two men, Malik Madjnoun and Abdelhakim Chenoui, were convicted of killing Matoub, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. The one-day trial was suspended twice when Matoub's family interrupted to insist the suspects were innocent.[4] As Madjnoun and Chenoui had been in prison awaiting trial since 1999, they were released in 2012, having served their time.[5]

Political views of Matoub [ edit ]

Matoub Lounès spoke out in favour of federalism, secularism, democracy, freedom of speech, the recognition of Berber as a national and official language, and the decentralization of public schools in Algeria.

For a period of time, he was a member of the Rally for Culture and Democracy, an opposition party in Algeria, although he had left the party by the time of his death.
New questions over A-G's link to embattled priest

Updated

New questions are being asked about the link between the New South Wales Attorney-General and a retired Catholic priest who allegedly abused a number of female children during his time in the church.

Father Finian Egan's more than 50 years as a priest took him to at least half a dozen churches in and around Sydney.

But the priest's service in the Catholic church came to an end when a number of women came forward to accuse him of abusing them when they were children.

Within weeks of 7.30 airing a series of stories on Father Egan, at least five people had gone to police and a widespread investigation was underway.

But nearly two years later, the priest has not been arrested or charged.

One of his alleged victims, Nikki Wells, says there is no reason the case should be taking so long.

"The wait has been absolutely horrendous. It's been really traumatic. The statements with the police have been finalised in 2010," she said.

"We've been told the case is on the DPP's desk, but it's been on the DPP's desk for seven months. Now they keep telling us they're just waiting for a signature, so it's beyond me how it's been so long.

"The case has been investigated. It's very clear the evidence is there from all the witnesses, so I don't understand why he hasn't been charged."

Father Egan has always denied the allegations, and as the case dragged on questions were raised elsewhere in the media about the alleged sex offender's long-time association with Attorney-General Greg Smith.

Mr Smith and Father Egan go back some years, and when Mr Smith was elected to Parliament five years ago he cited Father Egan's influence in his maiden speech to Parliament.

"At St Gerard's, Father Finian Egan charmed us with his Irish wit and his pastoral devotion to his flock," he said in the speech.

Damien Tudehope, now the Attorney-General's chief of staff, also knows Father Egan well, attending the priest's church and, as a solicitor, defending him against sexual abuse allegations.

The ABC does not suggest that either Mr Smith or Mr Tudehope have interfered with the potential prosecution involving Father Egan, but critics argue there is an appearance of a potential conflict which the A-G should address.

'Completely horrified'

But 7:30 can reveal discussions it is alleged the Attorney-General has had regarding the Egan matter which cast doubt over his impartiality.

Last year Ms Wells spoke to another Catholic priest about her frustration at the delay.

That priest, who the ABC has agreed not to name, says he then met Mr Smith last July.

After that meeting the priest detailed his version of what was said in an email to Ms Wells which the ABC has obtained.

In the email the priest says Mr Smith told him he thought Ms Wells was trying to take money from the church.

"I was with Greg Smith the other day and I raised your case with him. He commented that 'you were just trying to get $1m from the church'," the priest said in the email.

Ms Wells says the conversation was completely inappropriate.

"I was completely horrified that the chief lawmaker in the state could comment on an open criminal case for a start," she said.

"Secondly, that he'd pass judgment on someone he doesn't even know and just disbelief that the whole matter that our Attorney-General could speak so publicly about me and my case and a criminal matter.

"Clearly he thinks I'm a liar and that other witnesses are liars too because I'm not the only victim in this matter - a clear lack of empathy and devastating unprofessionalism."

The ABC asked Mr Smith if the priest's email description of the meeting and what was said was correct, and in response the Attorney-General issued a statement saying he "recalls no such conversation".

"The Attorney-General recalls no such conversation and notes that 7.30 has failed to provide any detail which would help his recall," the statement said.

"He says he would never suggest any victim of sexual abuse was simply motivated by a desire to claim a financial payout."

Questions

Beyond the alleged comment that Ms Wells was just after money, the email raises other questions.

In fact Ms Wells said she had discussed a $1 million figure with the church, not for herself, but as a loan for a charity she was running to care for survivors of childhood abuse.

She was shocked the Attorney-General would know anything about the $1 million figure, something she had raised only with senior churchmen, and she said so in her email reply to the priest.

"I am horrified that Greg Smith knows about us seeking assistance for the Sunrise Centre - I am also further disgusted that he said that I just wanted to get $1 million out of the church," she wrote in the email to the priest.

The priest replied, saying he had similar concerns about the fact Mr Smith knew about the $1 million figure.

"This is what he had heard and that concerns me where this had come from," he said.

"He is well connected within the church - he seems to know all the hierarchy - much more in the know than I am."

Those connections troubled Greens MP David Shoebridge, who put a series of questions about the matter to Mr Smith on notice in Parliament.

"In my dealings with him, it's an attorney that's more likely to defend the church than to get out and defend the victims," he said.

Among the questions, he asked Mr Smith whether he had had any communication with anyone beyond the DPP regarding the Egan case.

But Mr Shoebridge says in his answers Mr Smith did not address that issue, only stating that his office had not been in contact with the DPP about it.

"That's a remarkable lack of candour... it was a very specific question capable of a very precise answer and we simply didn't get that," Mr Shoebridge said.

"If the half of the answer you don't give is the core of the information, you've got to ask whether or not that is misleading."

Topics: government-and-politics, states-and-territories, crime, sexual-offences, catholic, nsw

First posted
T-Mobile is capping off the first calendar year of its Uncarrier strategy with a quarter of more customer additions than it's seen in years. The carrier says in its Q4 2013 results that it now serves 46.7 million customers, an increase of over 13 million year-over-year. This quarter alone it saw the addition of 869,000 postpaid customers — a major shift from losing 515,000 postpaid customers this quarter last year. T-Mobile says it hasn't done this well on postpaid since 2005.

More customers, more losses

But despite the gain in customers, T-Mobile continues to take a hit on overall earnings, posting a loss of $20 million, compared to a loss of $8 million from the prior year's quarter. In part, that's because T-Mobile has begun spending more money in order to get new customers — a cost up 40 percent year-over-year — and it's ultimately seeing less revenue from some of the most valuable ones. Average revenue per user for postpaid dropped around 9.4 percent from this quarter last year, lending to the increased losses.

Revenue for the quarter was up, though how much depends on whether you factor in MetroPCS, which has been folded into the company since this time last year. Including MetroPCS, T-Mobile saw revenues leap to $6.83 billion for Q4 from $4.9 billion the prior year; without MetroPCS, it still sees a 10 percent improvement on the back of strong equipment sales. Smartphones in particular soared this quarter, with T-Mobile selling 6.2 million units during Q4 2013, up from just 2.8 million in the prior year's quarter.

In a statement, T-Mobile CEO John Legere says that its fourth quarter numbers prove the company's new strategy is working. "Customers are fed up with the old ways and are voting in favor of choice, innovation and doing business with a company that cares about them and is willing to earn their business," Legere said. Earning their business is continuing to come at a cost, but for T-Mobile, that appears to be a cost worth bearing as it begins to improve its services and gain attention in the market.

Update: In a conference call discussing its quarterly earnings, members of T-Mobile's executive team expressed a positive outlook on the company's ability to turn its newfound growth into profitability as it moves forward, though they acknowledged that costs involved with its Uncarrier initiatives may not turn around immediately.

Some of its more recent Uncarrier plans have apparently been off to a strong start though, including its offer to pay ETF fees for customers transferring from other carriers. T-Mobile also said that its free data offer for tablets has been successful in getting new customers to try its network, and it suspects that many will eventually convert into paying tablet or smartphone customers.

Legere declined to comment on the possibility of further industry consolidation.
"I am looking to put this guy out," Bradley says, "I don’t want to go 12 rounds with this guy."

In anticipation of Timothy Bradley’s return to the ring against Ruslan Provodnikov on Saturday, March 16, at the Home Depot Center in Carson California, Bradley and his trainer recently met with the press.

The WBO welterweight champion remains undefeated at 29-0 and is one of the premier fighters in the game today. But things have not gone smoothly. There were promotional issues. There were family issues. There were public relations issues. And there were issues with the fans of Manny Pacquiao, who he defeated, albeit controversially, in his last fight.

“Every fight from here on out is a statement fight, especially coming after the Pacquiao fight,” Bradley said. “I am looking to make a statement in this fight and I am looking to damage this guy. I am looking to put this guy out. I don’t want to go 12 rounds with this guy. The longer he stays around the more confident he will get so I want to get him out of there as soon as possible.”

Bradley is known for many things, but power isn’t among them. The same, however, cannot be said for the hard-hitting but overmatched Provodnikov (22-1).

“I don’t know about his knockout power,” admitted Bradley. “I’m not worried about his power. He needs to worry about my power. I am not worried about anything he is going to bring. He is going to stand in the middle of the ring. I know exactly how to beat this guy—outbox him. Provodnikov has to worry about me. I am not worried about him.”

Bradley’s trainer, Joel Diaz, feels much the same way.

“We don’t take anyone light,” he said, “no matter who it is or what style he has. Ruslan has his style and I know he is training really hard because this is a great opportunity for him. I watch Provodnikov fights every night and know what he is and he’s not going to change very much. I know he has power in both hands, but to catch Tim Bradley is going to be very hard. Tim is really smart and now his punching power has increased because we made some adjustments. You are going to see a different Tim Bradley on the 16th and don’t be surprised if it doesn’t go the distance.”

Wherever Bradley goes, it seems Pacquiao is soon to follow.

“The Pacquiao made me grow as a person and as a fighter and it made me realize who was important and who was not important and what is important in my career,” said Bradley. “What is not important is what people’s perception of me is. Everyone has an opinion and they can say whatever they want to say but it’s not going to stop me from what I do and that’s kick butt in the ring. What’s important is my family and I pay attention to my career and stop worrying about everyone else’s career and what they are making. I just need to focus on my career and my life. Stop reading all this garbage that all these people are writing about me. I stopped reading columns. I used to read it all the time now I don’t read it at all.”

It’s easy to understand why Bradley is upset. When he defeated the Philippine icon, many were unhappy. Some even went so far as to make death threats. But whether one agrees with the judges’ decision or not, it was hardly a dominating performance. The best one can say is that Bradley held his own, an accomplishment in its own right, if not quite enough to limp away with the crown.

“I don’t get any credit after the Pacquiao fight, whatsoever,” he complained. “People talk about me, my style, that I’m boring. Some people talk about my wife, my kids. People sent me death threats after the fight because I won undeservingly. I should have given the belt back. A lot of different things went on. I can talk all day about things that people said about me. But it doesn’t matter. None of these people are going to get in the ring with me. People can say whatever they want—it’s a free country—so I am going to say whatever I want, when I want to say it and how I want to say it. Those people don’t know me at all. If you get to know me, if you know what I go through, how I train and you still talk crap about me, then you have the problem. No one knows what I go through to prepare for my fights. People need to sell papers I guess. I am the nicest guy you will ever meet on the street, ever.”

Appearances can be deceiving, yet it’s the appearance of arrogance that turns many off. Blanket dismissals are not, after all, how to win friends and influence people. Bradley can no sooner be Asian than Pacquiao can be African American. But when says he’s “the nicest guy you will ever meet,” Bradley is tempting fate.

Like Bradley, Provodnikov will never be mistaken Pacquiao. For one thing, he is considerably easier to hit.

“Oh heck yes,” agreed Bradley. “Pacquiao is tough to hit. He is good defensively.”

Diaz seconded that emotion. “Pacquiao is really smart, but at the same time Tim is the same way. Pacquiao was throwing punches from every angle and missing most of them. For the Pacquiao fight we wanted to execute Manny’s strategy, movement, technique, but the injury made us survive for the fight. But this guy (Provodnikov) comes straight forward. He is just a target in front of you.”

One of the things that Provodnikov has going for him is cornerman Freddie Roach. Roach’s career, after the two Pacquiao losses, no less than Amir Khan’s loss to Danny Garcia and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.’s loss to Sergio Martinez, is being reassessed. His star has lost its luster. Some blame the Parkinson’s. But others, like Joel Diaz, blame Roach himself.

“Freddie Roach was just a name that was created,” he said. “I think Freddie Roach lost the love of the sport. He created a name and it’s out there but he doesn’t have the compassion for the sport that he had a few years ago. I’ve seen it in the last Marquez fight. I’ve seen it in the fight before, the third fight with Marquez. Freddie Roach is the least of my concern for any fight. I just focus on the fighter. Freddie Roach is always trying to play mind games. Freddie says Tim is going to run. That is just Freddie playing mind games. They don’t know how we are going to fight. He is trying to get under Tim’s skin. At the end of the day Tim is going to be a winner, and that’s what matters.”
Increasing competition in the wireless market highlights the need for consolidation among operators, UBS Analyst John Hodulik said this morning. And an attempt at a deal between T-Mobile and Sprint may be the first domino to fall as M&A activity heats up.

The U.S. wireless industry has seen an unexpected war over unlimited data plans and an accelerated race to 5G in recent months. Meanwhile, the FCC’s ongoing incentive auction of 600 MHz spectrum has straightjacketed any significant mergers and acquisitions due to its anti-collusion rules, which prevent the discussion of deals by wireless companies and broadcasters that could influence bidding in the event.

Analysts said we may see a flurry of activity in the coming weeks, though, after the auction ends and as Donald Trump’s administration settles in. And an attempted merger between the nation’s third- and fourth-largest carriers may be in the offing, Hodulik said.

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“We continue to believe a Sprint/T-Mo announcement is likely given the benefits of moving from four wireless players to three and the significant synergies it would create,” Hodulik wrote in a research note. “In addition, we believe the timing is appropriate: (Sprint’s parent) SoftBank has already recovered its cost basis, turned the asset around operationally and financially, and moreover a deal would allow SoftBank to deconsolidate $30B+ in debt. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has already laid the political groundwork, promising to invest and create jobs in the U.S. We also note that the company has focused on strategic value rather than valuation in past acquisitions; we believe a premium here would make sense given asset scarcity and also valuation support and synergies.”

A tie-up between T-Mobile and Sprint makes sense on multiple levels: It would enable the two smaller carriers to better compete with Verizon and AT&T, which claim much larger customer bases, and it would enable T-Mobile—which is thriving financially—to tap Sprint’s significant high-band spectrum assets.

Such a deal would still face major hurdles, however. T-Mobile has become much more valuable in the last few years as its business has thrived, and Sprint’s precarious financial position may forestall any deal. Meanwhile, much of Sprint’s value lies in its spectrum holdings rather than its actual wireless business, further complicating any potential marriage.

That possible merger isn’t the only possible tie-up that could alter the wireless landscape in coming months, of course. Comcast and Charter have made no secret of their plans to move into wireless and may be looking to partner with an existing carrier to do so. And Dish Network and Ligado Networks are aiming to put their spectrum to use by building IoT-focused networks that could be complementary to current cellular networks.

T-Mobile is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of any M&A activity on the horizon, Hodulik said.

“With the incentive auction wrapping up, carriers will be free to start talks for the first time in a year,” he wrote. “Over this time period, a new deregulatory administration has entered the White House and wireless competition has become extremely aggressive, setting the stage for potential M&A. While many scenarios are possible, we believe T-Mobile stands to benefit given its strong fundamentals and strategic value.”
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The couple smiled at each other through the announcement

Japan's Princess Mako has formally announced her engagement to a non-royal after receiving the emperor's approval.

This announcement kicks off a lengthy marriage process, and it also means the princess will lose her royal status.

Under a controversial Japanese law, female imperial family members forfeit their status upon marriage to a "commoner" whereas male members do not.

At a press conference, she said she was first attracted to Kei Komuro's "smile like the sun".

"I've been aware since my childhood that I would lose royal status once I married," Princess Mako said. "While I've worked to help the emperor and fulfil duties as a royal family member as much as I can, I've been cherishing my own life."

The formal announcement came from Japan's Imperial Household Agency on Sunday, after local media reported news of the planned engagement in May.

The princess was not in line to the throne, as a 1947 succession law states that only men from her family's lineage can become emperor.

Image copyright AFP/Getty Images

Her fiancé, Kei Komuro, is a 25-year-old law firm employee. The couple met five years ago while studying at the same university.

In the televised conference, he described the princess as someone who quietly watched over him "like the moon".

Princess Mako, 25, is the eldest child of Prince Fumihito, whose official title is Prince Akishino. She is pursuing a doctorate and works as a museum researcher.

The announcement was originally expected in July, but was postponed after a rain disaster hit western Japan. The wedding is expected to take place next year, according to the public broadcaster NHK.
The province of New Brunswick is toying with the idea of adding a second moose hunt in 2017.

Dwayne Sabine, a biologist with the Department with Natural Resources, says the minister has been looking into the idea.

Sabine says there are benefits to having a split season.

"We see some crowding right now in some wildlife management zones where we have a lot of tags out with healthy moose populations," said Sabine.

"A split season would split the hunters up, a little less crowded in the woods."

The Department of Natural Resources registered a record number of moose this season, 3,728 animals were killed in total.

The Department of Natural Resources is considering a move to split moose hunting season in 2017. (CBC)

That's up from the previous year, which had a record 3,683 moose tagged. The success rate of hunters is around 80 per cent.

Sabine says a split season wouldn't necessarily mean more hunters in the woods.

"Sustainability would still be our first responsibility," said Sabine.

"It would also be helpful for the butcher situations," said Sabine.

"A lot of butchers are booked up solid right now, and I've heard a lot of hunters complaining they have no place to take their moose."

Larry Henderson, a meat cutter just outside of Fredericton, says he's booked solid after every hunting season.

"I've got 35 moose right now," said Henderson. "It's the busiest time of the year."

Henderson, a meat cutter since the 1970s, says he works non-stop for days after moose season begins each year.

"Well you work away at it. I've always had a full cooler, doesn't matter if it's a three-day season, five-day season, or a six-day one," said Henderson.

The Department of Natural Resources 3,728 animals were killed in total. (CBC)

"If I didn't have to hang them as long, that would help, but breaking it up like that would probably help."

Any changes to the season in the future would require a vote in cabinet.

The province is returning to a three-day moose season in 2016, down from the previous two years which saw five-day hunts.
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In statements at a panel in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said US president-elect, Donald Trump, "will be surprised" if he tries to renegotiate the hard-won nuclear deal.

The top diplomat noted that he's taking a "wait and see" attitude about the Trump administration and "the jury is out."

Pressed by the Associated Press afterward on Wednesday, Zarif said it "won't be the end of the world if he [Trump] tries to walk away from the deal [officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]".

"He wants to surprise people, so he will be surprised," if he does, Zarif said with a smile, without elaborating. Zarif also criticized the outgoing administration of Barack Obama, saying it "did not implement their side of the bargain in a full and complete way" notably about difficulties faced by Iranian banks.

In addition, he told the panel that Iran and Saudi Arabia should be able to work together to help end conflicts in Syria and Yemen, after successfully cooperating over Lebanon last year, Reuters reported.

"I do not see any reason why Iran and Saudi Arabia should have hostile policies toward each other. We can in fact work together to put an end to miserable conditions of the people in Syria and Yemen and Bahrain and elsewhere in the region," Zarif said.

"Iran and Saudi Arabia were able to actually stop impeding the process of the presidential election in Lebanon. We have a success story."
NEW DELHI: Real estate major DLF was on Wednesday directed by the Supreme Court to deposit Rs 630 crore fine slapped on it by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for allegedly resorting to unfair business practices.The apex court said the total ammount will be deposited within three months with its registry pending the outcome of the appeal filed by DLF against May 19 order of Competition Appellate Tribunal's upholding the penalty of Rs 630 crore imposed by the CCI."We direct the appellant (DLF) to deposit the amount of Rs 630 crore in this court," a bench comprising justices Ranjana Prakash Desai and N V Ramana said in its interim order.The bench said so far as the interest on the amount was concerned it has to be determined as per the November 9, 2011 order of the CCI that was fixed at 9 per cent.It also directed DLF to file a fresh undertaking that in the event of dismissal of the appeal it will pay such amount as directed by the court.DLF pleaded that it should be granted at least six months time to deposit the amount. However, the bench said it was inclined to grant three months time only.Further, the bench directed that out of Rs 630 crore, the real estate major has to deposit Rs 50 crore in three weeks and the Registry will be at liberty to invest it in any of the nationalised banks.The apex court adjourned the hearing by admitting DLF's appeal in which Haryana government, Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) are parties along with the residents' association on whose plea the competition watchdog had imposed the penalty on the company.The CCI in 2011 had found DLF violating fair trade norms and imposed a fine of Rs 630 crore on it following a complaint by Belaire Owners' Association in Gurgaon.It was in May 2010 that the buyer's association had complained against DLF.
When I initially started my Magic Mirror project, it was just to see if it was possible. It was never meant to be an open source project, let alone a commercial project. When the project eventually got more famous, it wouldn’t take long for the first commercial opportunities …

After the blog posts of my Magic Mirror went viral (mainly because the Raspberry Pi foundation blogged about it), the first inquiries started to appear in my inbox. An though I wasn’t really interested in building Magic Mirrors as paid projects, one inquiry really stood out.

It turned out a successful entrepreneur was building a new house and was looking for a nice eye-catcher as the center piece of the living room. Since the living room would contain a mirror anyway, the Magic Mirror project was the perfect fit.

The mirror ended up being a 2 x 3 meter mirror with a 60" LED TV behind it. As far as I know this is the largest Magic Mirror so far.

The client’s work consists of a lot of traveling, and thus he wanted a way to show the places on earth he visited most. Using Google’s WebGL Globe I created a module that showed the visited spots using spikes on a rotating globe. If a spot is visited more than once, the spike becomes longer.

Above video was made during the development process. The rotating globe really gives a nice futuristic touch to the project. Because of the WebGL usage, this Mirror isn’t running on a Raspberry Pi. It uses a Mac Mini as its host allowing me to built more processor intensive modules.

Since the mirror is larger than the screen itself, a black frame is placed around the monitor. This prevents you from seeing the guts of the Magic Mirror. On the photo you can see the frame around the monitor. But honestly, in real life it doesn’t affect the end result in a negative way. Better yet: it gives some depth to the project.

Having such a large Magic Mirror in the center of your living room gives you a lot of opportunities for cool home automation projects. So as you can guess, this is an ongoing project.

The best part of this project? It allowed me to work on the Magic Mirror on a paid basis, resulting in the MagicMirror² platform. Of course, the client specific modules (like the globe) are kept private. But any modification in the core will be added to the open source platform.

That leaves me with the most important part of this blog: thanking my client for the trust in the work he has shown by letting me built this awesome Magic Mirror and allowing me to continue my work on the MagicMirror² project.
Most of the technology inside the headset is common across all of the manufacturers, but ASUS has worked hard to make its offering unique where it can. For instance, the company used a polygonal-art covering for the visor, ensuring that it looks much nicer than, say, Acer's View Master-esque offering. Similarly, ASUS's headset feels much lighter than its rivals' models, and the company included an antimicrobial cushion inside.

The headset, like its brothers, has inside-out tracking, which uses the two front-mounted cameras to track the controllers. That makes it significantly cheaper than Vive or Rift handsets, which require additional peripherals for tracking. Before testing, my concern was that the cheaper technology would compromise the accuracy and reliability of the controllers. That concern was misplaced, and the system actually works really rather well.

The controllers themselves are designed by Microsoft and clearly sail close to the style laid down by Oculus for its Touch paddles. The biggest difference is a less gaming-focused button layout, with a touchpad, Windows key and thumb stick on the main platform. Your other fingers fall naturally around the other triggers that are situated on the slender hand sticks. They scream that they can be used for business just as naturally as play, as Microsoft is wont to do with its hardware design.

On the outside ring, you'll find a halo of 32 small LEDs that the headset uses to pinpoint the position of the controllers in the air. But even when pulling my hands well beyond the visor's field of view, the tracking remained pretty reliable. One of the demo titles required me to pull weapons out from over my shoulder, and the tracking remained impeccable.

The funny thing is that, personally, I was concerned that these headsets would attempt to please two masters and fail for both of them. After all, the inside-out tracking wouldn't be as accurate or reliable as more expensive alternatives, and its price was too high for a casual purchase. I'm happy to admit that I was wrong and that I'm actually pretty excited for this technology, especially now that it's compatible with Steam VR games.

ASUS doesn't know when its hardware will make its debut beyond the end of this year or the start of the next. Although it would be lunacy if it missed the holiday season, given that this may be many people's first attempt at buying VR gear for their homes. Either way, when it does arrive, it'll set you back €449, and you could expect it to set you back around $500-ish when US pricing is announced.

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John Tyndall FRS (; 2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was a prominent 19th-century Irish physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air. Tyndall also published more than a dozen science books which brought state-of-the-art 19th century experimental physics to a wide audience. From 1853 to 1887 he was professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.

Early years and education [ edit ]

Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland. His father was a local police constable, descended from Gloucestershire emigrants who settled in southeast Ireland around 1670. Tyndall attended the local schools (Ballinabranna Primary School) in County Carlow until his late teens, and was probably an assistant teacher near the end of his time there. Subjects learned at school notably included technical drawing and mathematics with some applications of those subjects to land surveying. He was hired as a draftsman by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in his late teens in 1839, and moved to work for the Ordnance Survey for Great Britain in 1842. In the decade of the 1840s, a railroad-building boom was in progress, and Tyndall's land surveying experience was valuable and in demand by the railway companies. Between 1844 and 1847, he was lucratively employed in railway construction planning.[1][2]

John Tyndall circa 1850

In 1847 Tyndall opted to become a mathematics and surveying teacher at (Queenwood College), a boarding school in Hampshire. Recalling this decision later, he wrote: "the desire to grow intellectually did not forsake me; and, when railway work slackened, I accepted in 1847 a post as master in Queenwood College."[3] Another recently arrived young teacher at Queenwood was Edward Frankland, who had previously worked as a chemical laboratory assistant for the British Geological Survey. Frankland and Tyndall became good friends. On the strength of Frankland's prior knowledge, they decided to go to Germany to further their education in science. Among other things, Frankland knew that certain German universities were ahead of any in Britain in experimental chemistry and physics. (British universities were still focused on classics and mathematics and not laboratory science.) The pair moved to Germany in summer 1848 and enrolled at the University of Marburg, attracted by the reputation of Robert Bunsen as a teacher. Tyndall studied under Bunsen for two years.[4] Perhaps more influential for Tyndall at Marburg was Professor Hermann Knoblauch, with whom Tyndall maintained communications by letter for many years afterwards. Tyndall's Marburg dissertation was a mathematical analysis of screw surfaces in 1850 (under Friedrich Ludwig Stegmann). Tyndall stayed in Germany for a further year doing research on magnetism with Knoblauch, including some months' visit at the Berlin laboratory of Knoblauch's main teacher, Heinrich Gustav Magnus. It is clear today that Bunsen and Magnus were among the very best experimental science instructors of the era. Thus, when Tyndall returned to live in England in summer 1851, he probably had as good an education in experimental science as anyone in England.

Early scientific work [ edit ]

Tyndall's early original work in physics was his experiments on magnetism and diamagnetic polarity, on which he worked from 1850 to 1856. His two most influential reports were the first two, co-authored with Knoblauch. One of them was entitled "The magneto-optic properties of crystals, and the relation of magnetism and diamagnetism to molecular arrangement", dated May 1850. The two described an inspired experiment, with an inspired interpretation. These and other magnetic investigations very soon made Tyndall known among the leading scientists of the day.[5] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852. In his search for a suitable research appointment, he was able to ask the longtime editor of the leading German physics journal (Poggendorff) and other prominent men to write testimonials on his behalf. In 1853, he attained the prestigious appointment of Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at the Royal Institution in London, due in no small part to the esteem his work had garnered from Michael Faraday, the leader of magnetic investigations at the Royal Institution.[6] About a decade later Tyndall was appointed the successor to the positions held by Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution on Faraday's retirement.

Main scientific work [ edit ]

Beginning in the late 1850s, Tyndall studied the action of radiant energy on the constituents of air, and it led him onto several lines of inquiry, and his original research results included the following:

Tyndall's setup for measuring the radiant heat absorption of gases. (Click on image for a description).

Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, also known as infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. [7] He was among the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859), after Eunice Foote in 1856. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapour strongly absorbed infrared radiation. [8] [9] Relatedly, Tyndall in 1860 was first to demonstrate and quantify that visually transparent gases are infrared emitters. [10]

He was among the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859), after Eunice Foote in 1856. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapour strongly absorbed infrared radiation. Relatedly, Tyndall in 1860 was first to demonstrate and quantify that visually transparent gases are infrared emitters. He devised demonstrations that advanced the question of how radiant heat is absorbed and emitted at the molecular level. He appears to be the first person to have demonstrated experimentally that emission of heat in chemical reactions has its physical origination within the newly created molecules (1864). [11] He produced instructive demonstrations involving the incandescent conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level, which he called calorescence (1865), in which he used materials that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light or vice versa. [12] He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat .

He produced instructive demonstrations involving the incandescent conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level, which he called calorescence (1865), in which he used materials that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light or vice versa. He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title . In the investigations on radiant heat in air it had been necessary to use air from which all traces of floating dust and other particulates had been removed. [13] A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering. [14] In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams against a dark background and are based on exploiting the Tyndall Effect. (When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others).

A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering. In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams against a dark background and are based on exploiting the Tyndall Effect. (When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others). He was the first to observe and report the phenomenon of thermophoresis in aerosols. He spotted it surrounding hot objects while investigating the Tyndall Effect with focused lightbeams in a dark room. He devised a better way to demonstrate it, and then simply reported it (1870), without investigating the physics of it in depth. [15]

In radiant-heat experiments that called for much laboratory expertise in the early 1860s, he showed for a variety of readily vaporisable liquids that, molecule for molecule, the vapour form and the liquid form have essentially the same power to absorb radiant heat. [16] (In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H 2 O).

(In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H O). He consolidated and enhanced the results of Desains, Forbes, Knoblauch and others demonstrating that the principal properties of visible light can be reproduced for radiant heat – namely reflection, refraction, diffraction, polarisation, depolarisation, double refraction, and rotation in a magnetic field. [17]

Using his expertise about radiant heat absorption by gases, he invented a system for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in a sample of exhaled human breath (1862, 1864). The basics of Tyndall's system is in daily use in hospitals today for monitoring patients under anaesthesia. [18] (See capnometry.)

(See capnometry.) When studying the absorption of radiant heat by ozone, he came up with a demonstration that helped confirm or reaffirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster (1862).[19]

Tyndall's setup for preserving broths in optically pure air.

In the lab he came up with the following simple way to obtain "optically pure" air, i.e. air that has no visible signs of particulate matter. He built a square wooden box with a couple of glass windows on it. Before closing the box, he coated the inside walls and floor of the box with glycerin, which is a sticky syrup. He found that after a few days' wait the air inside the box was entirely particulate-free when examined with strong light beams through the glass windows. The various floating-matter particulates had all ended up getting stuck to the walls or settling on the sticky floor.[20] Now, in the optically pure air there were no signs of any "germs", i.e. no signs of floating micro-organisms. Tyndall sterilised some meat-broths by simply boiling them, and then compared what happened when he let these meat-broths sit in the optically pure air, and in ordinary air. The broths sitting in the optically pure air remained "sweet" (as he said) to smell and taste after many months of sitting, while the ones in ordinary air started to become putrid after a few days. This demonstration extended Louis Pasteur's earlier demonstrations that the presence of micro-organisms is a precondition for biomass decomposition. However, the next year (1876) Tyndall failed to consistently reproduce the result. Some of his supposedly heat-sterilized broths rotted in the optically pure air. From this Tyndall was led to find viable bacterial spores (endospores) in supposedly heat-sterilized broths. He discovered the broths had been contaminated with dry bacterial spores from hay in the lab. All bacteria are killed by simple boiling, except that bacteria have a spore form that can survive boiling, he correctly contended, citing research by Ferdinand Cohn. Tyndall found a way to eradicate the bacterial spores that came to be known as "Tyndallization". Tyndallization historically was the earliest known effective way to destroy bacterial spores. At the time, it affirmed the "germ theory" against a number of critics whose experimental results had been defective from the same cause. During the mid-1870s Pasteur and Tyndall were in frequent communication.[21][22]

One of Tyndall's setups for showing that sound is reflected in air at the interface between air bodies of different densities.

Invented a better fireman's respirator, a hood that filtered smoke and noxious gas from air (1871, 1874). [23]

In the late 1860s and early 1870s he wrote an introductory book about sound propagation in air, and was a participant in a large-scale British project to develop a better foghorn. In laboratory demonstrations motivated by foghorn issues, Tyndall established that sound is partially reflected (i.e. partially bounced back like an echo) at the location where an air mass of one temperature meets another air mass of a different temperature; and more generally when a body of air contains two or more air masses of different densities or temperatures, the sound travels poorly because of reflections occurring at the interfaces between the air masses, and very poorly when many such interfaces are present. (He then argued, though inconclusively, that this is the usual main reason why the same distant sound, e.g. foghorn, can be heard stronger or fainter on different days or at different times of day.)[24]

An index of 19th century scientific research journals has John Tyndall as the author of more than 147 papers in science research journals, with practically all of them dated between 1850 and 1884, which is an average of more than four papers a year over that 35-year period.[25]

In his lectures at the Royal Institution Tyndall put a great value on, and was talented at producing, lively, visible demonstrations of physics concepts.[26] In one lecture, Tyndall demonstrated the propagation of light down through a stream of falling water via total internal reflection of the light. It was referred to as the "light fountain". It is historically significant today because it demonstrates the scientific foundation for modern fibre optic technology. During second half of the 20th century Tyndall was usually credited with being the first to make this demonstration. However, Jean-Daniel Colladon published a report of it in Comptes Rendus in 1842, and there's some suggestive evidence that Tyndall's knowledge of it came ultimately from Colladon and no evidence that Tyndall claimed to have originated it himself.[27]

Molecular physics of radiant heat [ edit ]

With this setup Tyndall observed new chemical reactions produced by high frequency light waves acting on certain vapours. The main scientific interest here from his point of view was the additional hard data it lent to the grand question of the mechanism by which molecules absorb radiant energy

Tyndall was an experimenter and laboratory apparatus builder, not an abstract model builder. But in his experiments on radiation and the heat-absorptive power of gases, he had an underlying agenda to understand the physics of molecules. Tyndall said in 1879: "During nine years of labour on the subject of radiation [in the 1860s], heat and light were handled throughout by me, not as ends, but as instruments by the aid of which the mind might perchance lay hold upon the ultimate particles of matter."[28] This agenda is explicit in the title he picked for his 1872 book Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat. It is present less explicitly in the spirit of his widely read 1863 book Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion. Besides heat he also saw magnetism and sound propagation as reducible to molecular behaviours. Invisible molecular behaviours were the ultimate basis of all physical activity. With this mindset, and his experiments, he outlined an account whereby differing types of molecules have differing absorptions of infrared radiation because their molecular structures give them differing oscillating resonances. He'd gotten into the oscillating resonances idea because he'd seen that any one type of molecule has differing absorptions at differing radiant frequencies, and he was entirely persuaded that the only difference between one frequency and another is the frequency.[29] He'd also seen that the absorption behaviour of molecules is quite different from that of the atoms composing the molecules. For example, the gas nitric oxide (NO) absorbed more than a thousand times more infrared radiation than either nitrogen (N 2 ) or oxygen (O 2 ).[30] He'd also seen in several kinds of experiments that – no matter whether a gas is a weak absorber of broad-spectrum radiant heat – any gas will strongly absorb the radiant heat coming from a separate body of the same type of gas.[11] That demonstrated a kinship between the molecular mechanisms of absorption and emission. Such a kinship was also in evidence in experiments by Balfour Stewart and others, cited and extended by Tyndall, that showed with respect to broad-spectrum radiant heat that molecules that are weak absorbers are weak emitters and strong absorbers are strong emitters.[10] (For example, rock-salt is an exceptionally poor absorber of heat via radiation, and a good absorber of heat via conduction. When a plate of rock-salt is heated via conduction and let stand on an insulator, it takes an exceptionally long time to cool down; i.e., it's a poor emitter of infrared.) The kinship between absorption and emission was also consistent with some generic or abstract features of resonators.[31] The chemical decomposition of molecules by lightwaves (photochemical effect) convinced Tyndall that the resonator could not be the molecule as a whole unit; it had to be some substructure, because otherwise the photochemical effect would be impossible.[32] But he was without testable ideas as to the form of this substructure, and did not partake in speculation in print. His promotion of the molecular mindset, and his efforts to experimentally expose what molecules are, has been discussed by one historian under the title "John Tyndall, The Rhetorician of Molecularity".[33]

Alpine mountaineering and glaciology [ edit ]

Tyndall visited the Alps mountains in 1856 for scientific reasons and ended up becoming a pioneering mountain climber. He visited the Alps almost every summer from 1856 onward, was a member of the very first mountain-climbing team to reach the top of the Weisshorn (1861), and lead of one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn (1868). He is one the names associated with the "Golden age of alpinism" — the mid-Victorian years when the more difficult of the Alpine peaks were summited for the first time.[34]

John Tyndall explored the glacial tributaries feeding Mer de Glace in 1857. General topology (left); dirt-bands in glacier (right).

In the Alps, Tyndall studied glaciers, and especially glacier motion. His explanation of glacial flow brought him into dispute with others, particularly James David Forbes. Much of the early scientific work on glacier motion had been done by Forbes, but Forbes at that time didn't know of the phenomenon of regelation which was discovered a little later by Michael Faraday. Regelation played a key role in Tyndall's explanation. Forbes didn't see regelation in the same way at all. Complicating their debate, a disagreement arose publicly over who deserved to get investigator credit for what. Articulate friends of Forbes, as well as Forbes himself, thought that Forbes should get the credit for most of the good science, whereas Tyndall thought the credit should be distributed more widely. Tyndall commented: "The idea of semi-fluid motion belongs entirely to Louis Rendu; the proof of the quicker central flow belongs in part to Rendu, but almost wholly to Louis Agassiz and Forbes; the proof of the retardation of the bed belongs to Forbes alone; while the discovery of the locus of the point of maximum motion belongs, I suppose, to me."[35] When Forbes and Tyndall were in the grave, their disagreement was continued by their respective official biographers. Everyone tried to be reasonable, but agreement wasn't attained. More disappointingly, aspects of glacier motion remained not understood or not proved.

Tyndall Glacier located in Chile and Tyndall Glacier in Colorado were named after John Tyndall, as is Mount Tyndall in California[36] and Mount Tyndall in Tasmania.[37]

Educator [ edit ]

Heat Considered as Mode of Motion, is his setup for demonstrating that air cools during the act of expanding in volume; and that air heats up during the act of compressing in volume. (Click on image for more explanation). John Tyndall's tutorial books about physics contained many illustrations. This one, from, is his setup for demonstrating that air cools during the act of expanding in volume; and that air heats up during the act of compressing in volume. (Click on image for more explanation).

Besides being a scientist, John Tyndall was a science teacher and evangelist for the cause of science. He spent a significant amount of his time disseminating science to the general public. He gave hundreds of public lectures to non-specialist audiences at the Royal Institution in London.[38] When he went on a public lecture tour in the USA in 1872, large crowds of non-scientists paid fees to hear him lecture about the nature of light.[39] A typical statement of Tyndall's reputation at the time is this from a London publication in 1878: "Following the precedent set by Faraday, Professor Tyndall has succeeded not only in original investigation and in teaching science soundly and accurately, but in making it attractive.... When he lectures at the Royal Institution the theatre is crowded."[40] Tyndall said of the occupation of teacher "I do not know a higher, nobler, and more blessed calling."[41] His greatest audience was gained ultimately through his books, most of which were not written for experts or specialists. He published more than a dozen science books.[42] From the mid-1860s on, he was one of the world's most famous living physicists, due firstly to his skill and industry as a tutorialist. Most of his books were translated into German[43] and French[44] with his main tutorials staying in print in those languages for decades.

As an indicator of his teaching attitude, here are his concluding remarks to the reader at the end of a 200-page tutorial book for a "youthful audience", The Forms of Water (1872): "Here, my friend, our labours close. It has been a true pleasure to me to have you at my side so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout, using in all possible cases your own muscles instead of relying upon mine. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own. It is thus that I should like to teach you all things; showing you the way to profitable exertion, but leaving the exertion to you.... Our task seems plain enough, but you and I know how often we have had to wrangle resolutely with the facts to bring out their meaning. The work, however, is now done, and you are master of a fragment of that sure and certain knowledge which is founded on the faithful study of nature.... Here then we part. And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us. Give me your hand. Good bye."[45]

As another indicator, here is the opening paragraph of his 350-page tutorial entitled Sound (1867): "In the following pages I have tried to render the science of acoustics interesting to all intelligent persons, including those who do not possess any special scientific culture. The subject is treated experimentally throughout, and I have endeavoured so to place each experiment before the reader that he should realise it as an actual operation." In the preface to the 3rd edition of this book, he reports that earlier editions were translated into Chinese at the expense of the Chinese government and translated into German under the supervision of Hermann von Helmholtz (a big name in the science of acoustics).[46] His first published tutorial, which was about glaciers (1860), similarly states: "The work is written with a desire to interest intelligent persons who may not possess any special scientific culture."

His most widely praised tutorial, and probably his biggest seller, was the 550-page "Heat: a Mode of Motion" (1863; updated editions until 1880). It was in print for at least 50 years,[47] and is in print today. Its primary feature is, as James Clerk Maxwell said in 1871, "the doctrines of the science [of heat] are forcibly impressed on the mind by well-chosen illustrative experiments."[48]

Tyndall's three longest tutorials, namely Heat (1863), Sound (1867), and Light (1873), represented state-of-the-art experimental physics at the time they were written. Much of their contents were recent major innovations in the understanding of their respective subjects, which Tyndall was the first writer to present to a wider audience. One caveat is called for about the meaning of "state of the art". The books were devoted to laboratory science and they avoided mathematics. In particular, they contain absolutely no infinitesimal calculus. Mathematical modelling using infinitesimal calculus, especially differential equations, was a component of the state-of-the-art understanding of heat, light and sound at the time.

Demarcation of science from religion [ edit ]

Vanity Fair, 1872 Tyndall caricatured as a preacher in the magazine, 1872

The majority of the progressive and innovative British physicists of Tyndall's generation were conservative and orthodox on matters of religion. That includes for example James Joule, Balfour Stewart, James Clerk Maxwell, George Gabriel Stokes and William Thomson – all names investigating heat or light contemporaneously with Tyndall. These conservatives believed, and sought to strengthen the basis for believing, that religion and science were consistent and harmonious with each other. Tyndall, however, was a member of a club that vocally supported Darwin's theory of evolution and sought to strengthen the barrier, or separation, between religion and science. The most prominent member of this club was the anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley. Tyndall first met Huxley in 1851 and the two had a lifelong friendship. Chemist Edward Frankland and mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, both of whom Tyndall had known since before going to university in Germany, were members too. Others included the social philosopher Herbert Spencer.

Though not nearly so prominent as Huxley in controversy over philosophical problems, Tyndall played his part in communicating to the educated public what he thought were the virtues of having a clear separation between science (knowledge & rationality) and religion (faith & spirituality).[49] As the elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874, he gave a long keynote speech at the Association's annual meeting held that year in Belfast. The speech gave a favourable account of the history of evolutionary theories, mentioning Darwin's name favourably more than 20 times, and concluded by asserting that religious sentiment should not be permitted to "intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command". This was a hot topic. The newspapers carried the report of it on their front pages – in the British Isles, North America, even the European Continent – and many critiques of it appeared soon after. The attention and scrutiny increased the friends of the evolutionists' philosophical position, and brought it closer to mainstream ascendancy.[50]

In Rome the Pope in 1864 decreed that it was an error that "reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at knowledge" and an error that "divine revelation is imperfect" in the Bible – and anyone maintaining those errors was to be "anathematized" – and in 1888 decreed as follows: "The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence.... A doctrine of such character is most hurtful both to individuals and to the State.... It follows that it is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional [or promiscuous] freedom of thought, speech, writing, or religion."[51] Those principles and Tyndall's principles were profound enemies. Luckily for Tyndall he didn't need to get into a contest with them in Britain, nor in most other parts of the world. Even in Italy, Huxley and Darwin were awarded honorary medals and most of the Italian governing class was hostile to the papacy.[52] But in Ireland during Tyndall's lifetime the majority of the population grew increasingly doctrinaire and vigorous in its Roman Catholicism and also grew stronger politically. It would have been a waste of time for Tyndall to debate the Irish Catholics, but between 1886 and 1893 Tyndall was active in the debate in England about whether to give the Catholics of Ireland more freedom to go their own way. Like the great majority of Irish-born scientists of the 19th century he opposed the Irish Home Rule Movement. He had ardent views about it, which were published in newspapers and pamphlets.[53] For example, in an opinion piece in The Times on 27 December 1890 he saw priests and Catholicism as "the heart and soul of this movement" and wrote that placing the non-Catholic minority under the dominion of "the priestly horde" would be "an unspeakable crime".[54] He tried unsuccessfully to get the UK's premier scientific society to denounce the Irish Home Rule proposal as contrary to the interests of science.[55]

In several essays included in his book Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, Tyndall attempted to dissuade people from believing in the potential effectiveness of prayers. At the same time, though, he was not broadly anti-religious.[56][57]

Many of his readers interpret Tyndall to be a confirmed agnostic,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64] though he never explicitly declared himself to be so.[56][57] The following statement from Tyndall is an example of Tyndall's agnostic mindset, made in 1867, and reiterated in 1878: "The phenomena of matter and force come within our intellectual range... but behind, and above, and around us the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution.... Let us lower our heads, and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all."[56]

Private life [ edit ]

A memorial to John Tyndall above Belalp in the Swiss Alps.

Tyndall did not marry until age 55. His bride, Louisa Hamilton, was the 30-year-old daughter of a member of parliament (Lord Claud Hamilton, M.P.). The following year, 1877, they built a summer chalet in the Swiss Alps. Before getting married Tyndall had been living for many years in an upstairs apartment at the Royal Institution and continued living there after marriage until 1885 when a move was made to a house near Haslemere 45 miles southwest of London. The marriage was a happy one and without children. He retired from the Royal Institution at age 66 having complaints of ill health.

Tyndall became financially well-off from sales of his popular books and fees from his lectures (but there is no evidence that he owned commercial patents). For many years he got non-trivial payments for being a part-time scientific advisor to a couple of quasi-governmental agencies and partly donated the payments to charity. His successful lecture tour of the United States in 1872 netted him a substantial amount of dollars, all of which he promptly donated to a trustee for fostering science in America.[65] Late in life his money donations went most visibly to the Irish Unionist political cause.[66] When he died, his wealth was £22,122.[67] For comparison's sake, the income of a police constable in London was about £80 per year at the time.[68]

Death [ edit ]

In his last years Tyndall often took chloral hydrate to treat his insomnia. When bedridden and ailing, he died from an accidental overdose[69] of this drug in 1893 at the age of 73, and was buried at Haslemere.[70] The overdose was administered by his wife Louisa. “My darling,” said Tyndall when he realized what had happened, “you have killed your John.” [71] Afterwards, Tyndall's wife took possession of his papers and assigned herself supervisor of an official biography of him. She dragged her feet on the project, however, and it was still unfinished when she died in 1940 aged 95.[72] The book eventually appeared in 1945, written by A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, whom Louisa Tyndall had authorised shortly before her death.

John Tyndall's books [ edit ]

See also [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]

Sources [ edit ]
Here are some recent developments on bitcoin and the blockchain from around the world.

Russia’s Love-Hate Relationship

Russia’s stance towards bitcoin and blockchain is a study of a great contrast. While Russia has been unfriendly towards bitcoins, it is showing enthusiasm towards its underlying technology, the blockchain. However, this could be changing. As Russia’s Central Bank moved to embrace the blockchain technology, comments by Andrei Lugovoi, Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee for Security and Anti-Corruption generated hope for the future of cryptocurrencies as well.

A press release by Russia’s Central Bank revealed that the central bank is setting up a working group to engage in the “analysis and evaluation” of application possibilities of new financial technology. An extract from the release read, “The Central Bank established the Working Group on the analysis of advanced technologies and innovations in the financial market. Among the priority issues - the study of distributed technologies (e.g. blockchain), as well as new developments in the mobile, payment, and other areas.”

Russia’s has been hard on its attitude towards bitcoin but the same has seen a gradual shift from a time when the Finance Ministry prepared a draft on banning all forms of money substitutes in Russia which includes bitcoins. According to Andrei Lugovoi, “In the beginning of 2016 after a series of meetings with the fiscal authorities and businesses, it was stated that in the future the Central Bank could begin to legalize and regulate certain transactions with Bitcoin, particularly peer-to-peer transactions and settlements with individuals.” Russia currently ranks fifth in the world with 200,000 users of cryptocurrency users, and thus if the above proposal is enforced, it will provide a big boost to virtual currencies.

Bitcoin Could Be ‘Real Money’ in Japan

In an interesting development, Japan’s financial regulators are reportedly considering treating virtual currencies such as bitcoin equivalent to real money, a move that would strengthen the mechanism of consumer protection and pave a way for growth in the virtual economy. Currently, virtual currencies in Japan are “recognized as objects but are not treated on a par with their more established counterparts.”

As per the Nikkei report, FSA is considering amendments to legislation to include virtual currencies such as bitcoin as “fulfilling the functions of currency.” The proposal will be submitted during the ongoing Ordinary Diet Session. This move would bring entities like exchanges for virtual currency under a regulatory preview with tighter oversight, thereby enabling virtual currency to expand in a safer mode.

Australia, Bitcoin & Blockchain

In a recent speech Greg Medcraft, Chairman, Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) spoke about the blockchain. He said, “This technology has the potential to fundamentally change our markets and our financial system .... Blockchain will have profound implications for how we regulate.” ASX has already collaborated with Digital Asset Holdings, LLC to develop solutions for the Australian equity market using the blockchain technology. Meanwhile in February, Melbourne based Bitcoin Group, a company that mines bitcoins, completed its initial public offering raising $4.2 million to be listed on Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). It was the first IPO by a company engaged in bitcoin mining.

Other than finance, blockchain is being applied to politics. Flux, “a revolutionary political party and politico-economic structure” is looking to revamp the way the orthodox system of politics by bringing in the blockchain technology. Flux provides a modern voting system using the blockchain technology which allows transparency, immutable records and ease of online voting. It filed its papers with the Australian Election Commission in January, and aims to elect six senators. Flux describes itself as “a layer for the redistribution of political power. And when a Flux candidate is elected they become a gateway for voters to directly influence parliament.” Flux now has 1238 registered members according to the website.

Blockchain Coming to Korea

The Korea Stock Exchange (KRX) as reported by The Korea Times has begun “preliminary steps” to develop a trading platform for off-board dealers based on the blockchain technology. The new platform will bring together buyers and sellers OTC which would facilitate trading by reducing efforts in finding trade partners and reducing costs involved.

Dubai’s Global Blockchain Council

To promote innovation and adopt next generation technologies at a global level, Dubai Museum of the Future Foundation recently announced the launch of Global Blockchain Council. Al Aleeli, CEO, Dubai Museum of the Future Foundation said that “the significant growth in the volume of transactions using Blockchain platform during 2015, which reached 56%, refers to the great opportunities that can be utilized through the optimal application of this technology in the relevant sectors." According to him, the global investments in blockchain could reach $300 billion over the next four years. The Global Blockchain Council will explore and promote blockchain and digital currencies as well as study its advantages and disadvantages while working on ways to utilize the technology in the best possible way.

European Parliament

A new draft report by the European Parliament on virtual currencies stresses that virtual currencies and blockchain technology can contribute greatly towards consumer welfare and economic development by dramatically lowering transaction costs for payments and transfer of funds while enhancing the speed and resilience of payment systems, and allowing transactions to be tracked in case of malfeasance.

The report calls for the creation of a horizontal Task Force DLT (distributed ledger technology) under the leadership of the Commission to facilitate the necessary technical and regulatory expertise to support the relevant actors (at both EU and Member State level) in efforts to ensure a timely and well-informed response to the new opportunities and challenges.

Meanwhile the European Central Bank (ECB) showed “openness to new technologies” and said that it intends to assess the relevance of blockchain and distributed ledger technology for various banking services like payments, securities settlement as well as collateral.

Final Word

The developments around bitcoin and the blockchain technology are fast evolving. While banks, and technology companies are already involved in many such projects, governments are becoming increasing open the changes which have entered the financial ecosystem (and extending beyond finance), while making sure that they do not compromise on issues such as money laundering and other illicit activities.
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Asura is a hack and slash that puts you in the role of a dangerous demon fighting an evil maharaja. Inspired by Indian myths and full of intense combat, it’s this week’s Indie Pick.

I’m a big fan of rougue-lites and classic dungeon crawling. I picked up Brutal last year and still take time for the occasional bit of questing. Asura scratches the same itch. Our editor in chief, Stephen Totilo, looked at it at E3 2016, enjoying the game while literally sitting on the show floor. It has snappy combat, fun magical spells, and constantly reshuffles level design to offer new configurations to explore each time you load it up.

One of the things I like the most about Asura is how it takes mythology and uses it to inspire these gameplay systems. It’s not just lore. And the designers at Ogre Head Studios took their story and integrated it nicely into the mechanics.

“When a demon dies he does not stay dead,” designer Zainuddin Fahad told Kotaku. “Instead he reincarnates. With a new skill tree in this case.”

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Fahad and his co-workers come from an initial background in mobile game design, which quickly took off in India. They found themselves working on project they lacked passion for. Inspired by games like Diablo and Age of Empires, they set off to create their own games. The result was Asura.

“Our [goal] was to bring a much needed change in the Indian games industry,” Fahad said. “We have rich culture and heritage which are personal to us. We wanted to fuse this with game design and mechanics.”

Asura might not revolutionize the hack and slash genre but it’s definitely held my attention. There’s always allure to finding a new treasure chest or slaying a difficult boss. It’s crafted with care. In this day and age, with bloated storefronts and rushed games, that makes all the difference in the world.

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You can play Asura on PC, Mac, and Linux.

Each week, I show off a new, affordable indie game using the tag “Heather’s Indie Pick.”

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In Local News, Public Transport / By Anthony Lim / 7 December 2016 10:22 am / 46 comments

It looks like taxi drivers may have lost the champion of their cause. According to a Malay Mail Online report, Big Blue Taxi Services’ owner Datuk Shamsubahrin Ismail has had a change of heart and is now backing the legalisation of ride-sharing services.

He announced the turnaround after his company was supposedly robbed of RM8,000 by a driver three days ago. The driver, a man in his 50s and who had driven for Big Blue Taxi for six years, has since disappeared. “I have helped him out so many times and this is how he repays me,” Shamsubahrin said.

He had lodged a police report and will be taking the taxi company, which the missing driver had obtained his permit from, to court. The case will be filed under Section 43 of the Land Public Transport Act Section, which states that a company can be held responsible if a taxi driver is found guilty of any wrongdoing.

Shamsubahrin claims this is the first time any taxi company is being brought to court under the section. “The existing law we have is already strong but Land Public Transport Commission must be more effective and proactive in ensuring that we don’t allow unethical and immoral people to work as taxi drivers,” he explained.

With regards to ride-sharing services, Shamsubahrin said that because taxi drivers were unfazed by the competition from Uber and Grab by refusing to change, he was urging the government to speed up the process of regulating them. “I support the approval of Uber and GrabCar services,” he stated.

This is a stark contrast to the stand taken previously. In October, he had said that the government’s idea of encouraging aspiring ride-sharing drivers with a RM4,000 rebate to purchase a Proton Iriz was a clear indicator of the government’s intention to wipe out the taxi industry in favour of ride-sharing companies.

“You said you want to transform the taxi industry, but we saw nothing from the budget that was helpful to the taxi industry. Instead you promote the people to drive Uber,” he had then said.

He also took a swipe at the government’s initiative in handing out 12,000 individual permits to qualified taxi drivers, saying the policies appeared to be half-baked. “There is nothing concrete. If they want to really help and allow us to compete at a level playing field they should regulate Uber’s fares as well,” he said.
Panhandler Lawsuit

Kim Pindak stands outside Chicago's federal courthouse after the first day of testimony in a civil lawsuit involving him and and other panhandlers Monday, Jan. 25, 2016, in Chicago. He and another panhandler brought a suit that alleges they lost up to $10 a day because authorities bar them from begging in Daley Plaza, a popular public square in the city. The trial that started today is a rare instance of jurors being asked to decide the issue of panhandlers' rights. (AP Photo/Michael Tarm)

CHICAGO -- A federal civil trial pitting two panhandlers against one of the nation's largest sheriff's departments got underway Monday, in a case stemming from a lawsuit that alleges the men were improperly stopped from begging at a popular Chicago square.

Kim Pindak and Sam Phillips claim they lost up to $10 a day over four years because Cook County sheriff's deputies told them repeatedly they couldn't ask for money at Daley Plaza, best known for its iconic Chicago sculpture by Pablo Picasso.

Pindak, 63, said during a break in the trial that he was forced to supplement his income by begging because all but $30 of his $750-a-month federal disability assistance went toward paying living expenses at an assisted-living facility.

"A lot of people see us as scam artists," he said. "I don't live in the Waldorf Astoria. I'm just trying to survive."

Wearing a sports jacket his attorneys bought him for the trial, Pindak said over lunch that he never imagined he would one day be a subject in a rare panhandler case to go before a federal jury. He quickly added, "I never thought I would be a panhandler, either."

He said he once aspired to become a physician before suffering debilitating mental illness. The extra income from panhandling allows him to buy an occasional coffee, a pair of shoes or sometimes books about his favorite hobby -- chess.

Back in the courtroom, he often looked uneasy as he sat at a table for the plaintiffs. The judge, Rebecca Pallmeyer, has presided over some of the most notable cases in recent Illinois history, including the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan.

In recent years, courts nationwide have increasingly agreed that asking passers-by for money is constitutionally protected free speech under the First Amendment, said Rebecca Glenberg, a civil liberties lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

A man panhandles on the street Monday, Jan. 25, 2016, in Chicago. A lawsuit brought by panhandlers who say they lose up to $10 a day because authorities bar them from a popular public square in Chicago is set to go to trial. The trial that starts Monday in Chicago federal court is a rare instance of jurors being asked to decide the issue of panhandlers' rights. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

The case in Chicago will examine whether lax or nonexistent training for sheriff's deputies regarding panhandlers' rights contributed to violations of Pindak's and Phillips' rights.

Pallmeyer already ruled that the men's rights were violated, at least in some instances. Jurors will be asked to come up with a dollar amount for any damages determined.

Pindak calculates he may have lost up to $10 a day for four days a week over a four-year period because of the sheriff's department; that could add up to more than $8,000.

Adele Nicholas, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told jurors during her opening statement Monday that the case is about the responsibility law enforcement agencies have to adequately train their staffs about citizens' rights. She said money wasn't the point.

"This case is about something bigger," she said. "It's about responsible police practices."

But an attorney defending the sheriff's office, Patrick Russell, told jurors there was never a concerted effort to bar panhandlers from Daley Plaza. At worst, he said, panhandlers like Pindak might have been asked to "move along" from time to time.

He said they were not arrested, detained or prosecuted.

"So I ask you: What are the damages?" he said.

Another attorney for the plaintiffs, Mark Weinberg, has filed other panhandler lawsuits. One, a 2001 class-action suit, argued it was illegal for Chicago to define panhandling as disorderly conduct. That suit was settled, entitling 5,000 panhandlers to payouts of $400 each.

City ordinance prohibits aggressive panhandling tactics. But no one accuses Pindak or Phillips of that.

Phillips said he simply holds a sign while panhandling that reads, "I'm Just Hungry."
Wednesday Writing Hook Sure Hump-Day can suck, but we’ve decided to turn it into a *Hooray-Day* by releasing a new writing hook every week! Each edition will feature an image of an artefact, a complementary writing hook, and a little about its historical provenance, with a further reading option. We’d love to hear about the stories and adventures you wrote with them – be sure to detail them in the comments below! You can subscribe for more writing hooks, or find them on Facebook or Twitter.

The Writing Hook

A pregnant woman has disappeared. The villagers mutter nervously and exchange dark looks – such disappearances have been going on regularly for the last 20 years, not to mention livestock rippings and other attacks. No one has ever been implicated.

A blood-trail leads back to the house of wealthy, pleasant local farmer, Peter Stummp, but there is no obvious evidence in the property. When questioned, neither Stummp nor his daughter seem to know anything, although you do notice that the kitchen is filled with the tantalising aroma of meat stock…

The Historical Facts

Peter Stummp, during 1589, had one of the most famous werewolf trials in history. As he was brutally tortured, he confessed to having practiced black magic since the age of 12, and that the Devil had given him a magical belt, which turned him into a great wolf until he removed it. He also confessed to killing and eating fourteen children, one of whom was his son, and two pregnant women. He later described the fetus hearts as “dainty morsels”, which he plucked out and ate whilst they were still beating. He was accused of incest with his daughter, and also confessed that he had intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil.

How would you use this writing hook for your writing or role-playing campaigns? How would you make this writing hook better? Let us know in the comments below!

Looking for more inspiration? Why not try last week’s writing hook, Writing Hook #1: The Mysterious Box.
Last season, the Los Angeles Chargers offensive line was ranked second to last. Veteran quarterback Phillip Rivers was pressured 238 times last season and out of the 1, 510 total rushing yards the team totaled last season, 960 of them came after contact.

While there are other areas the Bolts need to address, shoring up their offensive line should be a top priority for the team if they hope to have Rivers behind center for a couple more seasons.

Aside from center Matt Slauson, the offensive line was a train wreck in 2016. The team has signed former Seattle Seahawk Russel Okung to a four-year deal worth $53 million and are likely parting ways with left tackle King Dunlap and have already parted with former first-round pick D.J. Fluker.

Related Kenjon Barner prodded by two former Chargers to join team

Although it’s a weak 2017 Draft class for offensive lineman, here are three options for the Chargers in the first three rounds.
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Over the last two months, GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been forced to deal with various allegations against him and his campaign. With less than three months until the Republican National Convention, a new conspiracy has been released, this time against his father.

Conspiracy Cruz

Last month, the National Enquirer broke a story claiming that Cruz allegedly had affairs with at least five separate women, including former campaign staffers. Cruz quickly denied the allegations, which quickly faded away over the next week. Now a new claim has been released, this time targeting Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, allegedly linking him to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, as reported by The American Intelligence Report on April 17.

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WAS CRUZ’S FATHER LINKED TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION? https://t.co/acN2jQQm14 pic.twitter.com/FFwwZLuTzy — Kristan T. Harris (@KristanTHarris) April 17, 2016

The site notes that Rafael Cruz Sr. was in New Orleans and Dallas shortly before Kennedy was assassination on November 22, 1963. The elder Cruz married his first wife, Julia Ann Gara, following his graduation from the University of Texas in 1959. The couple moved from Dallas to New Orleans three years later in 1962. The claims of a conspiracy are based on a photo of alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald standing with a man that the site claims is Cruz.

The American Intelligence Report, via the Wayne Madsen Report, claims that Oswald hired Cubans to help distribute "Hands off Cuba" propaganda in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. In a photo released by the site, Oswald can be seen standing next to a man who looks similar to Cruz.

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Going even further, the report states that a "source" confirmed that it was Rafael Cruz in the photograph, and that "there is a strong reason to believe that Cruz was associated with Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Castro operations."

Conspiracy debunked

There have been hundreds of conspiracy theories about the murder of President Kennedy, with some having legitimate claims to contradict the findings of the Warren Commission. However, while some theories deserve investigation, others have been proven false, or to be downright silly.

Snopes: Was Ted Cruz's Father Linked to the JFK Assassination?: Disreputable web site posits a link between Te... https://t.co/qEIuNjPEl2 — Skeptic Network (@SkepNet) April 17, 2016

Just hours after the report of Cruz being linked to Oswald and the JFK assassination, Snopes released their findings.

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Describing the Wayne Madsen Report as "disreputable" and a "notoriously unreliable conspiratorial," Snopes found nothing that could backup the claims made in their report. Snopes also pointed out that Cruz left the city of Dallas a year before Kennedy even made his trip to Dealey Plaza, sarcastically noting, "the conspiracy in which Cruz and Oswald were involved was so vast, they were able to predict the movements of President Kennedy several months before Kennedy himself planned them."

Conclusion

The idea that Sen. Cruz's father had anything to do with the plot to kill Kennedy is, at least as of press time, a conspiracy that belongs with the Umbrella man. In 1978, United States House Select Committee on Assassinations released their findings in the Kennedy assassination and concluded that "Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," though it's highly unlikely that Cruz had anything to do with it.
Toys that we really can’t describe!

Bowlingual Voice

A Tomy employee poses with the Bowlingual Voice, a gadget that expresses dogs’ emotions, at the annual Tokyo Toy Show 2009. Tomy claims the gadget analyses a dog’s voice through a wireless microphone attached to its collar and then displays its emotions.

Maui Flowers Dog Bikini

Make a summertime splash with the Maui Flowers Dog Bikini. Your dog will not be able to resist this cute Spandex bathing suit. Canine Maui Flowers Bikini is two-piece for easy movement with a comfy and practical fit.

Dog Spinny Interactive Toy By Nina Ottosson

‘Dog Spinny’, has a single removable bone that has to be dislodged by the dog, who can then rotate the top section to access treats in the compartments below. By gradually reducing the number of treats, you can encourage him to work harder.

Nina Ottosson’s range of durable interactive games have been designed to stimulate a dog’s brain whilst reinforcing his relationship with people. Each design has a unique mechanism that requires mental as well as physical dexterity to work through the challenges and reveal hidden food rewards. They can be set to differing levels of complexity, to satisfy all ages and breeds of dog.

Zig A Zag Ball

The Zig A Zag Ball is a motorised ball that gives hours of crazy fun!

Using 1 AA battery which is supplied with the toy you can turn the ball on and watch your dog play for hours with the unpredictable movements the ball makes.

The toy is made from non toxic material and measures approx 9cm in diameter.

Dog Tornado Interactive Toy By Nina Ottosson

The idea behind the ‘Dog Tornado’ is for the dog to dislodge the removeable bones, then turn the revolving sections to reveal hidden treats. The Tornado has many variables to increase the level of difficulty as the dog’s skill improves. With a little practise, he will soon learn to dislodge the bones and turn the Tornado to access the rewards.

Nina Ottosson’s range of durable interactive games have been designed to stimulate a dog’s brain whilst reinforcing his relationship with people. Each design has a unique mechanism that requires mental as well as physical dexterity to work through the challenges and reveal hidden food rewards. They can be set to differing levels of complexity, to satisfy all ages and breeds of dog.

Hotdoll, Love Doll for Dogs

Dogs are animals with enormous sexual appetites that can’t be controlled easily. So this is in artificial way to stop dogs inborn character. The Hotdoll is a natural way (and actually a beneficial one for dog’s health) to control its sexual impulses. This Love Doll for dogs is shaped to be grabbed easily by the dog’s paws like grabbing female hips. Designer: Clement Eloy.

Humunga Stache Dog Toy

The Humunga Stache Dog Toy. On one side, it’s a fun black ball for your dog to play with while on the flip side is a gigundus moustache (yes, gigundus).

A Holiday Meal Fit for a Dog

Really, how cute is this? The set includes turkey, corn, baked potato, biscuit, and what appears to be broccoli, served on top of a Frisbee. Yes, a Frisbee plate!

Grrrona Mexican Beer Dog Toy

Long Summer days kicking back with a Mexican beer and a slice of lime. Summer bliss! Your pooch will love this embroidered plush Grrrona toy featuring a squeaker inside for added delight.

Doggie Chill Pill

Oh boy, don’t you just feel sometimes like giving your dog a “chill pill”? Well, now you can — er — figuratively. These Chill Pills plush and rope toys from Loopies crack me up.
What does "open source" mean? With open source software being so prevalent in our lives (Android, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox are almost fixtures), you would think that it would be simple enough to find somebody who can explain the term around here. A quick survey around the office turned out dismal results, however. A fellow intern told me "open source software" simply meant that the source code is open for view; another insisted that it means the software is free to use. I personally had the impression that it meant the code was crowd sourced and created by volunteer developers--the idea was immediately shot down by the other two. So what, really, does "open source" mean?

In an attempt to understand and clarify some of the misconceptions surrounding the term, I contacted the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a foundation that oversees the use of the term and approves open source licenses. I talked to Karl Fogel, the author of the book "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" and a board member of OSI.

I put to the test a few common beliefs about open source software:

Open source only means that the source is open to view.

False

Under the OSI's Open Source Definition, software that is open source must also allow unrestricted redistribution and modifications. Certain licenses are also copyleft, which means that any derived work must also be distributed under the same license--So check your licenses carefully before proceeding.

This misconception is due to a direct interpretation of the word "open source", says Fogel. Its actual meaning is supposed to invoke the idea of 'freedom'--the liberty to change and recreate--but finding the correct lexicon was difficult. "It is a problem inherent in the English Language. In Spanish and French you have the word 'Libre', but there is no such equivalent in English, " Fogel says.

Open source software is free.

True

This point is tricky, because it depends on what your definition of "free" is, and who you talk to. As mentioned above, the OSI's definition of open source software is “free” in the sense of giving freedom to those who use it. So in the most common way of thinking, where "free" means no upfront cost to use, modify, or distribute, the answer is yes: the software is free.

That said, if you lean towards economics and like to think about the long-term costs of open source software, you may have brought to mind the old adage "There's no such thing as a free lunch". (Or, as it is commonly used to compare with open source, a Free Beer.) Open source software rarely comes with the technical support and warranty services that proprietary software provides. So while you may not pay upfront now, the expenses for the software maintenance and upkeep may accumulate and charge you in the future.

On a smaller note, if you follow the Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s official four-point definition for free software, you may also have a problem with equating open source with free. FSF's definition, though similar, is not technically the same as OSI's definition for open source software. Indeed, on FSF's front page there is a link to an article by Richard Stallman, FSF's founder, with the title "Why Open Source Software misses the point of Free Software". The rift in the definitions causes a few select cases where the licenses are open source but not technically free software licenses. One such example is the NASA Open Source Agreement.

In response to questions about this technicality, Fogel stresses that they are, in actuality, small differences. "Although the wording of two definitions is different, their meaning is basically the same," he says. He points out that the two organizations often informally synchronize the types of licenses accepted so that the vast majority of open source licenses are also free licenses. It is "extremely rare" to find main stream software that falls under a license approved by one organization and not the other.

In the end, it all depends on what you think is "free" and there are many arguments for each. But for all general purposes and definitions, open source software is free.

Open source software cannot be commercial.

False

"All open source software is commercial software by definition," Fogel explains, " There's also the point that 'commercial' does not mean 'proprietary'. " Companies may not be able to sell open source software, but they can sell services and products related to it. For instance, they can offer a premium version of the software that has additional features.

An example of this is RedHat Linux Enterprise, a premium version of the widely available CentOS and Fedora. It offers binaries and support services on top of the original software, and is purchased through a subscription plan.

Open source software is crowd sourced and vice versa.

False

Crowd sourcing refers to the process of using a large group of public contributors to complete a task. While there are hundreds of crowd sourced projects that are open source as well (such as Wikipedia), the two terms are not interchangeable.

In crowd sourcing, the original group that initiated the project is allowed to keep intellectual property and distribution rights--restrictions which should not be present in an open source project. Yelp.com is one such example: Members of the public contribute by posting reviews on the site, but they are not allowed to, say, redistribute Yelp's content.

Nonetheless, Fogel believes that crowd sourcing is most sustainable when it operates on open source materials. "Then everyone in the crowd has equal claim to the results of the collective labor -- no one has a monopoly," he says.
When members of the opposition are trying to outflank Netanyahu on the right, even the IDF seems like a saner alternative to Israeli politicians.

By Yoni Mendel

“A nation in uniform,” “an army that has a state,” “a democracy of army bases.” In academic research of the critical kind, Israel is understood as a militaristic state.

This, among other things, is what the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling meant when he said, “whether we want it or not — we are a clearly militaristic society, and this militarism is also a central principle around which Israeli society is organized.” Uri Ben Eliezer wrote about Israel as a “nation in uniform,” researching the military characteristics of Israeli society. Oren Barak analyzed the development of “Israeli security networks” and their social and political role in the country.

In other words, much academic research has been dedicated to the topic. It is not difficult to find quotes from Israeli policymakers, most of them (unsurprisingly) Jewish men who served in high-ranking positions in the IDF — men who straddle the line between military and civil society in Israel. This begins with IDF Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin’s declaration in the 1940s that “the Israeli civilian is a soldier with 11 months leave” and continues with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks that Israel must “forever live by the sword.”

Lapid vs. Abbas and the security establishment

On the backdrop of Israel’s militarism, it is important to say a few things about the security establishment. This past month has seen a great number of examples that show how this establishment, and specifically the IDF, has begun to be viewed by the Israeli leadership — both by the government as well as by both the coalition and what, for some reason, is deemed the “opposition” in the Knesset — as outdated, irrelevant, ignorant, and deceitful.

This began with the violence and stabbings in October 2015. The propagandists of the Israeli government announced openly that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ incitement was behind the uprising. The demagoguery quickly became the prominent message, with the media quickly adopting the words “incitement” and “Abbas” as inseparable. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely went as far as to organize a training for senior members of the ministry focusing on “incitement,” which included talks by researchers who support her worldview. The same happened with Culture Minister Miri Regev, Energy and Water Resources Yuval Steinitz, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, and others.

What did the “opposition” do in the meanwhile? It isn’t hard to guess. MK Yair Lapid fell into line, stating that “Abbas is continuing with his crusade of incitement,” adding his own bit of militarism and claiming that “anyone who harms us will bear responsible for the outcome.”

On the other hand, we have an organization called the IDF’s Intelligence Corps. As opposed to the incitement of the right and the left, the corps released the following two professional assessments: “Abbas is not inciting in order to harm Israelis,” and “Abbas is considered a very moderating force in Judea and Samaria.” How did Education Minister Naftali Bennett respond? “The security establishment is wrong.”

This continued with the banning of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement; a movement that has the support of one-third of Muslims in Israel, that has a network of schools and restaurants, and which has its own newspaper. This movement, we must remember, has existed in a reality in which “Israel’s Arab citizens have been discriminated against since 1948 because they are Arab,” according to the government-appointed Or Commission. The cabinet, however, decided to outlaw the group, as opposed to outlawing discrimination and those who support it. After all, some of them hold high-ranking positions among the Israeli leadership.

There is no reason to provide a stage for the remarks coming from government ministers, who all sang the same tune against the Islamic Movement. Not a single one of them actually knows the movement, aside from a few choice quotes provided by a “research organization” whose ideas match up with theirs. But let’s see what those in the “opposition” thought about the decision. There, the leader of the “opposition,” Isaac Herzog, described the ban as the “first step in protecting democracy.” His co-leader, Tzipi Livni, added that she supports the ban. When asked why she didn’t take the same step when she was justice minister, she responded that the Shin Bet didn’t support it.

Had Livni maintained the same security-oriented stance she held back then, she would discover that the Shin Bet actually did publish a response to the ban. It turns out that the Shin Bet expressed doubts about banning the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement. In fact, the Shin Bet believed that doing so will only lead to more unrest among Israel’s Arab citizens. This is not a new position. It was presented to the government in 2014, when the Shin Bet wrote that “there is no intelligence that connects the Islamic Movement to real violent activity,” and that it opposes banning the group. Netanyahu, Livni, Herzog and others didn’t seem to care. Yair Lapid did not disappoint and praised the move.

Jewish Home vs. the IDF

The same phenomenon continued and reached the Israeli street. Over the last few days, as the violence in the West Bank has continued to flare up, and protests have begun to take place primarily in refugee camps, the same voices could be heard from the benches of the government. But there is no real need to give a stage to the extreme remarks by government ministers about what is happening in the West Bank. We must give the right to respond to the representatives of the “oppositional right” of Herzog-Livni-Lapid, and only after that give the IDF a chance to respond.

The representatives of the Zionist Union have already proposed it all. Herzog has already proposed that Netanyahu’s coalition put the West Bank on lockdown, place all the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem under closure, and consider calling up a large number of reserve soldiers. Chairman of the Council of Judea and Samaria (Yesha Council) Avi Ro’e, saw eye to eye with Herzog, stating that the opposition head would “do a much better job at dealing with Palestinian terror.”

As opposed to the hawkish views of Herzog, Netanyahu, Livni, Shaked, Lapid, Regev, Bennett and others, the IDF Central Command provided a different perspective. The commander of the Central Command stated that the terror attacks are not the result of institutionalized incitement or work of a terrorist organization, but rather part of a “limited uprising… and the attacks are inspired by other attacks, not by a centralized leadership… the terrorists are young, desperate, and frustrated, some of them are unemployed.”

According to Central Command, the violence can be stopped through easing restrictions: “economic relief, including providing more permits to work inside Israel, providing building permits in Area C, releasing prisoners, and approving the supply of weapons to the Palestinian Authority.” The government’s disdain for the IDF recommendations was difficult to hide. MK Moti Yogev (Jewish Home) toed the line of his friends from the right, stating that the army’s assessments were, put simply, “irresponsible.”

The swan song?

It is difficult to belittle the phenomenon we see before our eyes. It is also difficult to write these things, when considering the military’s involvement in our daily lives — an organization that deals with security, that has a clear preference for men, that excludes Arab citizens and is seen by many of them as the enemy for fighting their brothers — is a process that Israeli civil society must limit, not to mention refrain from celebrating.

The latest phenomenon reveals that both the army and the security establishment know that while the gut thinking of people like Netanyahu and Herzog might win elections, it is not good for the citizens of Israel. Palestinians live under occupation, and there is nobody who knows this better than the power hat occupies them: the commanders of the Central Command, which has been in control of the West Bank since 1967. They know that Palestinians in Al-Fawar refugee camp are desperate and frustrated.

We are also coming to terms with the political shallowness in which we are living: an extreme right-wing government that wins the support of the “opposition” for every violent step it takes, even if the price is rejecting assessments by state security experts. These are members of Knesset who think only of the next primaries, of how to give the public what it wants, as long as it is viewed as “relevant.” In reality, this translates to thinking of solutions that promote Netanyahu’s theory of living by the sword.

Perhaps this is the swan song. No one can promise that this kind of thinking will not eventually permeate the IDF. Perhaps soon the army will not abide solely by security-based thinking — which in itself is limited and limiting — but will start taking cues from the legislative and executive branches of the government.

Forget for a moment about stopping the attacks, forget about granting freedom to a nation we have been controlling for nearly 50 years. What’s really important is whether the candidate will be viewed as more nationalist than the nationalists. The recipe is simple, and the dish is being cooked up daily in the Israeli political kitchen: for everything Netanyahu says, say something even more extreme. And whenever the army says something, just oppose it and say that the security establishment is wrong and misleading the public.

Woe to us that we are resigned to put our trust in human rights, clearheaded thinking, and restraint in the hands of an army. An organization that is, first and foremost, dedicated to security. But as the Jewish sages said, “in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” And today, more than ever, it seems that both the opposition and coalition are bereft of decent people.

Yoni Mendel is the projects manager of the Mediterranean Unit at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and co-editor of the book review section of the Journal of Levantine Studies (JLS). This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call, where he is a blogger. Read it here.
Everything seems in order when you scroll down the list of young Peruvian players called up to represent their country at Under-15 level. That is, until you reach the name Osama Vinladen Jiménez López.

Vinladen called up by Peru

The Unión Comercio player has a startingly similar name to Osama Bin Laden, who was the founder of terrorist group al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Given that the Spanish pronunciation of the letter 'V' is very similar to the letter 'B' in this case, the name bears an even closer resemblance to that of the Saudi Arabian when spoken.

Peruvian naming tradition offers explanation

It is common in Peru for parents to name their child after a famous individual, regardless of how that individual entered the public consciousness. Peruvian culture places importance on names, and parents may think that giving their child a famous name will help them achieve notoriety. As such, it is not uncommon to come across Peruvians with names ranging from 'Hitler' to 'Ringo Starr'.
​"We wear white to unite against any attempts by the Trump administration to roll back the incredible progress women have made in the last century, and we will continue to support the advancement of all women," Frankel said via a statement released to Vox. "We will not go back." Frankel is the Beyonce of the party. She's the chair of the House Democratic Women's Working Group. A group of 66 Democratic women members, many of whom she has mobilised for the movement and are expected to take part in this fashion statement. When they are not syncing up their wardrobes, the group advocates for pay equality, reproductive health services and paid sick and family leave. Since the inauguration they have been particularly vocal about some of Trump's "achievements" that have wound back women's progress.

Just three days after taking office he reinstated the "global gag rule", also known as the Mexican City policy. A Reagan-era piece of legislation that prevents financial aid from the US funding non-government organisations that provide or advise on abortions and access to contraception for about 27 million women in developing countries. That executive order came just hours after the 44th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court ruling that recognises abortion as a constitutional right. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was, for a politician, refreshingly enthusiastic about the latest campaign by her party's working group. "​Tonight, our Democratic #WomenWearWhite in support of women's rights - in spite of a POTUS who doesn't!," she tweeted.
Patent Troll That Accused Company Of 'Hate Crime' For Fighting Back Now Asking Court To Silence Company

from the you-fail-at-law dept

For the foregoing reasons, Lumen View respectfully requests that the Court grant its Motion for a Protective Order ... to protect Lumen View’s confidential information and (1) prohibiting FTB and its attorney from further communicating with representatives of the media regarding confidential settlement information, or posting such information on social media, (2) require FTB and counsel to take necessary steps to remove from the internet its prior media disclosures, blog posts or press releases that disseminate this protected information, and (3) to grant any other such relief as this Court deems just and proper.

Wasserbauer's request has a couple of problems. First, his idea of what constitutes "confidential information" is pretty broad—it includes not just the $50,000 demand but Wasserbauer's own simple admission about who is behind Lumen View. Second, FindTheBest never signed any kind of non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement....

[....] The rule that Wasserbauer cites, Rule 408 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, is not actually the legal gag order he apparently imagines it to be. The rule doesn't say anything about talking to the media. It simply states that offers of compromise or settlement are often not admissible as evidence in court.

We recently wrote about how patent troll Lumen View's lawyer Damian Wasserbauer had gone off the deep end, claiming that an entrepreneur who was fighting back against the trolling was guilty of a hate crime . Kevin O'Connor, the CEO of FindTheBest (FTB) didn't want to give in to a patent troll shakedown, turning down a $50,000 settlement offer and pledging to spend $1 million fighting Lumen View just on principle. That's resulted in a countersuit, arguing that Lumen View is engaged in extortion and racketeering. Wasserbauer (who, frankly, appears to be a bit out of his league here) doesn't seem to be handling the publicity very well. He's asking the court for an astoundingly broad gag order against O'Connor, including saying he needs to try toprior disclosures.Yeah, good luck with that...Of course, as Joe Mullin notes over at Ars Technica, the entire basis of Wasserbauer's argument appears to be a significant misreading of the law:And we won't even get into the laughable claims by Wasserbauer that there's no First Amendment worries in such a gag order, because that's clearly false. It seems clear that Wasserbauer isn't happy with the media attention -- most trolls aren't -- especially since it's been fairly effective in highlighting the way Lumen View's trolling works. Trolls often get away with what they do because it's too much effort to even figure out how to fight back. If someone else is doing it publicly, it lowers the barrier tremendously.

Filed Under: damian wasserbauer, gag order, kevin o'connor, patent trolls, patents

Companies: findthebest, lumen view
Stephen Hawking says pope told him not to study beginning of universe HONG KONG (AP)  World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. Hawking, author of the best-seller A Brief History of Time, said John Paul made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican. He did not say when the meeting was held. Hawking quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God." The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. "I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said during a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The church condemned Galileo in the 17th century for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe. But in 1992, Pope John Paul II issued a declaration saying the church's denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Hawking is one of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation. He has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, and he proposes that space and time have no beginning and no end. During a question-and-answer session, Hawking was asked where constants like gravity come from and whether gravity can distort light. But there were several humorous moments. The wheelchair-bound Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, communicates with an electronic speech synthesizer. Hawking was asked why his computerized voice has an American accent. "The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986," he said. "I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it." He said he once considered using a machine that gave him a French accent, but he did not because his wife would divorce him. But Hawking said he is shopping for a new system because his current hardware is large and fragile, using components that are no longer made. "I have been trying to get a software version, but it seems very difficult," he said. He urged people with physical disabilities not to give up on their ambitions. "You can't afford to be disabled in spirit as well as physically," he said. "People won't have time for you." Hawking ended his lecture saying, "We are getting closer to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?" Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Dyngus Day Date When Celebrated : Always the Monday after Easter Dyngus Day, also spelled Dingus Day, is a fun Polish Holiday. It is very popular in Poland, as well as in Polish communities across America. After the long Lenten holiday, Dyngus Day is a day of fun. And, perhaps a little romantic fun. It is always celebrated on the Monday after Easter. The Irish traditions and celebration on Saint Patrick's Day is well known. For those of Polish decent, Dyngus Day is a similar day of fun, parades, drinking and festivities. You do not have to be Polish to enjoy Dyngus Day. Rather, consider yourself Polish for the day, and join in on the fun. You'll be glad you did. Dyngus Day Tradition: There are all sort of ways for boys to meet girls. But, this one takes the cake. Guys, on this day you get to wet the ladies down. Sprinkling or drenching with water is your goal. Chase after the ladies with squirt guns, buckets, or other containers of water. The more bold and gallant boys, may choose to use cologne. Hitting (gently, please) the ladies on the legs with switches or pussy willows is also common. Yes ladies, you can strike back. Ladies , you get your revenge on Tuesday, when tradition has it that you throw dishes or crockery back at the boys. It has become increasingly popular for the ladies to get their revenge on Monday, tossing water back at the boys. Note: Dyngus Day is also called Wet Easter Monday. Hmmmmm, I wonder why!? More about Pussy Willows What happened on this Day? This Day in History Famous Birthdays Origin of Dyngus Day: When exploring the roots of Dyngus Day, Historians point to the baptism of Polish Prince Mieszko I in 966 A.D. Baptism with water signifies cleansing, fertility, and purification. Somewhere along the way, the tradition of tossing water on the girls and hitting them with pussy willows evolved. Ecards We've got you covered with free Ecards for just about any other holiday, occasion, event, or no event at all!
news A senior IT professional specialising in regional telecommunications in Victoria yesterday afternoon delivered an extraordinarily erudite and pointed education to a 3AW radio host who had gone on an extended and inaccurate rant live on air, rebutting claims that the National Broadband Network project would cost $233 billion but deliver speeds no different to ADSL broadband.

Yesterday afternoon, the host of 3AW’s Drive program, Tom Elliott, broadcast a segment which contained a large number of factual errors regarding the National Broadband Network project initiated by Labor, which has been continued as the Coalition’s Broadband Network project.

Elliott highlighted an article in The Australian newspaper which had reported that Labor’s NBN project had passed just three percent of Australian premises, but had cost $7 billion to date. “If I got out my trusty calculator, if it cost the same amount of money to cover 100 percent of homes, which the NBN is supposed to do, and businesses, it would cost $233 billion,” Elliott claimed.

In fact, NBN Co’s recent Strategic Review (PDF) showed Labor’s version of the NBN would cost as little as $63 billion if funded by the Government completely, or $54 billion if the rollout was reworked. The Coalition’s version will cost even less. In addition, under all scenarios, the NBN project is slated to make a long-term modest return on its capital; effectively rendering its initial expenses meaningless. In addition, with major capital projects such as the NBN, it is common for a substantial amount of the overall capital cost to be lodged up-front; these costs do not reflect the remaining cost of such projects.

The host went on to interview a series of listeners live on air, who sequentially claimed that the NBN was delivering only equivalent or even worse service than prior ADSL broadband connections possible on Telstra’s copper network. “Broadband via the old copper network and ADSL is getting pretty quick. Unless it’s a huge leap forward, I just don’t know whether we should be spending anywhere between $70 billion and $233 billion on it,” said Elliott, who appeared to grow increasingly hostile towards the NBN project as the segment went on and anti-NBN caller after anti-NBN caller lined up to agree with him.

However, one of the later callers in the segment was able to substantially educate Elliott on the specific advantages of the NBN rollout.

Elliott introduced the caller as George Fong, the executive director of Victorian regional telecommunications consultancy Lateral Plains. However, Fong is actually a much more senior figure than he appeared on the call (see his biography here).

Fong (pictured, right) started his career practising law in Singapore, before moving to Australia in 1987 to lecture at the University of Ballarat. He then founded one of the nation’s first regional ISPs, NetConnect Communications, as early as 1994, and has subsequently spent over 20 years teaching, managing and consulting on IT matters. He is also vice president of the Internet society of Australia and sits on a number of other organisation’s management committees.

Fong spoke with absolute authority on the NBN project, answering all of Elliott’s comments with aplomb and leaving the host appearing to be speechless at some points. You can listen to the entire interview online; the MP3 file is available here and Fong’s segment starts around 1 hour and 19 minutes and 20 seconds.

For example, asked about the final cost of the project, Fong firstly pointed out that virtually every other major nation-building capital infrastructure project had gone at least slightly over their budget, before stating that the cost of the NBN project could only be examined in terms of the length of time the infrastructure would last.

“Instead of saying, this is what the immediate cost is, we need to look at the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years and amortise it across that in terms of the returns that we get from the advantages that we’ve got,” Fong told Elliott. “Remember dial-up. You would never go back to dial-up, would you? In ten years’ time we’re probably never going to go back to ADSL, and that sort of future-proofing that we need, that’s what fibre will do for us in the regional areas.”

Fong also commented with strong authority on issues such the disconnection of Telstra’s copper network, the inherent advantages of fibre over copper, the fact that the copper will need to be replaced eventually, the higher availability and ease of switching between competing ISPs on the NBN’s fibre, and even the expected boom in online media as a consequence of the project.

Elliott had no comeback to Fong’s comments, abandoned his criticism during the encounter and merely thanked him for appearing on the show.

It is very common for radio commentators to heavily criticise the NBN project. Shockjocks such as Alan Jones and Ray Hadley have become notorious for their ongoing, often vitriolic criticism of the project. However, it is very rare that an informed, erudite commentator such as Fong is allowed on the programs to refute the claims being made by the host.

opinion/analysis

This morning I was all set to write another in a very long line of articles about ignorant and ill-informed radio shockjocks criticising the NBN and Labor’s preferred Fibre to the Premises technology when I started listening to Elliott’s incredible segment on 3AW yesterday. And then George Fong came along.

I have never, in all my time reporting on the NBN project, heard such an erudite, educated and convincing counter-argument made on air or anywhere else. In the face of Elliott’s raving technical and commercial illiteracy, Fong’s calm and self-assured words were balm to my soul, and I’m sure many listeners felt precisely the same way. I’ve interacted with Fong before on Twitter, but never realised quite how convincing he could be on air.

George Fong, you are a bloody legend, mate, and have done a service to your country, educating thousands of listeners and one very ill-informed radio commentator about what the NBN project really is (or at least should be) all about. I hope you consider getting involved in further commentary on the issue, perhaps on other radio stations or on television. I now class you as a bona fide hero of the Australian IT industry. Fong is on Twitter: I recommend you message him and tell him what a good job he’s done. It’s not often you see this kind of thing happen in Australia’s mainstream media.

Image credit: Lateral Plains
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Names are not required on the backs of jerseys in college football, so why have a rule legislating what can be written in the space?

The NCAA only allows three FBS schools—Air Force, Army and Navy—to put something other than a player's name on the space above the numbers on the backs of their uniforms. Yet for every other school it's a surname or nothing at all.

A handful of teams wanted to go with non-names in 2014, yet each was rebuffed. Vanderbilt still went ahead and wore its "Anchor Down" jerseys for the season opener against Temple and nearly paid a steep price.

"We sent an email design concept to the NCAA football rules committee, got a cursory response which says, 'It looks good to us,'" Vanderbilt athletics department spokesman Rod Williamson said via David Climer of The Tennessean. "We thought that meant every piece of the communication was fine."

Initially, officials working the game announced that the Commodores' uniform violation would result in a loss of a timeout for each quarter those jerseys were worn. That ruling was quickly overturned, though it didn't help Vandy in the long run, as it was blown out 37-7 in its first game under new coach Derek Mason.

This isn't a matter of schools wanting their players to stand out, like with the old XFL and its use of nicknames on jerseys. Instead, it's meant more to inspire camaraderie and solidarity, as with South Florida coach Willie Taggart's (disallowed) wish to have "The Team" on the back of the Bulls' tops.
He's a "nice guy," she's "a wild child"; will they ever make it work?!

That's the question at the core of Love, a new comedy-adjacent series from Judd Apatow and writers-slash-real married couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin. Aspiring writer Gus (Rust) and adrift radio producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) repeatedly and hesitantly weave into and out of each other's lives, as if trying to determine whether they're looking at a life raft or an anchor that'll drag them into the depths of their worst selves.

Rating 2.5

It's not an uninteresting premise. The problem is that Love just takes way too long to get to a place that makes you realize why Gus and Mickey's relationship merits its own television series.

Early on, it meanders just as aimlessly as Gus and Mickey. It moves so slowly that it almost feels like watching their emotional horrorshow in real time, which sounds audacious until you consider that its first four episodes span a combined 142 minutes of screen time. If I weren't committed to watching all 10 episodes of Love for this review, I would have tapped out after the second episode — and that's a shame, because the back half of the series is so much stronger than the early episodes that it's actually shocking.

So to make sense of the confusing bundle of insecurities that is Netflix's latest original series, let's get into the good, the bad, and the "wait, what?" of Love.

The good: Addiction is incredibly difficult to portray. As Mickey, Gillian Jacobs digs in deep.

In Love's shapeless first few episodes, Jacobs's Mickey is by far the more interesting character to watch, even if her constant cursing left me — a New Jersey native whose own mouth tends to run NC-17 — feeling exhausted by the end of the series premiere.

The character is a clear proxy for Arfin, who turned her frank "Dear Diary" column for Vice into an equally frank book that discussed her heroin addiction; she's now been sober for a decade. Playing Mickey affords Jacobs the opportunity to stretch in all sorts of unflattering directions, and she rises to the occasion with obvious relish. And once Love peels back Mickey's protective layer of disdain to get to the addict underneath, she's a lot easier to understand.

Addiction is tricky to portray accurately; it's even trickier to portray both accurately and comedically. Working through self-destructive valleys to achieve lasting sobriety is an excruciating, maddening, constant process. Thus, it's a huge challenge to depict addiction on television shows, which depend on the audience connecting to characters in some way or another. But that's not to say it can't be done: CBS's Mom, for example, has found a way to tackle this tricky balance — and on a weekly multi-camera sitcom — to both devastating and hilarious effect.

Very often, Mickey is a tough character to swallow. But it makes perfect sense that she's unstable, erratic, selfish, and hungry for validation in the context of her addictions. So while it takes some time for Love to fulfill its potential, the moments when Jacobs gets to rip into what drives Mickey — and what keeps her stumbling backward — are truly great.

The bad: Love takes its sweet time to get anywhere particularly interesting

Television shows that assume their audience will binge-watch several episodes at once walk a very shaky line. On the one hand, they can lean into a slower, maybe more satisfying burn like few other mediums can. On the other hand, they risk devoting too much time to various characters and stories, just because they can.

So I get it, Love. You had 10 episodes to fill, and Netflix didn't restrict their running time, so you took that freedom and ran with it. But assuming that just because people have the opportunity to binge-watch, they'll stick with your show for a while — no matter what — is a dangerous trap. Airing on Netflix gives you more breathing room and flexibility, but it should in no way stop you from producing compelling, tightly edited work.

TV episode runtimes are fluctuating now more than ever, thanks to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon, but the standard episode length for any show that's not a drama is still around 30 minutes at most. (On a show that airs with commercials — basically anything that's not on premium cable — episodes usually top out around 22 minutes.) All but two episodes of Love run at least that long, and a handful run longer.

Assuming that just because people have the opportunity to binge-watch, they'll stick with your show for a while — no matter what — is a dangerous trap

It's one thing if you can justify a longer runtime with crucial character work, or a particularly funny bit. But on Love, those extra minutes hang like extra weight the characters have to drag around. Without any purpose, their banter is just kind of ... there.

Maybe Love should have looked to its Netflix peer Master of None for an example of how to balance extra room with smart editing. In its first season, the Aziz Ansari comedy could have easily pushed the boundaries of the 30-minute episode, but kept every episode under that mark.

At the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour, Ansari's co-creator Alan Yang even said that their "Mornings" episode — a highly ambitious collection of moments spread over a couple's first year living together — was originally 52 minutes long, or about twice as long as the final cut. As much as I loved "Mornings," a loose 52 minutes of that material very likely would have been a slog.

That Love slacks off on editing isn't particularly surprising, given that Apatow has a co-creator credit. His direction often yields projects that are two-thirds great and one-third superfluous, from 2009's Funny People to last summer's Trainwreck with Amy Schumer. At the same TCA winter press tour, Apatow got defensive when questioned about Love's 40-minute pilot, saying it's really the show's only longer episode — but with three other installments surpassing 36 minutes, that's just not true.

And so Love doesn't really click into gear until its fifth episode, after laying over two and a half hours of groundwork. In "The Date," Mickey resets her sober clock to "zero," and Gus goes on a disastrous date with her roommate, Bertie (a completely delightful Claudia O'Doherty). From that point on, every episode is noticeably more focused, and therefore, way more effective as a chapter in a love story.

The "wait, what?": Outside of Mickey, Love isn't sure where to direct your sympathy

Naturally, Love would like you to feel at least a little sympathetic toward both Mickey and Gus, since they're the main characters and all. But you can feel the show struggling to define both characters before that fifth and crucial episode, and in the meantime, it's just about impossible to know how the series itself views them.

Gus is very simply presented as a standard, somewhat dorky nice guy. He's less of an overt jerk than the egomaniacs Mickey usually goes for, but he's certainly got his own emotionally manipulative tendencies, and it's not clear until somewhere around the seventh episode whether the show realizes that or not.

Episode six serves as another weird interlude, sympathy-wise, as it sees Mickey going on a bender with actor and comedian Andy Dick, playing himself. In "Andy," he and Mickey get trashed together, and as they come down, he confesses that he believes drinking has destroyed his life from the ground up.

Dick has had very messy, publicly documented addiction issues, and his heart-to-heart with Mickey certainly feels like an honest, significant moment. But it's muddled by a vague story about going out with Vince Vaughn that "probably" ended in Dick "getting gropey" — an eyebrow-raising detail in the context of Dick's real-life, alcohol-influenced encounters, some of which resulted in sexual assault lawsuits as recently as 2012. It's difficult to know exactly what the show thinks of Dick in this moment, but if you're aware of the real-world accusations that've been against him, this tossed-off allusion to his "gropey" tendencies is even harder to understand.

The verdict: Love — both the show and the concept — is a promising mess

I've rarely been as frustrated by a TV show as I was while watching Love. I could tell it was trying to appeal to me — a 20-something writer who lives in Los Angeles — but all it did was remind me that this portrayal of Los Angeles can get insular and self-indulgent, fast. Most annoyingly, as the later episodes of the season eventually revealed, there was an incisive and witty show hidden all along beneath the sludge of its opening few chapters.

In fact, Love's first four episodes are so overstuffed with bland filler that episodes two, three, and four could've been cut altogether, and the show could've skipped right from the pilot with "The Date" without the plot losing much importance. The show's saving grace is that the far more interesting end of season one is a promising sign for season two, which Netflix ordered months before the show even premiered.

If there's one piece of writing advice that's stuck with me, it's the one delivered by a college professor who chopped three introductory paragraphs off a paper and told me I should do that with everything I write: "It's just clearing your throat before you get to the good stuff." I couldn't get that idea out of my head while watching Love; it just kept clearing its throat, over and over again, until it finally realized what it wanted to say.
Async IO for Rust (part II)

PaulColomiets Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 12, 2015

This is a second article about designing “rotor”, the library for doing asynchronous IO in Rust. This part describes what changed since the previous article as well as expands on discussion points of the previous write-up.

State Machines Are Good Enough

One of the hottest topics in the discussion of the previous article was whether threads are the better abstraction for I/O. And if OS threads are not good enough some kind of green threading should be introduced. There are two such libraries being developed: mioco and simplesched (both of them do not work in stable rust yet). Still I don’t believe it’s a good fit for low-level protocol handling.

This section looks at issues with the threading model for handling I/O in Rust. You may skip the section if you are more interested in Rotor rather than design decisions.

Memory ownership

Typical request processing code looks like:

It looks nothing wrong at a glance. No memory leaks here. But note that both “buf” and “parsed” are still being allocated while the response is being sent. But they are useless at that point in time. Is it easy to fix? Yes, just pass them by value, or wrap code block in braces. Is it easy to find? No. The code is too simplistic to show you the complexity. But compare it to the state machine:

It’s easy to reason about memory usage in this case. Also, note that nothing is allocated for idle connection at all (except obviously the state machine itself).

2. Timeout handling

Timeout handling is inevitable in any networking code. In most languages with green threading timeouts are simple: spawn another micro thread that sleeps and throws an exception to parent. If parent finished earlier, kill timer thread. But Rust doesn’t have exceptions.

An example of timeout handling in go should show you the complexity. To give you the short breakdown: it adds a timer with a callback, which finds current “cancel callback” in a map, which in turn closes an underlying connection. The process involves at least 3 shared locked objects, and may involve sending a message through a channel. A cancel callbacks are changed during the lifetime of the request several times and special channels just for cancel operation are created in multiple places (if it’s not clear: that happens on every request even if no timeout occurred).

3. Connection pooling

Threaded code dealing with client connections usually works along the lines of:

Acquire a connection from pool Do something with the connection Release the connection to pool

Sometimes it’s okay. But often things go out of control. For example, one may use two different connections for backends A and B, and keep both acquired at the same time.

When resource A becomes slow, connection pool B quickly becomes exhausted too, just because coroutines hold on the resource.

This is probably the norm for small python applications which handle ten simultaneous requests. But this can quickly become an issue for a server in Rust which can probably process a million requests per second (unproven yet, but I’ve got half of the million on 4 core i7).

Rotor forces the user to think about such cases. The easiest way to handle client connection in rotor is to send a message to a connection pool with the message being “do this unit of work for me”. Where examples of the unit of work are: execute a request, push message to Kafka, execute a transaction. This is possible with threading model, just much less common.

4. Unit tests

And it’s much easier to unit test a state machine. You can inspect it layer by layer because the state machines in Rotor are generic over the type of the next layer. You can test each state and each action separately without starting from the initial handshake. Often you can clone the state machine in test and continue by multiple paths. Obviously, you can test an assembled state machine. You can test with fake transport (i.e. without actually creating the sockets).

Many of the unit test features are easy and obvious on state machines but are impossible or very cumbersome on threaded code.

What’s New in Rotor?

So we keep state machines. We still pass them to action by value and rely on return value optimization (RVO) to do that fast. We still use the Context thing and have state machine types generic over it.

However, we get rid of Scope. This was an object that was carrying main loop operations to the state machine. It was too hard to handle because each layer of abstraction required a new unique type passed to the next layer and required that type to implement a number of traits. The traits could not be derived automatically in current rust language.

The most important subset of the functionality is now served by return value. We have a common return type that is used in all actions:

The M is a state machine, and V is a return value from the action to the lower layer. The V is defined by the specific lower layer.

You should think of it as of asynchronous counterpart of Result. Any action may return “Continue” to wait for the next event. “Stop” to stop the state machine and “Timeout” to set the timeout on a connection.

The value V is very dependent on layer used. For example on lowest layer there is a trait EventMachine, which has the following action:

If an action returns “Continue(m, Some(n))” this means n is a new state machine that must be inserted into the map of the state machines of the main loop. The “accept” transport uses it to accept connections. (Note the type of both things is the same because all connections are stored in the same slab, so are of the same type; “accept” transport uses enum to differentiate between the initial listening socket and a client connection).

Any communication between two subsequent layers may be performed as a series of the action calls and return values. For example, HTTP server implementation may accept full Response as value, but may also accept enum of Headers, ChunkOfBody, EndOfBody, to allow asynchronous response generation.

Timers work similarly: return the time of the next wake up. Next timer returned from the action replaces the previous one. This allows to get rid of possible timer leaks. The timers of each subsequent layer coalesce into a single timer (simple “min(x, y)” operation), so we have maximum one timer per state machine. We currently use a deadline-style timers instead of timeout-style, unlike in system calls.

The return type will probably slightly change in the future. For example, the Stop action may grow an error type. But overall Async type looks like a more deliberate decision than what we have used before.

Another thing we keep is Transport. It is the structure that contains network buffers which we pass from the stream to the protocol parser. We don’t pass the socket directly for a couple of reasons:

This way protocol parser doesn’t need to be generic over streams (TCP, Unix, SSL). Transport type is the same for all of them. It’s easier to unit test protocol parser. Just fill the buffers, instead of opening real OS sockets (especially it’s important for testing partial sends, which might be coalesced by OS) It’s unproven, but by using this API it should be possible to pass RDMA buffers or TCP buffers of userspace TCP stack directly to the protocol without changing the code. If protocol itself handles buffers, it will do additional buffering anyway in those cases.

Future Work

In the near future, I’m going to figure out the shape of the “Async” object. In particular, whether it’s possible to use it as a Carrier for Trait-based exception handling RFC, and what consequences of this are.

Also, I’m going to play with timeouts more. The large problem of the timeouts is not how to handle them but rather how to define them. For example, HTTP application might have five timeout classes: idle, header-receiving, request-body-receiving, response-generation, response-sending. And at least two of them may depend on the request itself.

Another hot topic is messaging between state machines. Currently, it is accomplished by a “wakeup” event that is triggered by a message to the main loop that contains machine token and no payload. The action then propagates through the state machine to all layers. It’s expected that state machine will find out what is the payload itself by looking into some queue or a cell. Still better abstractions should be created to accomplish request-reply pattern on top of that (probably something that looks like a Future) similar thing for queues shared between connection pool and may be other things.

Another exciting task is to figure out a better interface for the Stream/Transport pair. This is interesting for two reasons:

Simpler to write protocols Super-efficient RDMA and Userspace network stack

The second point needs a detailed explanation. For example, instead of the current “wake me up after the next read” abstraction we could provide a “wake me up when there are 128KiB in the buffer” operation. Then changing the underlying stream, into userspace TCP, the driver can arrange a network buffer of this size for the connection. So you don’t copy incoming packets and still have a contiguous chunk of data from the network, which can be used directly.

Disclaimer: my understanding of how RDMA or userspace TCP stack work are very sparse and theoretical, so I may be wrong.

Conclusions

Different languages have different idioms. I think I’ve found a good way to make asynchronous applications in rust.

This is not to say that threads are bad. Threads in rust are very great. Just threads for handling a large number of network connections and timers is not very good.

I believe that “rotor” library starts to gain its shape. Which means there will probably be no drastic changes in how it will work. Still some types, names, and other things will change in backwards-incompatible ways until it is feature complete. Which probably means that at least some critical number protocols implemented and at least few small applications.

Benchmark

And the fun part. I’ve just passed the point of 0.5 millions of requests per second served:

This works on i7–4790K (which is desktop-class CPU), on localhost (which also means that “wrk” runs on the same machine too).
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Oakland police beat a war veteran so badly they ruptured his spleen, then sent him to a jail where “medical personnel mocked and ignored his pleas for help,” the man claims in court.

Kayvan Sabeghi sued Oakland and three police officers – Marcell Patterson, Sgt. Patrick Gonzalez, and Frank (last name unknown) – in Federal Court.

Sabeghi claims the police beat him as he walked home alone after participating in an Occupy Oakland protest.

“These wrongs occurred in the wee hour of Nov. 3, 2011, during political demonstrations initiated by the Occupy Oakland movement,” the complaint states. “Mr. Sabeghi had participated in the protect activity, gone out to dinner and was making his way home when he encountered a police line blocking his path. When Mr. Sabeghi, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, questioned and verbally criticized the officers’ actions, defendant Officer Frank Uu and other Oakland Police officers brutally beat and arrested him in retaliation for his exercise of his First Amendment rights.

“Officer Uu and other officers beat plaintiff so viciously that they ruptured his splenic vein, causing severe pain and internal bleeding. Rather than summoning medical attention or taking plaintiff to the hospital, the Oakland Police officers proceeded to detain him at various locations near City Hall for some hours, and then transferred him to the Alameda County Jail, in further unlawful punishment for his First Amendment expression. Police officers, jailers and jail medical personnel mocked and ignored his pleas for help. Plaintiff was not taken to a hospital until approximately 18 hours after the beating. He had been bleeding internally the entire time and was in dire condition necessitating immediate emergency surgery.”

Sabeghi says the officers confronted him after her stopped at a newsstand near his home.

“Plaintiff asked to be allowed to pass, but the officers refused. Plaintiff was upset by this arbitrariness and began verbally arguing with the officers and criticizing the police. The police line began to move slowly forward … and two Doe officers jabbed plaintiff repeatedly with wooden clubs. Plaintiff retreated backward at a pace with the police. At no time did plaintiff present a physical threat to the police.

“Suddenly, defendant Uu came through the police line and confronted plaintiff, cursing at him, and then struck him repeatedly with a club, driving him towards the west sidewalk in front of the police line. Although plaintiff did not resist or fight back and was not physically aggressive in any way, defendants Uu, Patterson, and other officers tackled him at or near the curb with unnecessary and excessive force, piling on top of him and violently twisting his arms. Plaintiff suffered internal injuries as well as cuts and bruises. There was no justification for the use of force on plaintiff. Defendant Sgt. Gonzalez and other superiors failed to adequately supervise Officer Uu and other officers, failed to intervene, and approved and condoned the officers’ unlawful conduct against plaintiff.”

Sabeghi says he was put in a police van alone after the beating, then forced to sit on a curb with other handcuffed prisoners.

He says police refused to wash a “chemical agent” from his face, to loosen “his painfully tight handcuffs,” or provide medical attention.

“Eventually, defendants caused plaintiff to be put on a sheriff’s bus and taken to the Alameda County Jail, in violation of their California statutory obligation to cite and release a misdemeanor arrestee such as plaintiff and in retaliation for plaintiff’s exercise of his First Amendment rights. Defendants failed to communicate plaintiff’s need for medical attention to the Alameda County personnel,” the complaint states.

“Plaintiff had been bleeding internally this entire time and once at the jail, he began to experience severe pain and to vomit repeatedly. The sheriff’s personnel and medical personnel at the jail ignored plaintiff’s requests for help even though he was vomiting and unable to stand. Rather than providing medical attention, the jail and medical personnel ridiculed plaintiff, accusing him of being a heroin addict. Plaintiff was confined under unreasonably unsanitary conditions, and moved from holding cell to holding cell, each one filthy and stinking, as he continued to bleed internally. Even after a friend paid his bail, he was not released for several more hours. Finally, an ambulance was brought and he was taken to Alameda County Highland Hospital, some 18 hours or more after he was beaten by defendants. At the hospital, plaintiff received emergency surgery to repair a ruptured blood vessel in his abdomen, caused by the police beating. He remained in the hospital for five days.”

Sabeghi says he suffered pain and disability for eight months after the beating. He lost earnings and was unable to participate in “many of his customary exercise and leisure activities.”

He seeks punitive damages for constitutional violations, assault and battery and false imprisonment.

He is represented by Dennis Cunningham.

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THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- Robert Quinn crept toward the line of scrimmage with just over nine minutes remaining in Sunday's second quarter. He burst around Indianapolis Colts left tackle Anthony Castonzo at the snap, then picked himself up off the ground and wrapped his arms around the upper body of quarterback Scott Tolzien for his first sack of the year.

Two plays later, with the Los Angeles Rams in a nickel package on third and long, Quinn operated out of a three-point stance and did the very same thing -- he got around Castonzo, went after Tolzien, then quickly shifted his focus to Robert Turbin after a quick pitch, sending the Colts' running back to the ground almost immediately after he caught the football.

In a span of three plays, Quinn was personally responsible for a loss of 11 yards.

"That was just the official knock the rust off," Quinn said, smiling. "It's just fun to make a couple plays."

In defensive coordinator Wade Phillips' 3-4 base set, Robert Quinn has transitioned from defensive end to outside linebacker, where he will sometimes drop into coverage but mostly rush the passer. Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

If he can remain healthy, Quinn should make a whole lot more plays in Wade Phillips' system.

Phillips' 3-4 base set required Quinn to transition from defensive end to outside linebacker, where he will take on a role similar to the one DeMarcus Ware played in Dallas and in Denver, occasionally dropping back in coverage but predominantly going after the quarterback. Ware announced his retirement with an Instagram post that highlighted his accomplishments on his jersey. That post is now laminated and taped to Quinn's locker for motivation, as are the career statistics for some of the other great defensive ends and outside linebackers throughout NFL history.

The Rams have been very careful with Quinn, who amassed 40 sacks from 2012-14 but made only 15 starts from 2015-16. He didn't play in any preseason games and was held out of several practices while under what first-year head coach Sean McVay continually referred to as a "maintenance program." But Quinn made most of his adjustment to outside linebacker during the offseason program and said in the days leading up to the regular-season opener that he is "pretty comfortable with where I'm at."

The Rams played Quinn in only 50 percent of the defensive snaps in their 46-9 rout of the Colts, but he made his presence felt nonetheless.

"He's certainly a rusher that you have to account for," said McVay, who will probably give Quinn more snaps as the weeks go by. "He's got a great get-off; love the effort and intensity he plays with. He's one of the guys that I've always had a lot of respect for, just coaching against him in years past. When No. 94 is right, you feel him. He is an elite rusher and he certainly looked like that guy [on Sunday]."
It's nowhere near Valentine's day but Google is feeling the love. Maybe it wants to help you find that special person before New Year's Eve so you have someone to kiss at midnight, or maybe it's just setting you up for a healthy relationship in preparation for February 14th, but regardless of the reason, Google Search now responds to the command, "Give me a love quote." Try it and out pops a card with a random famous quote about love. Got one you don't like? You can try again.

It might not be as fun as flipping a coin or rolling a dice through a search, but it could potentially be life-altering. Who knows, you might start by wooing your date with some romantic words provided by Google, then end up committing to the ultimate quote of, "till death do us part." Sure, chances are you'll wind up searching for heartbreak or divorce quotes, but I'm an optimistic person. Go get'em tiger!

Source: @Google
Look in your bathroom. Got a loofah in there? Ever used one? You know, like a sea sponge? Now think about it being used for building houses. Huh!? This is exactly what’s happening right now in Paraguay. Elsa Aldivar, a social activist teamed up with Pedro Padros, an industrial engineer to make this happen.

It didn’t happen right away. Aldivar was searching for a way to give women an earth friendly way to generate income, and encouraged them to cultivate loofah, that grows easily there, to be dried out and made into cosmetic products. But they found that a certain portion weren’t up to export standards, and 30% of the quality material was being shaved off while making mats, slippers, insoles and the cosmetic tools.

[social_buttons]So she wondered what use/value could be created from these. Material for house walls and roofs, she decided. After extensive trial and error, she and Padros devised the perfect combination of loofah, recycled plastic, and things like cotton netting and corn husks, all of which would otherwise be disposed of. At less than $3 a square meter, competitive with wood.

But beyond being merely equivalent in price, it exceeds wood’s capabilities, with the ability to take dye during manufacture, making painting unnecessary. They are flexible, able to better withstand disaster situations. If they do fall, there’s less chance of injury, as they’re lighter weight. And they can be recycled, repeatedly. And with care in initial selection of plastics, when they can no longer be remade into housing material, they can be used as biofuel.

While totally viable as a building material in many environments far outside rural Paraguay, their ease of use, and ability to work with local, familiar materials like adobe makes them ideal for use locally, providing both shelter and income.

They are the winners of the Rolex Award for Enterprise, and with this, they’ll be building three demonstration homes and have a promotion center, where both urban and rural people will be able to learn about this innovative material.

Readers: What else are you seeing out there to make super efficient use of resources, for building and otherwise? What other, lesser known options are being developed that we should know about?

Article & image source: Rolex Awards for Enterprise
The 11-time winner is calling time on his F1 career after Sunday's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and was centre stage at a special team farewell party hosted in the Yas Marina paddock on Saturday night.

After deputy team principal Claire Williams paid tribute to the contribution he had made since joining the outfit in 2014, she announced that as well as presents of a photo album and specially-commissioned cartoon illustrating his career, he will be given his Brazilian GP chassis.

The car featured a unique rebranding from title sponsor Martini, which replaced its name with 'Massa' on the car.

Right time

As Massa struggled to hold back the tears after being told of the gift, he told team members, rival drivers, media, friends and family that he had huge gratitude for everything Williams had done for him but was even more convinced he was quitting F1 at the right time.

"I am so proud of my career, everything I passed through, difficult moments, and great moments," he said. "I think it is a good time, so I am really happy with my decision.

"It is very difficult to decide or stop, because we are young and you need to decide something in the moment that you are still fit. To keep doing and keep working for very long, I am really sure I chose the right moment to do that."

Final emotions

Massa secured a slot in Q3 in his final qualifying – and he was clearly delighted about the opportunity to show well after ending up 10th on the grid.

"Definitely it is a good thing, so definitely it is always good to be quick," he explained. "It is my last qualifying so it is good to finish with a good performance.

"I had quite a good qualifying. I am happy. So my last real qualifying of my career in F1, and it is always good to be quick.

"I am not stopping because of the speed. I am stopping because of other things – it is a nice gift. I am concentrated and ready for the race tomorrow and hopefully things will be even better tomorrow."

Massa insisted he was heading into Sunday's race with no feelings of sadness at all, having been overwhelmed by the support he has received in recent weeks.

"I am not sad. I am happy for my decision anyway," he said. "It is a really good feeling to finish your last qualifying but with a good performance, a good performance gives you happiness and I am happy for my job today and I hope we can have a good race tomorrow.

"We know the car we have. The race will not be easy, so many cars around that are more competitive than ours. But I will try everything I can for the best of my car."

Don’t miss our Abu Dhabi GP video preview…
CocoRosie / Busdriver Venue, Vancouver BC, October 24

Photo: Alan Ranta

Published Oct 25, 2013

9

Surrealism was in the air as the CocoRosie faithful came out in force, as hippy-gypsy Renaissance Fair ladies in frilly dresses that looked like they walked out of the freak-folk duo's liner notes filled Venue to capacity.With skeletons and mummies hanging from the ceiling to light the Halloween spirit, and a clothesline stretched across the stage, Los Angeles rapper Regan Farquhar (a.k.a. Busdriver) warmed the crowd up with a solo set. He tweaked beats ranging from hard house to symphonic glitch over which he laid his signature cerebral flows, delivered at a breakneck pace that could rival Busta Rhymes in his prime. While obviously talented, Farquhar seemed almost schizophrenic, alternately dazzling and befuddling as he attempted to engage the distracted crowd with hard-stop teasers and beckons to the crowd for responses.Upping the theatrics, CocoRosie sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady, along with multi-instrumentalist Takuya Nakamura and ace beatboxer TEZ, took the stage wearing stripy muumuus, the first of many costumes they'd move through. Sierra would rock lingerie, an apron, and a sequin geometric tutu, while Bianca put on a Twin Rivers t-shirt from the clothesline, a top hat, overalls, a "Pride" baseball hat, and saggy bottom jogging pants, with both later donning the tribal masks from their "We Are On Fire" video.Their performance went far beyond costumes, though: Nakamura played a Nord keyboard, upright piano, and trumpet, among other things; Sierra spent time between harp, piano, and vocal processors; and Bianca laid down bass lines on a Korg and performed various wind instruments. TEZ was the only musician who didn't change instruments between every song.Everything felt live and fresh. For all the dense soundscapes, they sprinkled in stunning minimal moments like when Bianca sang the majority of "Harmless Monster" from their recent albumwith just a piano accompaniment, or when TEZ nailed an awe-inspiring solo beatboxing exhibition mid-set, including his take on Ginuwine's "Pony."Their theatricality was something else. They played with the clothesline, or at least got caught up in it a couple times, and used a white vanity set to stage Broadway moments, fanning themselves there before an early costume change or reapplying makeup. With her creepy, childlike voice and hip-hop style, Bianca was reminiscent of Beth Gibbons, but Sierra earned MVP of this show; her opera training at the Conservatoire de Paris shined through, hypnotizing with her shimmering soprano, and imbuing hooks like "welcome to the afterlife" and "this is the end of time" with all the drama of a Disney princess.Near the end of their set, during a downtempo new-age take on "God Has A Voice, She Speaks Through Me," Sierra put on a silver dangly headpiece that slipped down and became tangled. Abandoning the third verse, she turned away from the crowd and ripped it off, taking a large chunk of her hair with it. While Bianca momentarily looked at her with concern, Sierra ditched the clump of jewelry and tresses and returned to the mic, powering through to sing the rest of the track like nothing happened.Although the biggest crowd response arguably went to their trip-hop laden "Smokey Taboo" from 2010's, Busdriver came back for an incendiary verse on their upbeat take on "K-Hole" from, which brought their set to a natural crescendo.
Review Article

1Department of Molecular Physiology, Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Schlossplatz 8, 48143 Münster, Germany

2Unit for Drug Discovery, Department of Parasitology, Institute of Biomedical Science, University of São Paulo, 1374 Prof. Lineu Prestes Avenue, 05508-000 São Paulo, SP, Brazil

3Bernhard-Nocht-Institute, Bernhard-Nocht-Straße 74, 20259 Hamburg, Germany

Received 14 February 2014; Revised 28 May 2014; Accepted 29 May 2014; Published 15 July 2014

Academic Editor: Nongyao Sawangjaroen

Copyright © 2014 Dana Ditgen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Helminths are the largest and most complex pathogens to invade and live within the human body. Since they are not able to outpace the immune system by rapid antigen variation or faster cell division or retreat into protective niches not accessible to immune effector mechanisms, their long-term survival depends on influencing and regulating the immune responses away from the mode of action most damaging to them. Immunologists have focused on the excretory and secretory products that are released by the helminths, since they can change the host environment by modulating the immune system. Here we give a brief overview of the helminth-associated immune response and the currently available helminth secretome data. We introduce some major secretome-derived immunomodulatory molecules and describe their potential mode of action. Finally, the applicability of helminth-derived therapeutic proteins in the treatment of allergic and autoimmune inflammatory disease is discussed.

1. Introduction

During the last centuries living conditions in western countries changed extremely and social and economical structures shifted dramatically. As a suggested consequence of the resulting improvements in hygiene, antiparasite treatments, and the reduced exposure to pathogens and childhood infections, the occurrence of chronical inflammatory diseases and allergies increased rapidly [1, 2]. In 1989, David Strachan was the first one to link these two developments and enunciated the “Hygiene Hypothesis.” According to this thesis, the observed increases in certain inflammatory disorders were due to the decreased early-life exposure to microorganisms and other eukaryotic infectious agents including helminths [3].

Worm-like parasites that belong to unrelated phyla, namely, the plathelminthes (trematodes and cestodes) and the nematodes, were already present in early Hominidae. This long coexistence between humans and helminths must have had a fundamental impact on the constitution and regulation of the immune system [4–6].

As an advancement of the “Hygiene Hypothesis,” the “Old Friend Hypothesis” was put forward by Graham Rook. He hypothesized that numerous harmless pseudocommensals, including the helminths, were tolerated by the immune system due to their abundant presence [6]. In this way, the tolerance of helminths reduces the negative impact on the host’s fitness, since it decreases the tissue damage or other fitness costs [8].

Recently, William Parker extended this hypothesis to the “Lost Friends Theory” or the “Biome Depletion Theory.” This theory describes the consequences of separating us from our partners in coevolution. Accordingly, the reduced pattern of exposure to microorganisms and helminths and their depletion from the human ecosystem lead to an unstable and unbalanced immune state [9]. Since the loss of components of our biome is partly responsible for epidemics of immune-related diseases such as autoimmune and allergic diseases, the most reasonable solution would be the restoration of the biome [10]. Hence exposure to helminth parasites could again establish and maintain the normal immunological balance in humans. However, colonization with intestinal helminths as immune therapy is problematic due to various physiological side effects. Furthermore, the induced immune hyporesponsiveness could affect immune reactions to concomitant infections and vaccination efficacies [4, 11]. An alternative approach therefore is to identify the immune modulatory molecules produced by helminths that can alter immune functions.

2. Helminths

Infections with helminth parasites have great impact on global health and it has been estimated that at least one-third of the human population is infected with these parasites, prompting helminth infections to be termed the “Great Neglected Tropical Diseases” [4, 12]. Although highly parasitized individuals can suffer from severe pathology, helminths usually cause asymptomatic or subclinical chronic infections, with little evidence of an inflammatory response or overt tissue destruction. As such, many helminths can survive within their host for decades.

About one-third of mankind in the tropics and subtropics are chronically infected with one or more helminths [4, 12]. According to the WHO, more than 1.5 billion people or 24% of the world’s population are infected with soil-transmitted infections (WHO, report 2014). The most common helminthiases of humans are caused by soil-transmitted nematodes, namely, Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, and the hookworms Necator americanus and Ancylostoma duodenale, followed by schistosomiasis (blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma) and lymphatic filariasis (Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi, and Brugia timori) [13] (Table 1). According to the CDC, approximately 807–1,121 million people are infected with A. lumbricoides, 604–795 millions with whipworms, and 576–740 millions with hookworms (CDC, report 2013).

Table 1: Overview of the most common human pathogenic helminths.

While these helminths show a remarkable variety in their mode of life, their hosts, and life history stages, they induce a canonical host immune response pattern.

3. Helminth-Associated Immune Response

The human immune system responds to the invasion of helminths into the organism differently than to bacterial or viral infections. While microbial pathogens are usually eliminated from the host with a rapid and inflammatory immune response, the immune response to helminths is less severe and has a strong regulatory character [14].

Worm infections elicit T H 2 cell responses associated with a significant production of IL-4, IL-5, IL-9, IL-13, IL-31, IL-25, and IL-10 [13, 15]. Furthermore, the worm infections are often associated with high levels of IgE, IgG1, and IgG4 and stable eosinophil and mast cell responses [16]. Eosinophils become activated in helminth-infected sites and secrete proinflammatory cationic proteins, oxygen radicals, lipids, and other mediators like cytokines. Eosinophils and mast cells release their cytotoxic products during degranulations at infected sites [17]. The release of mediators leads to blood vessel enlargement, increased mucus production, and cell contraction of smooth muscle cells [18]. It is assumed that the primary role of eosinophils lies in the defence against large organisms which cannot be phagocytosed. Eosinophils can bind to carbohydrate ligands and fixed antibodies on the parasites surface, degranulate and release their cytotoxic agents to harm the parasite [19], and then get phagocytosed by macrophages after their response [17, 18].

Within 24 h after penetration into the host organism most helminths trigger an immediate production of T H 2 cytokines [14]. The protective effect of helminths against allergy and autoimmunity strongly depends on worm species (age, state of infection, and parasite burden) [20, 21]. Individuals infected with filarial nematodes like W. bancrofti and Onchocerca volvulus or with trematodes like Schistosoma mansoni and Schistosoma japonicum develop a strong T H 2 immune response [22]. Nevertheless, three helminth stages are known, which do not induce a T H 2 response immediately after infection: the cercariae of schistosomes, the microfilarial stage of B. malayi, and the nematode Trichuris muris [14].

In case of helminth and Mycobacterium tuberculosis coinfection, a dramatic reduction of protective immune responses can be observed [22]. However, some infections with parasitic worms like Nippostrongylus brasiliensis and Toxocara canis with Mycobacterium bovis or M. tuberculosis do not lead to an impaired protective immune response [22–24].

Although allergy-associated T H 2 responses and antihelminthic T H 2 responses are very similar, they also differ as follows: (1) larger amounts of polyclonal, non-parasite-specific IgE antibodies are produced that do not cause allergic reactions and (2) during helminth infection an induction of strong inflammatory regulatory immune responses occurs [25, 26]. In worm infections the Fcε receptors on mast cells can be saturated with non-worm-specific IgE; thereby, a binding of worm-specific IgE is averted. This occupation of receptor-binding sites suppresses the immediate hypersensitivity responses and the degranulation of mast cells (IgE blocking hypothesis) [18]. The IgE blocking hypothesis is still a matter of discussion. Larson and colleagues have shown that in mice the suppression of basophil responsiveness by chronic helminth infections was found to be dependent on host IL-10 [27]. IL-10 downregulates key-IgE signaling molecules [27] causing the level of serum IgE to decrease. This in turn influences the production of IgE receptors on basophils and mast cells [28–30]. Additionally, Mitre and coworkers demonstrated that the blocking of FcER1 on mast cells and basophils by parasite-induced polyclonal IgE does not mediate the protection against atopy, since the ratio of polyclonal IgE to allergen-specific IgE is too low to saturate the receptors and to suppress degranulation of mast cells and basophils [28].

Furthermore, Larson and colleagues compared the release of histamine from basophils in helminth-infected children before and after anthelminthic drug treatment and observed the suppression of basophil responsiveness during the intestinal helminth infection. They proposed that this inhibition of basophils, which are involved in the development of T H 2 responses and function as effector cells for allergy, leads to protection against allergic diseases [31].

Helminth parasites have developed a lot of strategies to evade or modulate the host immune responses with advantages on both sides [32]. Thus, there is a shift in the T H 2 response towards immunosuppression, immunological tolerance, or modified T H 2 response [16]. In case of immunosuppression an upregulation of regulatory T cells takes place which suppresses protective T H 2 as well as inflammatory T H 1 responses. During immunological tolerance development, effector T H 2 cells enter a state of anergy and fail to develop specific T effector cells which mediate resistance. Finally, in the modified T H 2 response, downstream effects of the normal T H 2 responses are muted and result in an increase of noncomplement fixing IgG4 and IL-10 [16, 33, 34]. In case of asymptomatic parasitic infections, the concentration of the T H 2-dependent isotype IgG4 is increased. A differential stimulation of IgG4 is promoted by IL-10 which is formed at high concentrations during chronic helminth infections [18]. Furthermore, many studies have shown that these helminth-mediated T H 2 responses can also prevent the often harmful inflammatory T H 1 responses by inducing suppressive regulatory T cells which contribute to the formation of IL-10 and TGF- . Thus, helminths are able to regulate the immune responses and ensure homeostasis under various disease conditions such as autoimmune diseases, inflammations, cancer, and microbial infections [13, 15, 35].

Affected by IL-4, IL-13, and IL-21, the differentiation of alternative activated macrophages (AAMs) occurs that can inhibit the proliferation of other cells and support an increased intracellular growth of bacteria [13]. In addition to their recruitment to sites of infection and various effector functions, they also have strong anti-inflammatory properties. These are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF- and the expression of certain genes that are involved in the repair of the extracellular matrix, fibrosis, and wound healing [13, 15]. Thus, AAMs serve tissue homeostasis, act as effector cells against parasites, and downregulate the adaptive immune system [16].

In summary, chronic helminth infections result in a downregulation of proinflammatory responses, an enhanced T H 2 response, and repair mechanisms [13, 32].

Figure 1 describes the interactions in the immune response to helminths.

Figure 1: Cellular interactions in the immune response against helminths. Helminth-secreted excretory/secretory (ES) products are capable of inhibiting in vitro generated dendritic cells (DCs). They can inhibit the maturation of DCs and induce the expansion of functional T regs [35, H 2 response starts with the recognition of parasitic pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) by certain pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that are expressed on the DCs of the host [ H 2 cells. This response includes IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, and IL-10 secretion and production of IgG4 and IgE by B cells, as well as the activation of effector cells such as mast cells, eosinophils, and basophils [ H 1, T H 2, and T H 17 cells. Thus, these cells have strong anti-inflammatory properties, which are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF-β as well as the expression of additional genes [16, RI) on mast cells and basophils; this leads to an activation of these cells and a secretion of inflammatory mediators like histamine, heparin, leukotrienes, and prostaglandin D2 [38– H : T helper cells; TGF- : transforming growth factor- ; ADCC: antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity; EDN: eosinophil derived neurotoxin; DC: dendritic cell; APC: antigen-presenting cell; T reg : regulatory T cell. Cellular interactions in the immune response against helminths. Helminth-secreted excretory/secretory (ES) products are capable of inhibitinggenerated dendritic cells (DCs). They can inhibit the maturation of DCs and induce the expansion of functional T 36 ]. The helminth-induced T2 response starts with the recognition of parasitic pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) by certain pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that are expressed on the DCs of the host [ 13 37 ]. Through contact with the antigen, the DCs become activated, allowing them to act as antigen-presenting cells (APC) after the migration to the adjacent lymph nodes, with the ability of processing and presenting the antigen to T cells to initiate an immune response [ 16 ]. The helminth-induced host immune response is focused on the protection of the host organism and is mediated by T2 cells. This response includes IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, and IL-10 secretion and production of IgG4 and IgE by B cells, as well as the activation of effector cells such as mast cells, eosinophils, and basophils [ 35 ]. Affected by IL-4 and IL-13 occurs the differentiation of alternatively activated macrophages (AAMs) which can inhibit the proliferation of other cells like T1, T2, and T17 cells. Thus, these cells have strong anti-inflammatory properties, which are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF-as well as the expression of additional genes [ 13 32 ]. Furthermore, IL-4 and IL-13 lead to an increased contractility of smooth muscle cells and a hypersecretion of mucus for expulsion of intestinal helminths [ 38 ]. Immune complexes of IgE bind to high affinity IgE receptors (FcRI) on mast cells and basophils; this leads to an activation of these cells and a secretion of inflammatory mediators like histamine, heparin, leukotrienes, and prostaglandin D2 [ 16 40 ]. PAMPs: pathogen-associated molecular patterns; PRRs: pattern recognition receptors; ES: excretory/secretory; IL: interleukin; Ig: immunoglobulin; AAM alternatively activated macrophages; T: T helper cells; TGF-: transforming growth factor-; ADCC: antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity; EDN: eosinophil derived neurotoxin; DC: dendritic cell; APC: antigen-presenting cell; T: regulatory T cell.

4. Therapeutical Use of Helminths

Since there was such mounting evidence that helminth infections can modulate the mammalian immune response, treatment of immune dysregulatory diseases with live worms was considered to possess therapeutic capability, even though the suppression of an ongoing dysregulated immune response is probably more difficult to achieve than the prevention of its development. Because of the predicted lack of pathogenicity of certain helminth species, these were used in a series of clinical trials. For ethical reasons only individuals were treated who already suffered from immune dysregulatory diseases and in most studies the helminth dose was much lower than in natural infection [41, 42].

In the beginning, in a small trial three patients suffering from ulcerative colitis were treated with ova from the pig whipworm Trichuris suis [43]. In a clinical trial carried out by Summers et al., T. suis ova (TSO) were administered to 29 patients suffering from Crohn’s disease. 79.3% improved significantly and 72.4% experienced remission [44, 45]. Similar results were obtained in a larger trial where patients with ulcerative colitis were treated. A decrease of pathological symptoms was observed among 43.3% of the 54 patients treated with TSO [46]. Further double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials using TSO are currently conducted by Coronado Biosciences and Falk Pharmaceutical company [47] (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov). A different approach, using 50 live N. americanus larvae, was executed by Croese and colleagues with 9 patients suffering from Crohn’s disease. Following the treatment, a decrease in pathology was recorded for two patients [48]. Correale and Farez conducted studies with multiple sclerosis patients that had also been affected by parasites. They were able to show that in these patients the disease pattern was weaker than in the control group [49, 50].

Nacher et al. observed that malaria patients with an additional gastrointestinal helminth infection, notably Ascaris, rarely showed acute renal failure or cerebral malaria in comparison to other malaria patients [51]. In mice infected with Helicobacter pylori, helminth infections were shown to reduce the tissue-damaging inflammation [52]. Recent epidemiological studies have clearly demonstrated that helminth, for example, Schistosoma spp., infected children had a reduced prevalence of allergic disorders. Other studies have shown that chronic infections with helminths protect people against allergic sensitization. The same results were achieved by infecting mice with Strongyloides stercoralis [25, 26]. Here, anthelmintic treatment led to loss of immune suppression and to an increase in atopic reactivity to allergens. Furthermore, the relationship between suppression of allergies and Schistosoma infection has been shown in both infected humans and mouse models [53].

A suppression of lung inflammation was shown in S. stercoralis-infected mice [54]. Also, extracts of the porcine parasite Ascaris suum inhibit IgE antibody production against unrelated antigens or antigens without reference and the generation of ovalbumin-specific T H 2 responses in a murine model of asthma [25, 55]. Infection with the rodent intestinal nematode N. brasiliensis is another example of suppression of T H 2 type allergic reactions, which inhibits the development of allergen-induced airway eosinophilia [56]. ES products of N. brasiliensis (NES) elicit a T H 2 response by affecting DCs. But besides the regulation of T H 2 response, NES also affect the proinflammatory T H 1 responses by suppressing mitogen-dependent IFN-γ release as well as DCs produced and LPS induced IL-12p70 [57–59].

The trematode Fasciola hepatica causes liver fluke disease in sheep and cattle. F. hepatica infected mice, which were experimentally coinfected with Bordetella pertussis, showed a reduced bacterial-specific T H 1 response. Furthermore, the mice were unabled to eliminate the microbe [60, 61]. This might be triggered by F. hepatica tegumental antigens that inhibit mast cells [62]. Contrariwise, F. hepatica did not suppress the IFN- -driven T H 1 response triggered by Toxoplasma gondii infection [63].

As described before, helminths can downregulate harmful T H 1 responses which are upregulated during autoimmune diseases. A therapeutic use of helminths could lead to a modified T H 2 response and to an induction of T regs . This could result in a simultaneous reduction of T H 1/T H 17 responses and thereby reduce the pathology of autoimmune diseases [64–66].

In summary, all these studies support the concept of bystander immunoregulation by chronic helminthic infections being able to control allergen-specific or other inflammatory responses [67]. Since the dampening of the systemic immune response of the host is beneficial in transplantation, recent publications even suggest the use of helminthic therapy or helminth product therapy to enhance the allograft tolerance [68]. Despite these promising trials, the use of helminths within the therapeutical range is currently not possible due to various reasons: the breeding of helminths in the required amounts is not feasible and there are safety factors that need to be considered. Since there is evidence that only chronic but not acute infections are protective, parasite loss over time needs to be monitored [37]. The parasitic modes of action within the host are hardly explored and in some cases even completely unknown, so that possible side effects like diarrhea and intestinal pain are unpredictable [41, 69]. Unfortunately, most of the current experiments were performed with animal models and the assignability on humans cannot be guaranteed [70]. Furthermore, the psychological burden of the patients needs to be considered here as well [11, 25, 26].

The most potent anti-inflammatory response observed in humans is caused by chronic helminth infections, such as with Schistosoma spp. or O. volvulus and not by a transient infection. Therefore, it is obvious that only chronic infections with long-living helminths offer great therapeutic and preventive antiallergic effects [25, 26]. But not only live parasites can modulate or suppress the immune response. Glycans of the cuticula as well as helminth eggs or soluble extracts of worms can have the same effect. For example, S. mansoni egg soluble antigen (SEA) has the ability to prevent autoimmune type 1 diabetes by inducing a stronger T H 2 and T reg cell response as well as functional changes in APCs [65, 71–73]. However, the repeated use of helminth antigens might also induce neutralizing antibodies, thereby preventing long-term protection. In order to avoid the possibly critical therpeutic infection with a parasite, one major research aim is to identify and characterize helminth-derived molecules that are capable of modulating the immune system and to implement therapeutic approaches based on such molecules and thus replicate the protective effect already observed in helminth therapy. These immunomodulators could lead to the generation of novel strategies for anti-inflammatory drug development [41, 58, 70, 74, 75].

5. Excretory/Secretory (ES) Products

The immunomodulatory potency of helminths appears to be largely achieved by their surface or ES products [25]. Secretory products are substances with certain biological functions that are secreted from cells or glands. Contrariwise, excretory products are unnecessary metabolic products that are released from the body. Both, however, are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another. The composition of these products varies significantly from parasite to parasite, but in general all of them contain different glycoproteins, proteins, and smaller peptides; nonprotein components include glycans, glycolipids, and bioactive lipids, like the eicosanoid inflammatory mediators, prostaglandins, and leukotrienes [76, 77]. The term ES products describes both substances that are actively secreted by helminths and products that are released within the course of physiological processes, for example, digestion or egg-laying [58, 78]. Furthermore, varying compositions of ES products at different life cycle stages can be expected [78, 79].

Given below are a few examples of ES products that exert the antiallergic and anti-inflammatory effects of helminth infections. In a chemically induced colitis mouse model the ES products of the canine hookworm Ancylostoma caninum reduced the inflammatory response and expression of proinflammatory cytokines while inducing the production of IL-4 and IL-10 [32, 75]. Furthermore, the ES products of the hookworm Ancylostoma ceylanicum can protect against chemically induced colitis by downregulating T H 1 and T H 17 cytokines [80]. Similar protection against inflammation was also obtained by using recombinant ES protein rTsP53 from T. spiralis in a colitis model [81]. Hsieh and associates also describe a secretory protein from N. americanus which binds to natural killer cells and stimulates the production of interferon-gamma [82]. The secreted protease inhibitor cystatin from Acanthocheilonema viteae, Av17, modulates macrophage-mediated inflammation in a murine model of colitis and significantly reduces inflammatory infiltrations and epithelial damage. As immunomodulatory strategy, the enhancement of IL-10 production by macrophages is proposed [83]. The immunomodulatory effect of ES products has also been shown for the cestode Taenia crassiceps. T. crassiceps ES products regulate DC activity by binding multiple receptors (e.g., MGL, MR, and TLR2), thereby downregulating TLR-mediated DC maturation and secretion of IL-12 and TNF- . This results in T H 2 polarization [84].

There are a growing number of helminth mediators identified in the secretome that have the potential to be used in new therapeutic strategies against inflammatory diseases. Furthermore, the identification of the mechanisms and pathways these mediators utilize to redirect the immune system might reveal further key mechanisms that have evolved in host-parasite coevolution. Below we provide some examples of immunomodulatory proteins found in the secretome of parasitic nematodes.

6. Proteins Found in the Secretome of Parasitic Helminths

The secretome contains functionally diverse classes of molecules that are involved in different vital processes. While some proteins are secreted by exocytosis via the classical pathway using a hydrophobic signal peptide, other alternative pathways include exosomes, lysosomes, and microvesicles. Exosome-like vesicles have been described in the trematodes Echinostoma caproni and F. hepatica. These extracellular vesicles are internalized by an unspecific endocytic pathway or by specific ligand-receptor recognition mechanisms [85]. Transmembrane flipping and translocation can also result in the release of proteins. Finally, proteins can shed their extracellular domains, while other parts remain inside [86].

Parasitic nematodes secrete a wide range array of proteins and obviously not all of them interact locally and systemically with host immune cells; for example, there are proteolytic enzymes that are secreted to help parasites penetrate the host skin, enable tissue migration, or are involved in feeding. Furthermore, detoxifying enzymes or stress-related proteins are released to assist parasite survival in inflamed tissues. Acetylcholinesterases (AChe) are utilized that potentially interfere with secretion processes of the intestinal mucosa involved in the expulsion of pathogens [87]. Recently, it has been shown that acetylcholine is capable of modulating the activity of macrophages and attenuating local and systemic inflammation [88], making the secretion of AChe by parasites even more intruiging.

Parasitic nematodes include pathogens from plants and animals. Ectoparasitic plant parasites feed on the roots, while endoparasites penetrate the root. The obligate root-knot Meloidogyne species have evolved a highly sophisticated relationship with their hosts. Here, secretory proteins play an important role during migration through the roots and the formation and maintenance of proliferating cells [89]. Besides this, just like in animal-infecting parasites, molecules are secreted that are involved in the suppression or evasion of the innate immune system of the host plant. Here, antioxidant proteins coat the surface of the nematode or jasmonic acid-dependent responses are blocked. Furthermore, plant cells are reprogrammed to form multinucleate giant cells as a permanent feeding structure by the induction of nuclear division without cytokinesis [90].

Most secretory proteins of parasitic plant nematodes are produced in the oesophageal, amphidial, and rectal glands, as well as in the hypodermis and intestine [90, 91]. Common secretome components include cell-wall-degrading enzymes and expansins, venom allergen homologues (VAL), SXP/RAL-2 protein, MAP-1, SEC-2, and cuticle collagens [90].

Unlike the previously mentioned nematodes, the pine wood nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus does not establish permanent feeding sites but kills quickly by feeding on parenchymal cells after migrating through the resin canals of the tree. Following the death of the plant cells, the nematode feeds on fungal growth [79]. Due to this special feeding habit, ES products of the parasite include cell-wall-degrading enzymes like cellulases, pectate lyase, expansin-like, and venom allergen-like proteins. Furthermore, cysteine and aspartic peptidases are two of the most abundantly secreted peptidase groups found in the B. xylophilus secretome [79]. These could be beneficial for the parasite in several ways: it either allows the degradation of host molecules for their own nutritional purposes or serves as a defense against host responses [79]. Besides peptidases, 47 peptidase inhibitors were found that could battle against host plant peptidases. Interestingly, expression of host peptidases was significantly increased during B. xylophilus infection [79].

In general, animal parasitizing helminths secrete two sets of protease inhibitors that have immunomodulatory properties, cystatins, and serpins. The varying properties of cystatins from parasitic nematodes with respect to their free-living relatives point to the acquisition of anti-inflammatory properties during the coevolution of the parasites and their hosts. Cystatins have been shown to interfere with the host immune cell signaling pathways. They inhibit cysteine proteases such as cathepsins and aspartyl endopeptidase which are important for the processing and presentation of antigens by APCs. Thereby, they inhibit T cell activation. Furthermore, cystatins also prevent T cell proliferation and trigger the decrease in costimulatory molecule expression by APCs [58]. Serpins on the other hand are inhibitors of serine proteases and are able to inhibit neutrophil proteinases and elastase and cathepsin G [92]. The serpin SPN-2 is the most abundant member of secreted proteins from B. malayi microfilariae; however, its function is still not clear [93].

To survive within their host, nematodes secrete a battery of diverse antioxidant systems that detoxify oxygen radicals produced by infection-stimulated host phagocytes. These proteins include peroxiredoxin, catalase, glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, thioredoxin, thiroredoxin peroxidase, and many more [7, 94]. Secretory glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) are thought to participate in the protection of parasite membranes from peroxidation [95]. Interestingly, the secretory GST-1 from O. volvulus has prostaglandin D2 activity, thereby contributing to the production of parasite-derived prostanoids [96].

The nematode Haemonchus contortus belongs to the order of the Strongylida and can infect both cattle and humans worldwide. This blood feeding nematode elicits haemorrhagic gastritis, anemia, oedema, and associated symptoms by nurturing on capillaries of gastric mucosa [97, 98]. H. contortus has a large set of secreted peptidases and peptidase inhibitors that function in host penetration, blood feeding, and blood-digestion [97–100].

Similar to the ES products of other parasitic nematodes, H. contortus releases substances influencing the host-parasite interaction as well as the host immune response, resulting mostly in a T H 2 response. ES products also include sugar-binding proteins that act as receptors for glycoprotein ligands. These C-type lectins and galectins mimic host molecules and might facilitate evasion by competing with host lectins for the binding to ligands that are involved in inflammation [58, 98, 101]. Interestingly, galectin-9 from the canine gastrointestinal nematode Toxascaris leonina was shown to suppress dextran sulfate sodium-induced intestinal inflammation in mice and elevated levels of IL-10 and TGF-β were observed [102].

Other types of molecules that mimic host molecules are IFN- , TGF- , and the macrophage migration inhibition factors (MIFs) [103]. The cytokine MIF is an early mediator of innate and aquired immune responses and is rapidly upregulated in various inflammatory conditions [104]. Besides having cytokine activity, MIFs also have oxidoreductase and tautomerase activity. The filarial MIF homologue from B. malayi promotes alternative activation of macrophages in a T H 2 environment. This activation can be directly linked to its oxidoreductase activity [105, 106].

ES products from the murine gastrointestinal parasite Heligmosomoides polygyrus were shown to have a wide range of immunomodulatory activities including the suppression of airway allergic inflammation [41]. Also, the calcium-binding chaperone calreticulin was shown to induce a T H 2 response and at the same time interact with the mammalian scavenger receptor type A on DCs [107]. The proteins VAL-1 and AChe-1 are prevalent in L4 and adult ES products. They are considered as antigenic targets, since they induce protective immunity in mice; however, their mode of action is still unknown. While ES products from L4 and adults also seem to have TGF-β activity, released molecules from the egg stage appear to be less important in immunomodulation [108]. The Sushi domain protein family and the ShK/SXC domain toxin family are highly prevalent in the L4 secretome [108]. Sushi-like proteins are prevalent in mammals and regulate complement activation. The conserved ShK/SXC domain that shows similarity to cnidarians toxins is also extensively expressed by other nematodes including T. canis [108, 109]. Proteins of this family are able to inhibit calcium-dependent lymphocyte activation [110].

The A. suum secretome comprises about 750 molecules and contains many peptidases used for penetration and degradation of host tissue and molecules which serve to escape or modulate the host immune response. Secreted peptidases such as astacin, serine-, cysteine-, and metalloproteases ensure migration and feeding of the worm [111]. Besides this, these proteases are involved in the modulation of the host immune response [111–113]. In a murine air pouch model, the A. suum-derived protein PAS-1 inhibits the inflammatory leukocyte migration and reduces the synthesis of proinflammatory cytokines. Furthermore, the suppressive effect of PAS-1 in OVA-induced lung allergic inflammation was shown to be attributed to the induction of CD4+CD25+ T cells and CD8+ T cells [114].

The secretome from the canine filarial parasite Dirofilaria immitis contains a 15 kDa antigen (DiAg) that can induce antigen-nonspecific IgE production in rats through increased generation of T H 2-related cytokines. Interestingly, DiAg suppresses the immediate dermal response to allergen-IgE interactions. This supports the IgE blocking hypothesis mentioned above [115].

In Teladorsagia circumcincta, an astacin-like metalloprotease and cathepsin F were identified as the most abundant ES products. These proteins are known to digest host proteins; however, the astacin-like metalloprotease additionally stimulates the immune responses during the early phase of the infection [116, 117].

Carbohydrates that are linked to proteins and lipids of nematodes have been shown to have immunogenic and immunomodulatory properties [118]. ES proteins of A. suum that are homologous to helminth-secreted peptides with important immunogenic or immunomodulatory roles in host animals are mostly O-linked glycosylated proteins. These glycans are unusual and structurally distinct from host glycans and induce a glycan-dependent cytokine response biased toward Th2 cells [111].

The major antigenic determinant phosphorylcholine (PC) is a small hapten that is often linked to carbohydrate epitopes in gastrointestinal and filarial nematodes [119]. PC-bearing antigens are able to interfere with key proliferative pathways in B and T cells, DC maturation, and mast cell degranulation [120]. The rodent filarial parasite Acanthocheilonema viteae secretes the aminopeptidase ES-62, which is the most intensely studied PC-substituted protein. ES-62 exerts its effect on various immune cells, where its anti-inflammatory action depends on the PC-moiety. It has the ability to inhibit B cell, T cell, and mast cell proliferation, promotes the alternative activation of macrophages, and is responsible for the T H 2 response through inhibition of IL-12p70 production by DCs [121]. In a mouse model for rheumatoid arthritis, ES-62 was able to significantly reduce the severity of developing collagen-induced arthritis and suppress further progression of an already established disease [122] Furthermore, its anti-inflammatory action was also observed in human rheumatoid arthritis-derived synovial tissue cultures [123].

Here we have given a few examples of proteins found in the secretome of parasitic nematodes, some with known functions in immune modulation and some with as-yet hypothetical functions.

Helminth secretomes are a rich source of novel drug and vaccine targets, diagnostic markers, and immunomodulatory proteins. While the analysis of secreted proteins from different life stages of helminths is still quite challenging, numerous secretome analyses of helminths exist by now (Table 2). The combination of the existing data towards a more integrated view of ES products from helminths will be the next logical step. Existing difficulties, such as the lack of genomic sequence information, can be dealt with by using RNA-sequence assembly as reference for the identification of ES products. More challenging, however, are low protein concentrations due to high dilutions of cultivation media, is contamination of normally nonsecreted proteins due to cell lysis and death, or is that most developmental stages cannot be cultivated in vitro [117]. Here enrichment methods could be applied that are based on posttranslational modifications of secreted proteins, for example, glycosylation [124].

Table 2: Overview of the proteomic analyses of helminths secretome.

7. Conclusion

Helminthic infections have a large impact on global health and can cause severe forms of helminthiasis. Nevertheless, they have proven to have immunomodulatory and immunoregulatory effects on the host’s immune system which can be exploited in the treatment of immune dysregulatory diseases. While helminths have independently evolved various strategies to gain entrance to host tissues and to actively evade or even manipulate the signaling network of the immune system, the host developed strategies to limit pathology by shifting the T H 2 response towards immunosuppression instead of triggering an inflammatory tissue-damaging response.

A number of promising clinical trials were performed using live worms to treat immune dysregulatory diseases. However, the major research aim is to identify and characterize helminth-derived modulators which can foster anti-inflammatory drug development.

Abbreviations

AAM: Alternative activated macrophages ACE: Acetylcholinesterase AcES: Ancyostoma canium ES products APC: Antigen-presenting cell DCs: Dendritic cells DiAg: Dirofilaria immitis antigen ECM: Extracellular matrix ES: Excretory/secretory Fc RI: High affinity IgE receptors GST: Glutathione S-transferase IBD: Inflammatory bowel disease IFN- : Interferon-gamma Ig: Immunoglobulin IL: Interleukin LF: Lymphatic filariasis LPS: Lipopolysaccharide MGL: Macrophage galactose C-type lectin MHC: Major histocompatibility complex MIF: Macrophage migration inhibitory factor MR: Mannose receptor NES: N. brasiliensis ES products NK: Natural killer cells OVA: Ovalbumin PAMPs: Pathogen-associated molecular patterns PAS-1: Protein from A. suum PC: Phosphorylcholine PRRs: Pattern recognition receptors RELM- : Resistin-like molecule-alpha SEA: S. mansoni egg soluble antigen TGF- : Transforming growth factor-beta T H : T helper TLR: Toll-like receptor TNF- : Tumor necrosis factor-alpha T regs : Regulatory T cells TSLP: Thymic stromal lymphopoietin TSO: Trichuris suis ova VAL: Venom allergen/Ancylostoma secreted protein-like.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Authors’ Contribution

Dana Ditgen and Emmanuela M. Anandarajah contributed equally to this work.

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge the CAPES/DAAD support within the UNIBRAL Programme entitled “INFECTBIO-USP-WWU” (348/2013).
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Irish nurse Aoife Ni Mhurchu treats a patient last year at Tari Hospital in the highlands region of Papua New Guinea. The woman sought treatment for lacerations after her husband cut her with a knife on the back of her head and both hands. Credit:Jodi Bieber/MSF

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets the crowd as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Fredericksburg, Va. (Photo: Courtesy photo)

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Tickets are available at no charge through the Trump campaign's website, donaldjtrump.com/schedule/register/asheville-nc.

Nathan West, chair of the Buncombe County GOP, which helped organize the event, said he's expecting a casual rally as opposed to a formal, teleprompter speech.

“I think it’s going to be more of a rally," he said. "I don’t think there’s going to be any specific policy, but I’m not 100 percent sure right now. We just wanted to make a statement in Asheville and to let people know Western North Carolina is in play.”

The Republican National Committee, the North Carolina GOP, the local Republican party and the Trump campaign are involved in organizing the event, West said.

Other GOP leaders will attend the rally, West said, but those details are forthcoming.

West said the organizers are prepared for crowds and protesters.

“Have we heard of any (protests)? No. But I’m sure that will develop over the next few days," he said.

The United States Secret Service is in charge of security in and around the U.S. Cellular Center, said Joey Robison, public information officer for the city of Asheville, which owns the venue. Local law enforcement will play a supporting role, she said.

Matt Quinn, public information officer at the Secret Service's field office in Charlotte, said he could not release details about road closures or protest procedures, but he said details might become available prior to the event.

Drivers who do not have to come downtown Monday should avoid the area because of traffic and security, West said. The U.S. Cellular Center website encourages attendees to carpool.

West said the event will highlight the number of Trump supporters in the area. Republican organizers want to show that Buncombe County and Western North Carolina are significant this election season, he explained.

“I think Asheville, specifically Buncombe County, there is some doubt as to the momentum here," he said.

The Asheville metro area displayed a variety of results in the presidential primary in March.

More Buncombe County residents voted for Democrat Bernie Sanders than all the Republican candidates combined.

In Henderson County, where the majority of primary voters were Republican, Ted Cruz was the front runner, although Trump was a close second with 8,374 and 7,042 votes, respectively. He also placed second behind Cruz in Transylvania County's primary.

In Haywood County, Trump was the No. 1 Republican primary candidate, although Sanders and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton each garnered more votes.

In Madison County, Trump lagged behind Sanders, Clinton and Cruz, and Democrats outnumbered Republicans.

Trump performed best in the far western portion of the state. He was No. 1 in presidential primaries in Macon, Graham, Swain, Cherokee and Clay counties. He also performed best in McDowell, Polk and Avery counties.

It's unclear whether Trump will make additional Western North Carolina stops. The Trump campaign was not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Online, Trump's schedule is sparsely populated. Asheville is the only campaign stop scheduled after Friday, when he will appear in Washington, D.C. and Pensacola, Florida.

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At one point, he called out in Mandarin in an attempt to confuse the enemy. He was wounded, but the tactic worked, allowing his unit to reposition and drive back the Chinese. Awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a Marine can receive, he was cited for “extraordinary heroism.”

“Despite serious wounds sustained as he pushed forward,” the citation read, “First Lieutenant Lee charged directly into the face of the enemy fire and, by his dauntless fighting spirit and resourcefulness, served to inspire other members of his platoon to heroic efforts in pressing a determined counterattack and driving the hostile forces from the sector.”

Less than a month later, while Lieutenant Lee was recovering in a field hospital from a gunshot wound to an arm, tens of thousands of Chinese forces surged into the region, overwhelming 8,000 American troops fighting as United Nations forces.

His arm was still in a sling when he and a sergeant left the hospital against orders, commandeered an Army jeep and returned to the front. Over the next two weeks, Lieutenant Lee helped lead his unit of several hundred Marines across snowy mountain passes at night, using only a compass, to find and reinforce a smaller group that had been surrounded. His unit then repeatedly drove back Chinese soldiers, ensuring that the vastly outnumbered Americans were able to retreat to the sea.

A final wound during the fighting ended his combat duty in Korea. For this action he was awarded the Silver Star.

“First Lieutenant Lee’s platoon was pinned down by intense hostile fire while attacking south on the main service road from Koto-Ri,” the citation said. “Observing that the heavy fire was inflicting numerous casualties, he exposed himself to the deadly fire to move among his troops, shouting words of encouragement and directing a withdrawal to covered positions. Assured that the last of his wounded was under cover, he was seeking shelter for himself when he was struck down and severely wounded by a burst of enemy machine-gun fire.”

Some who either served with Major Lee or knew of him said they believed he was deserving of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.
Hey everybody! Welcome to Clix O’Clock, a new weekly feature here on We the Nerdy! Assistant Editor Henry has been playing Heroclix for a very long time and wants to spread his love of the game with everybody who’ll listen! This week he talks about the constant obsession people have over the War of Light Entities, and why he is perfectly okay if he never has one in his clutches again (Other than to trade it away for some sweet Clix swag!)

So this weekend my school ran a small convention where we hosted a Heroclix event. We were very fortunate that we were able to play with some War of Light boosters and play a miniature Month 4 event. A friend of mine, newer to Heroclix, was able to buy his first War of Light boosters and pulled Proselyte. I was really happy for him and tried to hold back my secret envy, since Proselyte has a great value on the secondary market. But I got over this quickly and realized something. I really don’t care about the Entities anymore.

I’ll admit that there is a part of me that does want the entities, but for a much simpler purpose than most. I just like the idea of adding people to certain theme teams. How fun would it be to make Superman a Blue Lantern with Adara, or for the Joker to be inducted via the Butcher into the Red Lantern Corps? But apparently, most people seem excited by them because they have the potential to be so deadly via the possession trait. For a mere 25 points, you can make any piece objectively more awesome, something that anybody can get behind. People quickly gravitated towards this incredible mechanic, and the prices of the already rare pieces (1 per case) skyrocketed.

Here’s the thing. Paying upwards of $100.00 for a Heroclix is kind of insane for me. I’ll admit that I’ve bought expensive pieces in the $70.00 range, but those are few and far between. Entities have been heralded as game-breaking pieces that can ruin the spirit of Heroclix. They’re not.I was lucky during my Month 3 Event and I pulled Ion, the Green Lantern Entity. I used him, equipping him to my Black Lantern John Stewart (Which I later realized wasn’t necessary), and went to town on opponents. But when the event was over, and I had won my prizes, I quickly traded him off. His initial value of $280.00 was too much to pass up, and it got me a slew of Marvel Zombies and convention exclusives. I was very happy to do that, because it allowed me to get a bunch of pieces I had wanted for quite some time.

The very moment where I stopped caring about Entities came last week, when I played against a team that had three of them in a 300 point game. It was a pretty nasty team, with an overall worth of over $400.00, but it didn’t demolish me. It beat me, yes, but even with all of the crazy nonsense that it gained from the Entities, it didn’t break the game. I felt like I held my own and had my opponent shaking in his boots a few times. Ultimately, a good player can go toe-to-toe with an Entity based team. They are good, but they cost a lot and the cost becomes more apparent with the more they use. When you think about how little you are really facing, you don’t have nearly as much to worry about as you’d expect.

Despite this, people are obsessed with collecting them all. And there is nothing wrong with wanting them all, but I really hope people can keep things in perspective. They aren’t going to automatically give you victories, and even for all they can do, there is so much else you can do for 25 points in today’s age of Heroclix. You can add some tokens, an ATA, or change a resource entirely. I think that though the Entities are good and have their value, the obsession that people have with equipping them to other characters and using the “Possession” ability is a bit absurd. At the end of the day, they are nothing more than the current new hotness, and in a few months there will be something else that completely negates them. The band-wagoners will move on and fawn over something new and exciting. And the cycle will continue.

Thanks for checking us out! Be back here next week at the same time, Clix O’Clock!

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It's a valid question: why is it that the United States has long refused to launch air strikes or other military action against the Islamic State (ISIS), the extremist group responsible for untold suffering and destruction in Syria, but is happy to bomb ISIS now that it has pushed into Iraq? Why is it okay to attack ISIS on one side of the largely-hypothetical Syria-Iraq border, but not okay to do on the other side, particularly given that ISIS is doing way more harm in Syria than it is in Iraq, and is only able to attack Iraq at all because of its huge haven in Syria?

It turns out, though, that there are legitimate reasons for bombing Iraq and not Syria. And while there are arguable cases for attacking ISIS in Syria, it is also true that the distinction matters a great deal, and that the Obama administration's approach isn't as hypocritical as it might look at first glance. Here are six reasons why.

1) Bombing Iraq is about preserving the status quo; bombing Syria would be about changing the status quo, which is much harder and more open-ended

Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS in Iraq focused on the narrow goal of defending Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdistan had been mostly secure until ISIS began pushing into the territory about a week ago; it's got a stable, pro-American, oil-producing government. Obama's strikes are meant to help Kurdistan defend itself, and to preserve the status quo of a secure Kurdistan. The strikes are very clearly not about trying to change the larger ISIS war in Iraq, or to help Iraq retake the vast ISIS-held swathes of territory.

In Syria, there is no "good" status quo to defend. Any strikes against ISIS there would be about pushing the group back from Syrian territory it already controls, so that more moderate Syrian rebels could seize it. In other words, the air strikes would be about changing the facts on the ground in Syria, rather than preserving them.

Obama seems willing to use force when he can protect something good — a stable, secure Iraqi Kurdistan — but not to try to fix something bad. He doesn't want to "own" the outcome, get dragged into a potentially long engagement that could easily escalate, or risk sending the conflict spinning in an unpredictable new direction. So the US approach to Syria and Iraq is consistent in this respect.

2) The US has a local partner that can take the lead in Iraq, but not in Syria

President Obama does not want to be responsible for either of these wars. He's willing to intervene in Iraqi Kurdistan, but not in Syria (or in non-Kurdistan Iraq, for that matter), because in Iraqi Kurdistan there is a trustworthy, stable, pro-American partner that can take the lead in fighting ISIS: the Kurds. So the US doesn't have to run an entire side of the war; it can just help out the Kurdish forces and leave the conflict to them.

The thinking here is both that the US doesn't want to get sucked into putting boots on the ground for an open-ended occupation and that the US doesn't want to create a power vacuum. Bombing ISIS in Iraqi Kurdistan won't create a power vacuum because the Kurdish government is already on the ground to take territory back.

In Syria, however, it's not clear that the moderate rebels are capable of pushing back ISIS; even if they were, the disorganized network of rebels isn't exactly a stable and self-perpetuating government that we know will act predictable and responsibly. And there are plenty of other extremist groups in Syria that could take over any territory ISIS is booted out of.

3) Bombing ISIS in Syria would mean helping Bashar al-Assad

In Syria, ISIS's two main enemies are Syrian moderate rebels and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. The US bombing ISIS, then, would indirectly help out Assad.

No one in the American government likes Assad, whose government has played the leading role in slaughtering civilians during the three-year civil war. But the tricky thing here is that US policy is still to avoid toppling Assad outright, since this could open a dangerous power vacuum that ISIS might fill.

If there were a way to bomb ISIS without helping Assad, then the US might be more open to it. But there's not. Obama has said he doesn't want the US military to start acting as Iraq's unofficial air force — that's just not a job for Americans to take on, he thinks — so he certainly wouldn't want to act as Assad's air force.

4) Meanwhile, bombing Assad would help ISIS

Another argument you hear is that, if Obama isn't going to bomb ISIS in Syria, he should at least bomb Syrian regime targets. But, again, there is no way to do this without helping ISIS, even if the aim would be to help Syrian moderate rebels.

As long as the Syrian civil war is a three-way fight between two American enemies (Assad and ISIS) plus one maybe-sorta-potential American ally that is nowhere near winning, the US is just very unlikely to intervene. Meanwhile, in northern Iraq the fighting is between an American enemy (ISIS) and a close American ally (Iraqi Kurdistan), so the calculus is much clearer.

5) The US has legal authority to intervene in Iraq, but not in Syria

The Iraqi government has authorized the US to conduct air strikes against ISIS in Iraq, which means that the US does not need authorization from the United Nations Security Council in order for the operation to be legal under international law.

In Syria, by contrast, there was no Security Council authorization for the use of force, because Russia made it clear that it would veto any attempt to pass one. And there was, obviously, no invitation from the Assad regime for the US to conduct air strikes against it.

That means that any military operation to protect Syrian civilians would have had far shakier legal authority. That's not necessarily entirely dispositive — under some legal theories, humanitarian intervention is permissible even in the absence of Security Council authorization if it is responding to an urgent civilian protection need. But those doctrines are less established, and thus less legally certain, than the legal authority for intervention in Libya, and now Iraq.

Legally, the US strikes in Iraq are more akin to the NATO-led operations conducted in Libya in 2011. UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the Libya campaign, used very similar language to the August 7 resolution on Iraq: it referred to "widespread and systematic attacks" against the civilian population, which "may amount to crimes against humanity."

For Syria, meanwhile, there was no such legal authority and no clear way to get it. That's something that clearly matters to Obama.

6) Iraq strikes have broad international support, Syria strikes do not

Immediately before the Iraq operation was announced, the Security Council, after an emergency meeting, passed a unanimous resolution expressing "deep outrage" at ISIS's attacks on vulnerable minority groups, and noting that such actions "may constitute crimes against humanity." The resolution also "call[ed] on the international community" to support the Iraqi government's efforts to help communities targeted by ISIS. This strongly suggests that the Security Council supports the air strikes.

There's a reason that the UN Security Council is used as a benchmark for international support for military operations. The five permanent members are the five largest stakeholders in the international system — the US, UK, France, Russia, and China — and it can take a lot for them all to agree on something. Syria's Bashar al-Assad has a high-placed friend on the Security Council — Russia — and by virtue of being a state has other allies that don't want to see Syria bombed by the US. ISIS, meanwhile, is universally loathed, so countries are generally happy to have the US push it back.

In case this weren't clear enough, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power tweeted a photo of the resolution minutes before Obama announced that he had authorized air strikes, suggesting that the administration wanted to establish that there was international support for the operation before they announced it.
TIM Cahill has declared that Melbourne City’s clash with the ‘defensive’ Sydney FC is an FFA Cup final replay.

The star attacker revealed that he had struggled since the team’s chaotic trip to Coffs Harbour a month ago after playing on a “cricket pitch”.

The guest marquee was back in starting contention for Friday night’s AAMI Park clash along with right-back Ivan Franjic who set up his Cup final winner almost three months ago.

City's Tim Cahill is penalised for this tackle on Sydney's Berni Ibini during the round 10 match. Source: AAP

Round 21 Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre

Cahill vowed to attack the Sky Blues, expecting the visitors to pick their moments.

“This is like another FFA Cup final, they’re coming to our place,’’ Cahill said. “There’s a lot on it, we’re excited by it. There’s a fresh buzz about our team and we’re starting to click.

“When you play Sydney FC you know they’re going to come here and defend, it’d be very unlikely for them to come out and attack,’’ he said.

“They know we’ve got a lot going forward. They’ve based themselves on a manager (Graham Arnold) that makes sure they’re well drilled.

“The way they play, all the midfield fuses back in. They wait and pray and there’s 11 behind the ball, 24/7.

“You have to really respect that, that’s the reason that they’re at the top but questions will be asked when it’s about winning games at the right times.

“We need to finish as high as possible and come finals, we need to be firing. It’s about whoever’s up for the fight at the end of the season.’’

Tim Cahill. Source: AAP

Cahill’s last start was in the January 27 loss to Newcastle and featured for just a few minutes off the bench last week, with a suspension sandwiched in between.

“Coffs Harbour was a big one for me playing on a cricket pitch, it was a difficult trip, travelling almost 48 hours and the morning of the game and I had a bit of a knock,’’ he said.

“It’s working out OK; it’s about management. There’s eight games until finals.”

City are third on goal difference, trailing leaders Sydney FC by 17 points.
President Barack Obama bases his surrender to Iran’s nuclear ambitions on the notion that his olive branch is reversible. In effect, he believes, it can’t hurt to talk. That’s a notion inculcated into diplomatic culture, and put forward by at various times by accomplished diplomats like Nicholas Burns and Ryan Crocker. It’s also a notion which is demonstrably wrong.

A nuclear deal isn’t like mail ordering a child’s toy with 100-percent guarantee on returns. Once Obama went down the path toward even a framework agreement—never mind that the framework seems increasingly illusionary by the day—he effectively ceded any and all momentum to the Iranians.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif once studied in the States. He speaks English. But spending time in America and speaking English does not make a foreign ideologue sympathetic to America; rather, it simply enables that ideologue to be able to communicate more easily with Americans. Just as after a visit to Damascus as senator, John Kerry became convinced of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s reformist nature, now as secretary of state, Kerry has allowed Zarif to substitute charm for sincerity.

Hence, Zarif’s triumphalist gloating upon his return to Tehran: Bahman Kalbasi, a correspondent for BBC TV Persian Service, tweeted, “State TV host: ‘But the US says the architecture of sanctions stays?’ Zarif laughs: It has already collapsed.” Rouhani, likewise, has been triumphalist as he once again lives up to his reputation as the regime’s “Mr. Fix-It,” getting the financial relief the Iranian leadership so craved at little or no cost to the Islamic Republic itself. The sanctions, Obama promised, would “snap back into place” if Iran didn’t meet its obligations.

But since the death fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, through the early days of Critical Dialogue (when, against Europe’s outstretched hand, Iranian hitmen assassinated dissidents in downtown Berlin), and after the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center, the Iranian government understands that the European Union cares more about mercantile issues than human rights or international security. Nor does Russian President Vladimir Putin even bother about the pretense of caring about human rights. Zarif is right; international sanctions crafted and carefully pushed through the Security Council by men like John Bolton (something Obama and partisans forget) have effectively been squandered upon the altar of Obama’s ego and Kerry’s ambition. There is no going back. Deal or no deal on June 30, Iran’s goal in negotiations has always been sanctions relief, not nuclear normalization. Tehran has won; international momentum against it has evaporated. From Iran’s perspective, Zarif has reason to gloat.
Westminster Presbyterian Church on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis plans to demolish an eight-story glassy office building adjacent to its historic site and expand the church’s footprint in its place.

The building project, contingent upon church board approval next week, is part of a larger campaign focused on positioning the church for its next 100 years in downtown Minneapolis. The campaign also will raise up to $7 million for charity and community services, including about $4 million for new affordable housing in the city, said senior pastor Tim Hart-Andersen.

Westminster is seeking city approval for a two-story, 41,000-square-foot modern expansion with large plazas and gardens lining the highly trafficked street. Early cost estimates put the project at $27 million to $28 million.

The church in 2012 purchased the property at 1221 Nicollet Mall for $8.7 million. At that time, the 3,100-member Westminster announced that it planned to eventually raze the blue-hued office building to make way for a church expansion.

The original portion of Westminster was built in 1897 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Westminster plans to use the addition for worship and gathering space, a multipurpose room, classrooms, youth spaces, church offices and community partnership space, according to documents filed with the city.

Westminster Presbyterian Church on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis plans to demolish the 9-story office tower it owns next door and replace it with a two-story, 41,000 square foot church expansion.

“We want to be a part of this city’s growth for years to come,” Hart-Andersen said. “One of our principles is to be ecologically responsible as it is our understanding of caring for creation. There will be a green roof that will water the plaza and provide water for the bathrooms.

“We really want it to be an example of how you can have a green and sustainable building in the heart of the city.”

Community partners

About 25 percent of the new space is designed to host community partners, including one of two possible nonprofits, Hart-Anderson said.

Declining to name the organizations they are having conversations with, Hart-Andersen did say it will probably either be a nonprofit that provides services for early intervention for babies and toddlers who have suffered trauma or an urban school.

In addition to the expansion, Westminster plans to renovate 30,000 square feet of its existing interior to provide new libraries and co-working space.

The modern-style expansion will use more natural materials like limestone, zinc-coated copper and a stucco-like plaster.

Westminster plans to start demolition on the 1980s-era office building April 15. Plans also include a two-story underground parking garage for more than 230 vehicles. The church would get rid of its existing surface parking lot.

Instead, there will be large outdoor plazas and gardens on both the Nicollet Mall and Marquette Avenue sides.

“We want this to be a beautiful and inspiring space,” Hart-Andersen said. “It’s part of a larger effort to position the church for the next 100 years.”

Coincides with mall project

The construction coincides with a high-profile makeover of Nicollet Mall, the city’s signature street. Westminster has been in communication with the Nicollet Mall redevelopment team to make sure construction timing and designs don’t conflict with one another.

“A lot of thought went into how the Nicollet Mall redesign would fit in with its space,” said Steve Cramer, president and chief executive of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. “Apart from the aesthetic value of their project, which I see as high, their investment in the community is hugely important. So an A-plus from the Downtown Council’s perspective.”

The plans are on the agenda of the city’s Planning Commission Committee of the Whole for March 17 — the same day the church board will vote on the project.

Westminster has committed to building 150 affordable housing units in or near downtown Minneapolis over five years. It contributed to The Rose, a recent affordable housing complex at the corner of Portland and Franklin avenues.

The church is working with Aeon to construct another 90 units near Hennepin County Medical Center in Downtown East.

$4M Affordable housing will be built in the program 41,000 Square footage of the modern expansion $28M Estimated total cost of the whole project

If approved, Westminster will launch its fundraising campaign on April 10. The construction is expected to take two years, with a targeted completion date of Easter 2018.

“We’ve had a generous response from our congregation already,” Hart-Andersen said. “People are really energized and excited by this.”
• Scaffolds • Cord Blood & Regenerative Medicine • Bone and Cartilage Tissue Engineering • Stem Cells-Tools to Battle Cancer • Novel Approaches in Guided Tissue Regeneration • Clinical Medicine • Clinical Trials with Stem Cells • Biomaterials and Bioengineering • Tissue Biomarkers • Regeneration and Therapeutics • Rejuvenation • Immunotherapy • Stem Cell Treatment for Diabetes • Applications of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine • Bioreactors in Tissue Engineering • Biochips and Tissue Chips • Cancer Stem Cells • Tissue Regeneration • Advances in Stem Cell • Materials and Designs for Tissue Engineering • Tissue Engineering and 3D Printing • Whole Organ Engineering and Approaches • Stem Cell Engineering (SCE)

Conference Series llc LTD is a World’s leading Event Organizer that organizes 1000+ Global Events inclusive of 300+ Conferences, 500+ Upcoming and Previous Symposiums and Workshops in USA, Europe & Asia with support from 1000 more scientific societies and publishes 700+ Open access journals which contains over 30000 eminent personalities, apparent scientists as editorial board members.

Conference Series llc LTD invites all claimants to attend “ 12 th International Conference on Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine ” which is going to be held during November 11-12, 2019 at Madrid, Spain mainly focuses on two key topics viz. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine with basic theme “ Regenerative Medicine: Power to Repair, Rejuvenate, Renew ”.

Sessions & Tracks

Scaffolds

Scaffolds are one of the three most important essentials constituting the basic concept of Regenerative Medicine, and are included in the core technology of Regenerative Medicine. Every day thousands of surgical procedures are done to replace or repair tissue that has been damaged through disease or trauma. The developing field of tissue engineering (TE) aims to regenerate damaged tissues by combining cells from the body with highly porous scaffold biomaterials, which act as templates for tissue regeneration, to guide the growth of new tissue. Scaffolds has a prominent role in tissue regeneration the designs, fabrication, 3D models, surface ligands and molecular architecture, nanoparticle-cell interactions and porous of the scaffolds are been used in the field in attempts to regenerate different tissues and organs in the body. The world stem cell market was approximately 2.715 billion dollars in 2010, and with a growth rate of 16.8% annually, a market of 6.877 billion dollars will be formed in 2016. From 2017, the expected annual growth rate is 10.6%, which would expand the market to 11.38 billion dollars by 2021.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Cord Blood Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine

Recently, cord blood stems cells are developed in the treatment of different diseases, including a broad range of cancers, blood disorders, and genetic diseases. In a cord blood transplant, stem cells are infused in to a patient’s bloodstream for healing and repairing damaged cells and tissue. In a successful transplant, new healthy immune system has been created. The natural power and purity of newborn's cord blood are responsible for healthy development during gestation. Cord blood applications have developed beyond transplant medicine into the areas of regenerative medicine including brain injuries, autism, Cardiac Problems, and Autoimmune Deficiencies. The latest research in routine transplantation of cord blood are reviewed followed by the critical role of cord blood stem cells in regenerative medicine research and novel approaches using cord blood as a source of whole blood for transfusion.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); British Association of Tissue Banks; British Association for Tissue Banking; European Tissue Repair Society; Spanish Association of Tissue Bank; European Calcified Tissue Society; European Association of Tissue Banks;

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS).

Bone and Cartilage Tissue Engineering

This interdisciplinary engineering has attracted much attention as a new therapeutic means that may overcome the drawbacks involved in the current artificial organs and organ transplantation that have been also aiming at replacing lost or severely damaged tissues or organs. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is an exciting research area that aims at regenerative alternatives to harvested tissues for organ transplantation with soft tissues. Although significant progress has been made in the tissue engineering field, many challenges remain and further development in this area will require on-going interactions and collaborations among the scientists from multiple disciplines, and in partnership with the regulatory and the funding agencies. As a result of the medical and market potential, there is significant academic and corporate interest in this technology.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR); ScanBalt Stem Cell Research Network;

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); American Association of tissue banks; New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS);

Asia:

Asia Pacific Association of Surgical Tissue Banking; The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research;

Stem cells to Battle cancer

Stem cell transplant is treatment in some types of cancers like leukemia, multiple myeloma, or some types of lymphoma. Stem cell transplantation is the procedure that restores blood-forming stem cells in patients who have had theirs destroyed by the very high doses of chemotherapy or radiation therapy that are used to treat certain cancers.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Novel Approaches guided in Tissue Engineering

GTR are dental surgical procedures that use barrier membranes to direct the growth of new bone and gingival tissue at sites with insufficient volumes or dimensions of bone or gingiva for proper function, esthetics or prosthetic restoration

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Clinical Medicine

Clinical medicine relates to medicine field that deals mainly with the study and practice of medicine based on the direct examination of the patient. In clinical medicine, medical practitioners assess patients in order to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Clinical trials with Stem Cells

Stem cell treatments and clinical trials have been going on for over 40 years; however we are still in the initial stages of stem cell therapy being utilized as an effective alternative treatment method to traditional pharmaceutical based treatments. Much of the early work in stem cell clinical trials focused on the overall effectiveness and safety of the procedures involved. The primary concern with any new treatment is the long term safety and standardization of results. There have been countless journals and research papers focusing in on these clinical trials that have revealed promising results from these initial trials around the world

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Biomaterials & Bioengineering

Biomaterials are being utilized for the social insurance applications from old circumstances. In any case, consequent development has made them more flexible and has expanded their utility. Biomaterials have reformed the territories like bioengineering and tissue designing for the advancement of novel methodologies to battle perilous infections. Together with biomaterials, immature microorganism innovation is additionally being utilized to enhance the current human services offices. These ideas and innovations are being utilized for the treatment of various maladies like cardiovascular disappointment, cracks, profound skin wounds, and so forth. Presentation of nanomaterial’s then again is turning into a major seek after a superior and a reasonable social insurance. Mechanical headways are in progress for the advancement of persistent observing and controlling glucose levels by the implantation of sensor chips.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Biomarkers

Biomarkers, in the hands of clinical investigators, provide a dynamic and powerful approach to understanding the spectrum of diseases with obvious applications in analytic epidemiology, biomarkers and clinical research in disease prevention, diagnosis and disease management. Biomarkers have the additional potential to identify individuals susceptible to particular diseases. This conference is a podium that brings and shares collective knowledge and research explorations in biomarkers study. In the recent years, the information about cancer biomarkers has increased largely providing a huge potential for improving the management of cancer patients by improving the accuracy of detection and efficacy of treatment. Latest technological advancements have enabled the examination of many possible biomarkers and renewed interest in developing new biomarkers. All such developments can be evidenced in this biomarker congress.

Cancer Biomarkers, Molecular Biomarkers, Genomics biomarkers, Biomarkers in Clinical Research & Development, Biomarkers and Pathology

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Regeneration & Therapeutics

Some parts of our bodies can repair themselves quite well after injury, but others don’t repair at all. We certainly can’t regrow a whole leg or arm, but some animals can regrow - or regenerate - whole body parts. Regeneration means the regrowth of a damaged or missing organ part from the remaining tissue. As adults, humans can regenerate some organs, such as the liver. If part of the liver is lost by disease or injury, the liver grows back to its original size, though not its original shape. And our skin is constantly being renewed and repaired. Unfortunately many other human tissues don’t regenerate, and a goal in regenerative medicine is to find ways to kick-start tissue regeneration in the body, or to engineer replacement tissues.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Rejuvenation

Rejuvenation is a medical discipline focused on the practical reversal of the aging process. Rejuvenation is distinct from life extension. Life extension strategies often study the causes of aging and try to oppose those causes in order to slow aging. Rejuvenation is the reversal of aging and thus requires a different strategy, namely repair of the damage that is associated with aging or replacement of damaged tissue with new tissue. Rejuvenation can be a means of life extension, but most life extension strategies do not involve rejuvenation.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy, also called biologic treatment, is a kind of disease treatment that lifts the body's common guards to battle the malignancy. It utilizes substances made by the body or in a research facility to enhance or re-establish safe framework work. Immunotherapy may work in these ways: Halting or abating the development of tumor cells, preventing malignancy from spreading to different parts of the body, helping the safe framework work better at crushing disease cells. There are several types of immunotherapy, including: Monoclonal antibodies, Non-specific immunotherapies, oncolytic virus therapy, T-cell therapy, Cancer vaccines

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Stem cell treatment for Diabetes

Insulin is a very important hormone that is produced by the pancreas and helps to keep the body’s blood sugar (glucose) levels in check. Diabetes is caused when there is an imbalance of insulin in the body. Type 1 Diabetes: This is usually diagnosed during childhood where the body makes very little or no insulin. In conventional therapy, there is only a way to maintain the right levels of insulin with daily injections. Type 2 Diabetes: In this condition, the body becomes resistive to insulin and the pancreas loses the capability to make enough insulin which is required to keep blood glucose levels normal. This is usually because of incorrect diet, lack or exercise or being overweight. Most diabetics suffer from Type 2 Diabetes.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Applications of Tissue engineering & Regenerative Medicine

There are many applications of Tissue engineering but majorly they are used in Organ Transplantation and Therapeutic Cloning like Bio Artificial liver device, artificial pancreas, artificial bladders, and Cartilage. When there is damage in our body cells or organs we use tissue engineering techniques to overcome the damage by replacing the old cell. There is wide range of Tissue Engineered product or materials which are used to cure diseases in human and save life.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Bioreactors in Tissue Engineering

Bioreactors in Tissue Engineering a bioreactor is a device that utilizations mechanical intend to impact organic procedures. In tissue designing bioreactors can be utilized to help in the in vitro advancement of new tissue by giving biochemical and physical administrative signs to cells and urging them to experience separation as well as to create extracellular network before in vivo implantation. This section examines the need for bioreactors in tissue building, the various kinds of bioreactor that exist, the methods by which they empower cells and how their usefulness is represented by the prerequisites of the particular tissue being built and the cell compose experiencing incitement.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Biochips & Tissue chips

Biochips refer to the complete fundamental functional unit, capable of performing multi biochemical tasks simultaneously. Tissue chips on the other hand are similar miniaturized units that can replace a tissue or some part of it, enabling the organ to work normally. Both biochips & tissue chips have been elemental in tissue engineering technology and have proven to be of utmost importance in the same arena. DNA microarray also called as biochip in simple terms consists of a two dimensional grid system where upon sensors or solid flat substrates are incorporated. These solid substrates can be either positively charged just like silicon or glass or can also be consisting of integrated circuitry units that perform best in signal transduction studies. These sorts of microarrays have application in micromechanical studies.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Cancer Stem Cells

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are cancer cells (found within tumors or hematological cancers) that possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the ability to give rise to all cell types found in a particular cancer sample. CSCs are therefore tumorigenic (tumor-forming), perhaps in contrast to other non-tumorigenic cancer cells. CSCs may generate tumors through the stem cell processes of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple cell types. Such cells are hypothesized to persist in tumors as a distinct population and cause relapse and metastasis by giving rise to new tumors. Therefore, development of specific therapies targeted at CSCs holds hope for improvement of survival and quality of life of cancer patients, especially for patients with metastatic disease.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR); ScanBalt Stem Cell Research Network;

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); American Association of tissue banks; New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS);

Asia:

Asia Pacific Association of Surgical Tissue Banking; The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research;

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a widely used treatment for cancer. It usually entails the use of chemicals to destroy cancer cells on a selective basis. As part of the body's natural process, cells are constantly replaced through a process of dividing and growing. When cancer occurs, cells reproduce in an uncontrolled manner. More and more cells are produced, and they start to occupy an increasing amount of space until they occupy the space previously inhabited by useful cells. It usually is used to treat patients with cancer that has spread from the place in the body where it metastasized. Chemotherapy destroys cancer cells anywhere in the body. It even kills cells that have broken off from the main tumor & travel through the blood or lymph systems to the other parts of the body.

Chemotherapy drugs: Impair mitosis, or prevent cell division, as in the case of cytotoxic drugs. Target the cancer cells' food source, which consists of the enzymes and hormones they need to grow. Apoptosis stop the growth of new blood vessels that supply a tumor in order to starve it. A single drug or a combination of drugs is used. These can be delivered either directly into the bloodstream, to attack cancer cells throughout the body, or they can be targeted to specific cancer sites.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Tissue Regeneration

In the field of biology, Regeneration is the progression of renewal, regeneration, and growth that makes it possible for genomes, cells, organ regeneration to natural changes or events that cause damage or disturbance. This study is carried out as craniofacial tissue engineering, in-situ tissue regeneration, adipose-derived stem cells for regenerative medicine which is also a breakthrough in cell culture technology. The study is not stopped with the regeneration of tissue where it is further carried out in relation with cell signalling, morphogenetic proteins. Most of the neurological disorders occurred accidental having a scope of recovery by replacement or repair of intervertebral discs repair, spinal fusion, and many more developments. The global market for tissue engineering and regeneration products such as scaffolds, tissue implants, biomimetic materials reached $55.9 billion in 2010 and it is expected to reach $89.7 billion by 2016 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4%. It grows to $135 billion by 2024.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR);

USA:

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR);

Asia:

The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Advances in Stem Cell

Since the beginning of there has been a effective research in the field of stem cell biology, recent advances in the field of stem cell research mainly focused in the translation of scientific insights into new therapies. It represents a new strategy for organ and tissue repair in several pathologies. Additional treatment strategies are urgently needed due to donor organ shortage that costs many lives every year and results in lifelong immunosuppression. Stem cells are characterized by the ability to renew themselves and differentiating into a various range of specialized cell types. Stem cells have potential to treat various diseases, genetic bone marrow disorders and the treatment of malignant. Being all other stem cell applications highly experimental, Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence showing that administration of stem cells leads to the successful regeneration of tissues or organ.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); ScanBalt Stem Cell Research Network; EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR); British Association of Tissue Banks.

USA:

Regenerative Medicine Foundation; American association of tissue banks; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS).

Asia:

Asia Pacific Association of Surgical Tissue Banking; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research.

Materials and Designs for Tissue Engineering

Tissue engineering of musculoskeletal tissues, particularly bone and cartilage, is a rapidly advancing field. In bone, technology has centered on bone graft substitute materials and the development of biodegradable scaffolds. Recently, tissue engineering strategies have included cell and gene therapy. The availability of growth factors and the expanding knowledge base concerning the bone regeneration with modern techniques like recombinant signalling molecules, solid free form fabrication of scaffolds, synthetic cartilage, Electrochemical deposition, spinal fusion and ossification are new generated techniques for tissue-engineering applications. The worldwide market for bone and cartilage repairs strategies is estimated about $300 million. During the last 10/15 years, the scientific community witnessed and reported the appearance of several sources of stem cells with both osteo and chondrogenic potential.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

European Association of Tissue Banks; Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR); ScanBalt Stem Cell Research Network; Danish Stem Cell Society (DASCS); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia.

USA:

American association of tissue banks; International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR); Adult Stem Cell Research Network (ASCR); California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF)

Asia:

Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS); Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Australian Society for Stem Cell Research (ASSCR); Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research;

Tissue Engineering and 3D Printing

Aims to fabricate of multifunctional scaffolds that meet the mechanical, structural, and nutritional requirements based on optimized models. Computer-aided three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is driving major innovations in many areas, such as engineering, manufacturing, art, education and medicine. It is being applied to regenerative medicine to address the need for tissues and organs suitable for transplantation. Recently, it has shown a great promise in tissue fabrication with structural control from micro- to macro-scale by using a layer-by-layer approach. It involves additional complexities, such as choice of materials, cell types, growth and differentiation factors, and technical challenges related to the sensitivities of living cells and the construction of tissues. It has been already used for the generation and transplantation of several tissues, including multi-layered skin, bone, vascular grafts, tracheal splints, heart tissue and cartilaginous structures. Other applications involve developing the high-throughput 3D-bioprinted tissue models for analysis, drug discovery, and pharmacological medicine. This track will cover several approaches that have advanced the field of 3D technology through novel fabrication methods of tissue engineering constructs.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

The Swiss Stem Cell Network; Danish Stem Cell Society (DASCS); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia. EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research); German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); ScanBalt Stem Cell Research Network; European Calcified Tissue Society; European Association of Tissue Banks.

USA:

Adult Stem Cell Research Network (ASCR); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR); California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); American association of tissue banks; Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS).

Asia: Asia Pacific Association of Surgical Tissue Banking; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research.

Whole Organ Engineering and Approaches

Guided tissue regeneration is defined as procedures attempting to regenerate lost periodontal structures through differential tissue responses. Guided bone regeneration typically refers to ridge augmentation or bone regenerative procedures it typically refers to regeneration of periodontal therapy. The recent advancements and innovations in biomedical and regenerative tissue engineering techniques include the novel approach of guided tissue regeneration.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Europe:

Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia; German Stem Cell Network (GSCN); German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research (NCSCR); European Tissue Repair Society; Spanish Association of Tissue Bank.

USA:

International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); Adult Stem Cell Research Network (ASCR); California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Regenerative Medicine Foundation.

Asia:

Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Australian Society for Stem Cell Research (ASSCR); The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS);

Stem Cell Engineering (SCE)

Stem cell engineering (SCE) was to gather information on the worldwide status and trends of research and development in field SCE, that is, the engineers and engineering approaches in the stem cell field, both in basic research and translation of research into clinical applications and commercial products. The study of Stem Cells Engineering is facilitated and managed by the World Technology Evaluation Center (WTEC). This will provide a support for the generation of future economic growth and new markets. The process involved site visits in both Europe and Asia, and it also included several different workshops.

Related Regenerative Medicine Conferences | Stem Cell Conferences | Stem Cell Congress | Tissue Science Conferences | Europe Conferences

9th Advanced Cell and Gene Therapy conference, March 21-22, 2019 Rome, Italy; 12th Genomics and Molecular Biology conference, April 15-17, 2019 Berlin, Germany; 7th Integrative Biology conference, April 15-16, 2019 Berlin, Germany; Pacific Regenerative Medicine Conference, May 16-19, 2019 Hawaii, USA; Annual conference & Exhibition on Transversal, Translational & Transformative, December 2-5, 2019 Florida, USA; 21st International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, June 27 - 28, 2019 London, United Kingdom; World Advanced Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress 2019, May 15 – 17, London, UK; 6th Annual European Congress on Clinical & Translational Sciences, October 18-20, 2019 Vienna, Austria;

Related Associations and Societies:

Europe:

Danish Stem Cell Society (DASCS); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia; German Society for Stem Cell Research (GSZ); Stem Cell Network North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW); Spanish Association of Tissue Bank; European Calcified Tissue Society; European Association of Tissue Banks.

USA:

Adult Stem Cell Research Network (ASCR); California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM); New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF); Tissue Engineering International & Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS); International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR); Regenerative Medicine Foundation.

Asia:

Australian Society for Stem Cell Research (ASSCR); The New South Wales Stem Cell Network; Korean Society for Stem Cell Research; Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine; Taiwan Society for Stem Cell Research; Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS)
The graphic disparity between Watch Dogs' reveal trailer and yesterday's story trailer have been an extremely hot topic. Online communities are filled with discussions about the game's graphics being “downgraded” and we're seeing reports of Ubisoft's PR working to handle the immense backlash.

One such Ubisoft PR person is Tessa Vilyn, Ubisoft Benelux PR and events manager. Due to her comments supporting the game's visuals, she has become a target for questions from the distraught community looking for answers.

Her initial tweet about the matter is as follows, “Bit bummed about some people not liking the graphics of the #Watchdogs trailer! I saw the game guys and it looks INCREDIBLE! #promise”

When faced with a tweet asking her if the graphics have been toned down since the E3 reveal, she responded by saying that such a thing is “impossible”.

“it is impossible, of couse [sic] it is not downgraded at all. :),” she wrote.

“i love graphics, its because i know they look good i'm bummed they think differently about it.[...] its a true next gen game for sure... for sure.. “

Tessa states that she's played the latest demo of the game and that reactions are too harsh and lack the hands-on experience that she had had with the game.

“Believe me the game is not downgraded, that would just be a bit ridiculous. :) … Again this is my opinion based on what i saw when playing the latest demo.”

One such comparison that's making the rounds is the one that I have embedded below. It shows footage of a car chase from Watch Dogs footage in 2012 and footage from the latest trailer. The lighting effects shown are not very comparable.

In a Eurogamer interview with Watch Dogs' creative director, Jonathan Morin, posted yesterday, Morin stated that despite the game's delay to improve functionality of gameplay mechanics, the game will not look like the game's reveal trailer.

"Are we delivering the 'movie [style vision] of every single person on Earth who saw that [The Games Reveal Trailer]? Probably not, that's not possible. But are we delivering on this fantasy of being a hacker, controlling everything and approaching things in different ways – yes,” said Morin.

Last year, Morin told VideoGamer that there would be no visual downgrade from the game's reveal to retail state. "There's no scale down in quality, especially the next-gen versions," Morin told VideoGmer in September. "It's pretty much the opposite. What we showed at E3 2012 in a lot of respects was less good. I think it's in the details. So no, there's no scale down."

Watch Dogs Delay: Game Delayed to Tend to "Important Details", Will Not Look As Good As E3 2012 Reveal

Honestly, the backlash toward the game's graphics seems a bit excessive - especially when it's driving people to toss vitriol towards Vilyn, someone that had no hand in the game's development or the latest trailer. Watch Dog's still looks like a good game, even if the graphics have been downgraded, but there are many prospective buyers out there that want answers, and the only material that they have are comparisons comprised of media coverage footage and trailers.

Ubisoft is going to have to release some official comparison shots and or footage, or a statement if they want to nip this backlash in the bud.
No timetable on pulling jets, says Defence Minister

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan

Canada will not pull its CF-18 fighter jets from the combat mission in Iraq and Syria if it degrades the overall capability of the coalition forces, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan told SiriusXM in an interview on “Everything in Political with Evan Solomon.”

“The decision for that will be based on my conversations with my counterparts, making sure that the coalition’s capability is not reduced,” the defence minister said. He said he is working on various options and will announce a decision soon.

This stands in contrast to what the Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said on Monday, when he announced that the combat mission would end imminently.

“It will be a matter of weeks not months,” Dion told reporters. Dion also said pulling out Canada’s jets would be done in conjunction with Canada’s allies and rolled out alongside a new plan, but he never hinted that the defining issue would be “capability.”

Sajjan also said he is considering leaving Canada’s air refueling and reconnaissance aircraft as part of the mission.

The Conservative defence critic James Bezan responded to Sajjan, demanding to see the details of the Liberal plan for the military mission. He believes there have been contradictory messages sent about the nature of the mission and whether the Liberal government will eventually put more boots on the ground.

“I’m looking forward to seeing exactly what the plan is because that wasn’t apparent,” says Bezan. “The defence minister is using language that’s quite different from what we’re hearing from the Prime Minister,” he said.

Bezan said the Prime Minister has said in the House that Canada needs to fight ISIS in its own territory. “Does that mean boots on the ground?” he asked.

The defence minister joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Pearson airport on Thursday night to greet the incoming Syrian refugees, but Sajjan says the government is trying to avoid using military bases to house more refugees.

“We are trying to, hopefully, not even be able to use military bases, but if it’s needed, we are available for that purpose,” the minister said.

Today the threat level from ISIS was raised in Geneva after suspects related to the Paris attacks are being tracked by police, but the defence minister maintains his previous statement that Canada has nothing to fear from ISIS.

“Canada should not fear ISIS, and I am firm believer in that,” he said. “Canadians should feel safe but that does not mean that we are going to eliminate all threats, but we have security forces that 24/7 are looking out for these types of threats,” he said.

Sajjan also said his most important job is protecting the mental health of the men and women in the Canadian military.

The comments came in a wide ranging interview ton “Everything is Political” that covered new money in the budget for the military, sexual misconduct in the forces, and Canada’s support for the Afghan police force.

The entire interview can be heard by clicking on the link below or by subscribing to the “Everything is Political podcast here..
On March 4th, 2017 – 2 PM, at the Peace Wall in Berkeley, CA fascists are coming back. The feeling across organized circles is that this is, on some level, a trap. So come and enjoy a strategy of vigilance. Please don’t run alone after the first fascist you see, but collect yourself and take note of your surroundings. Find allies and accomplices.

There will be no platform for fascism in the Bay Area nor will revolutionaries be pawns in some neo-reactionary game. Our strength is exercised not just in our ability to respond and react but in our proactive autonomy that creates a cool, determined, collected atmosphere of safety and solidarity. May we humbly suggest not taking any bait but make collective decisions. Stay with your affinity group and resist the frogmen that come out from behind the keyboards. This is not a statement on any particular tactic – it’s a call for strategic engagement.

Some wisdom garnered from fascist demonstrations over the least few years in California suggests that some participants on their side are easily shaken and violently react with weapons. This is to say Anti-Fascists should be aware of this in scenarios in which small numbers of boneheads/frogmen walk to and from the demonstration.

What began as a direct response to Feb. 1st – a march for “free speech,” with the frat-brownshirt Proud Boys as special guests – has been completely rebranded since Milo’s fall from grace. Now the organizers of these “Marches 4 Trump” are trying to pull together a coalition of libertarians, ancaps, armed militias, brownshirt alt-right enforcers, the “patriotic” Tea Party crowd, and alt-lite Deplorables without alienating any of them.

People getting organized against fascist 'Proud Boys' holding 'March 4 Trump' in #Berkeley pic.twitter.com/sF29nUxLVS — FireWorks (@FireWorksBAY) February 22, 2017

Rich Black is the public face of the March on Berkeley. His Twitter header is a pastel ancap flag. He neglected to make the March on Berkeley Facebook event page (or its guest list) private. In an attempt to funnel every angry conservative in California into downtown Berkeley, he (or other organizers) canceled the Sacramento and Los Angeles marches and combined them with Berkeley’s. He seems very eager to simultaneously a) reassure everyone that this is not an alt-right event and b) tag Gavin McInnes begging for promotion, retweet the Proud Boys, and tag both them and the Oath Keepers in his tweets. For someone who isn’t organizing a fascist march, he sure wants all the fascists to know about it.

Black wants his fascist cake and eat it too.

The Berkeley College Republicans, everyone’s favorite concentration of truly banal evil, will be in attendance as well. In meetings they’ve been enthusiastically hyping March 4th and are trying to get the California State Militia to show up. BCR’s alt-right and white nationalist ties are well documented and getting stronger. Jack Palkovic was spotted on BART with Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo. They hugged each other goodbye.

The feeling on the ground is that this is, on some level, a trap. They’re massing outside the police station. The cops are ready to protect these fascists, and they aren’t going to be hands-off this time. Camera-hungry Milo counter-protesters like Eddie Brock show up in Rich Black’s Twitter conversations. They call themselves a march, but there’s no parade route even being discussed. Their organizers claim to be working with police, militias, and the FBI. And they’re expecting antifascist resistance. They’ve been circulating our calls to action, warning each other that the spectre of antifa will be back to haunt them.

So show up and haunt these motherfuckers. Bring your friends. Give ’em hell, but be careful. Berkeley is the hill that the alt-right and their growing coalition have chosen to flounder on, and they’re only getting cockier.

We shut these fascists down before, and we’ll do it again.
by Lucy Peltz

From America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, Britain’s economic, social and political stability was in turmoil. Against this backdrop of revolution abroad, the relations between the sexes – and their proper roles — were increasingly challenged. While the figure of the respectable female writer of sentimental novels, poetry or didactic literature had become a cultural commonplace, there was a new backlash against the literary woman asserting her views in the more ‘masculine’ genres of history and politics. The tightening of gendered boundaries can be particularly identified in the reception and troubled reputation of a new generation of political voices, including the radical Mary Wollstonecraft.

In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft was a relatively unknown writer who was running a school when she published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. This was a ‘conduct book’, one of the few genres deemed acceptable for women writers. A year later Wollstonecraft wrote Mary, A Fiction, a semi-autobiographical novel in which she created an independent female protagonist whose ‘grandeur is derived from the operations of [her] own faculties, not subjugated to opinion’. It was also in 1788 that Wollstonecraft began to write for the Analytical Review. It was in this radical newspaper, that she first declared her admiration for the controversial republican thinker, Catherine Macaulay. This happened when Wollstonecraft was reviewing the older woman’s Letters on Education, where there was a clear overlap between Macaulay’s ideas and those Wollstonecraft had published in Letters on Education, especially around the importance of parental nurture and the coeducation of girls and boys. Wollstonecraft also empathised with Macaulay’s attack on the way girls were expected to ‘counterfeit . . . weakness in order to attract the notice of the male’. And while Wollstonecraft had formerly imagined herself the ‘first of a new genus’, in 1790 she was pleased to identify Macaulay as a female role model. Her enthusiastic sense of affinity with the ageing radical is evinced in the unsolicited and bold letter that Wollstonecraft wrote to Macaulay.

Madam,

Now I venture to send you < blank >, with a name utterly unknown to you in the title page, it is necessary to apologise for thus intruding on you – but instead of an apology shall I tell you the truth ? You are the only female writer who I consider in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world. I respect Mrs Macaulay Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers.

Whereas the final sentence of this letter captures the spirit of the two writers’ shared interest in promoting a new model of assertive womanhood, it is the first (now expurgated) sentence that indicates Wollstonecraft’s main excuse for writing to Macaulay without prior introduction. With this letter, we can deduce that Wollstonecraft had sent a copy of her recent publication the Vindication of the Rights of Men. This was her impassioned reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) which had appeared a few months before — Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790). Her letter to Macaulay thus attempted to reach out to a kindred political and intellectual woman whose own published attack on Burke’s Reflections had also just appeared. Both pamphlets reflect the feeling among radicals who had welcomed the French Revolution, in its first years. Wollstonecraft later summed up the mood when she stated that a ‘new spirit has gone forth, to organise the body-politic . . . Reason has, at last, shown her captivating face.’The Vindication was Wollstonecraft’s first major success and it moved her into the masculine terrain of political discourse. It argued in favour of a more meritocratic society and scorned the privilege and property of the aristocratic hierarchy which Burke had defended. The first edition of the pamphlet made no mention of Wolstonecraft’s name and many critics assumed it was the work of a man. The Analytical Review knew better and their critic could not resist mocking Burke on this point: ‘How deeply must it wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight . . to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women!’ For conservatives in Britain desperate to maintain the status quo the deferential relationship expected between men and women took on an increasingly politicized charge at this time at this time. In this context, the image of the empowered woman – as identified particularly in the French mob — became deeply emotive. An example of this can be seen in the satire Don Dismallo running the Literary Gauntlet.This etching was published by William Holland, a radical printseller, just one month after the publication of Burke’s Reflections. It portrays Burke in the character of Don Dismallo, the deluded knight from Don Quixote who champions chivalrous but pointless causes. The inference here is that Burke’s support for the French monarchy was just such a pointless cause. To reinforce this point, Burke is presented in a fool’s costume running the gauntlet past a line of opponents who are each armed with a cat-o’-nine-tails to punish him. On Burke’s left we can see: Helena Maria Williams, the poet, Richard Price, the Dissenting minister and polemicist, Anna Letitia Barbauld, the poet and educationalist. To Burke’s right, are: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an MP who opposed Burke in the House of Commons, and the figures of Justice, holding out her sword, and Liberty, who turns her back on Burke to support a frail figure with a banner bearing scenes from the storming of the Bastille. To their right, are John Horne Tooke another radical MP and Catharine Macaulay. She, like the other women, wears French tricolours.The people in this print are all linked by their support for the Revolution. The women were distinguished for refuting Burke in print, or so it seemed. Williams who was noted for her sympathetic, eyewitness Letters Written in France had just published a poem in praise of the storming of the Bastille. Catharine Macaulay’s forthcoming attack on Burke’s Reflections had been announced and Barbauld, who had first opposed Burke in March1790, was assumed to be writing another refutation of his Reflections.While only a handful of the responses to Burke were by women, Don Dismallo indicates how the female political voice raised special anxieties. Horace Walpole, who shared Burke’s anti-revolutionary conservatism, dismissed them as cheap hacks who ‘spit their rage at eighteenth pence a head’. He vilified further, describing them as ‘Amazonian allies, headed by Kate Macaulay and the virago Barbaud, whom Mr Burke calls our poissardes’. By referring to Burke’s description of working-class women in the French mob — as fishwives, or the ‘furies of hell’ – Walpole’s comments reflect the conservative fear of female activism.Wollstonecraft’sappeared just a few days before Don Dismallo which explains why she is not figured in the print. According to her biographer, the Vindication received ‘extraordinary notice’, especially once it was identified as the work of a woman.At the same time, her name became associated with other leading revolutionaries who, like Tom Paine, had attacked Burke’s Reflections. She met Paine and many others through Joseph Johnson, the bookseller who was like a father figure to her. He gave weekly dinners which were a meeting place for London’s religious dissenters and political radicals. Among them were Henry Fuseli an extrovert but married artist for whom Wollstonecraft developed a desperate infatuation and eventually proposed a ménage à trois — and William Godwin – a shy and awkward philosopher who was initially irritated by the way she monopolized the conversation but would later become her husband. It was also through Johnson that Wollstonecraft met John Opie, the fashionable artist who became her life-long friend. This was his first portrait of Wollstonecraft painted in the period immediately following the Vindication. It is a sensitive and confident image of a female author, showing her distracted momentarily from her studies.With Opie’s typically dark palette we have the sense that Wollstonecraft is working late into the night. Although Fuseli had criticized her as a ‘philosophical sloven’, Wollstonecraft is shown here with the powdered hair and silk gown of a polite woman. There is no record of Wollstonecraft’s views on this portrait. But her comments on sitting for the portrait below, at about the same time are, however, revealing.She wrote to her supporter William Roscoe, stating that ‘I do not imagine that it will be a very striking likeness; but, if you do not find me in it, I will send you a more faithful sketch – a book that I am now writing, in which I myself . . . shall certainly appear, hand and heart’. This comment contains both prosaic and psychological insight. Apparently Wollstonecraft doubted Williamson’s work but, more importantly, she was did not like giving up control over her own self-representation. The book that she refers to in this letter was her The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).It would be an overstatement to call the Rights of Woman an autobiography. The work does however tackle issues of female education, identity and autonomy that had preoccupied and effected Wollstonecraft for most of her adult life. English women she argued had been forced into narrow roles within society, were denied access to education and were thereby trivialized as frivolous creatures whose purpose was only to please men. Moreover, women were complicit in their own cultural subordination through their love of sentimental novels, gossip and fashion. Advocating serious study to lift a woman from sensation to intellect, Wollstonecraft’s rallying cry was aimed at the radical reform of Britain as a whole. “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.Having renounced Christianity in 1790, Wollstonecraft’s proposals were rooted in her belief in ‘perfectibility’ – the doctrine that people can achieve perfection in their lifetime. The work was also based on a levelling principle which took its inspiration from the French Revolution. Both were contentious positions to adopt and yet the Rights of Woman was greeted with approval in 1792. That is because most reviews treated it as ‘an elaborate treatise on female education’. The Analytical Review, for one, managed to overlook the radical elements and conclude that ‘If the bulk of the great truths which this publication contains were reduced to practice the nation would be better, wiser and happier’. The only periodical to attack the Rights of Woman was the Critical Review. This Tory paper correctly identified the revolutionary ambitions and implications of Wollstonecraft’s proposals. It envisaged a world in which Wollstonecraft’s proposals were put into action and decried the social impact if women, once educated to the level of men, refused to continue their allotted duties of child care and nursing the sick. Ironically the French Revolutionary government concurred. Although Wollstonecraft had dedicated the book to the French diplomat Talleyrand, his report on education to the National Assembly in France expressed the view that women were indeed the weaker sex and should follow the ‘will of nature’ in pursuing gentler, domestic occupations.Despite its initial success, the Rights of Woman and its author would become synonymous with libertarian immorality and would soon be shunned. The reasons for this fall from grace were manifold including the reception of Wollstonecraft’s subsequent writings, the details of her private life and the increasingly repressive social and political situation. The personal details were revealed by her widower William Godwin whose Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was rushed into press four months after Wollstonecraft’s gruesome death in childbirth in 1797.Godwin, a leading radical philosopher, was grief-stricken and stayed away from Mary’s funeral writing ‘I have not the least expectation that I can ever know happiness again’. During a deep and prolonged melancholy, his one consolation was reading Wollstonecraft’s manuscripts including her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Within two weeks, he had begun to write her Memoirs which were published with four volumes of her posthumous works. If this was a cathartic exercise for Godwin, his inability to dissemble ruined the Wollstonecraft’s reputation for generations to come.True to his philosophical ideal that perfection could be achieved by reason alone, Godwin made no attempt to hide the scandals of her life. He shocked readers with details of how Wollstonecraft had lived out of wedlock and had a child with another man, had twice attempted suicide, had become pregnant before her marriage to Godwin and, finally, had refused religious rites on her deathbed. In focussing on her personal life and distress, Godwin aimed to present his dead wife as a ‘female Werther’ – the doomed character in Goethe’s influential novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). But in the end, Godwin’s writing is in fact more an exploration of his own feelings and the culture of sensibility than the Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy.Before her death in 1797, Wollstonecraft was the most widely read political woman in Europe. While her death had been recorded by respectful obituaries, Godwin’s Memoirs made a spectacle of her unconventional life. Describing her as having ‘sentiments as pure, as refined, and as delicate, as ever inhabited a human heart’ his principle mistake was to ask for sympathy for her plight and pose her as ‘the fairest source of animation and encouragement to all who would follow’. Godwin was of course deluded by grief but he also misjudged the moral climate in presenting Wollstonecraft as a role model. Those periodicals that had applauded the Rights of Woman were almost unanimous in wishing Godwin had never written such a ‘tribute’. Her posthumous reputation was also poorly served by his publication of her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman which excuses adultery, argues for women to have control over their own property and is frank about female sexual appetites.In the end, there was no literary model which Godwin could use to represent Wollstonecraft as a subjective, intellectually assertive woman with desires in a way that did not render her contemptible. Moreover, his catalogue of her sexual exploits and political beliefs provided a rod with which to beat all radical women writers. The grand inquisitor was Reverend Richard Polwhele whose long verse-diatribe The Unsex’d Females, of 1798, was one of the most concerted critiques of late eighteenth-century feminist writers. Using the inflammatory category ‘unsex’d’, Polwhele named and attacked a band of women who, he declared, had abandoned ‘natural’ modesty, supported the introduction of democratic politics and who even went as far as to demand equality with men. Unsurprisingly, he considered Wollstonecraft the archetypal ‘unsex’d female’:

See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks,

Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex;

O’er humbled man assert the sovereign claim,

And Slight the timid blush of virgin fame.
A gay couple living in Wynantskill, New York had their home and car struck by vandals this week.

John Mcenerney said his partner Lyle Houston woke up Thursday morning to discover the spray painted slur on the side of their home. The crude graffiti is difficult to read but “Jenner Fags” appears visible. A window pane in a side door and the window of Houston’s Jeep were also broken.

“You would think my initial gut reaction would be like, ‘oh my God, I fear for my life.,'” said Mcenerney in an interview with WNYT. “I kind of feel more sorry for the person that they felt it was necessary to try to destroy somebody’s house.”

WYNT adds:

Lyle said there was also an incident Monday night, but his pitbull scared away someone he now thinks was trying to break in. The couple says they aren’t scared, they’re just going to remain positive
Denver's cannabis industry is hoping to add more minorities to its workforce.

Two local organizations are teaming up to bridge the gap between people in minority groups and employment opportunities. Marijuana Industry Group and Servicios de La Raza started the initial effort on Sunday at the Vangst Cannabis Career Summit at Mile High Station.

Servicios de La Raza provides support services for communities it says are underrepresented in the Denver area.

The strong push to hire more minorities was spurred by Denver’s city council, according to MIG executive director Kristi Kelly.

“They really threw down the gauntlet to us in the last year and said, ‘Hey, we’re not seeing people of color represented at the same proportion as our city,’” Kelly said. “So, we really want to change that.”

The partnership aims to “break down barriers of discrimination and lack of access,” said Servicios de La Raza executive director Rudy Gonzales.

“Cannabis businesses offer meaningful employment at living wages,” Gonzales said. “That’s what we look for when we want to break the cycle of poverty.”

The two groups hope to use the new strategy to also create opportunities for the people they say have gotten into trouble with the law because of marijuana. The organizations said previous offenders often have a hard time getting jobs and their hope is to make it easier for them to find work.

Copyright 2017 KUSA
July 21, 2009

Dennis Kosuth responds to a critique of his article on the 1989 Tiananmen uprising from a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

MY ARTICLE on the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising in China ("Twenty years after Tiananmen Square") for SocialistWorker.org drew a harsh response from Richard Becker, writing for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Including footnotes, Becker's reply is nearly twice as long as my original article. It is packed, every inch of the way, with denunciations of me and the International Socialist Organization, which publishes SocialistWorker.org.

Why should a relatively brief article on Tiananmen provoke such a lengthy and hostile response? It isn't because my article was a sustained attack on PSL--I mentioned the organization once, three paragraphs from the end.

The answer is that what you think about the Tiananmen Square uprising goes to the heart of what you think about socialism.

The American socialist Hal Draper once wrote a brilliant essay titled "The Two Souls of Socialism" that identifies two trends in the socialist movement historically--those who believe socialism can be imposed "from above," in the name of the working class, whether by electing socialists to government office or through a military victory and force of arms; and those who think socialism must be achieved "from below," by the collective action of the working-class majority in overturning capitalism and creating a workers' state based on mass democracy and freedom.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising shook China's rulers

Becker and the PSL have two feet firmly planted in the "socialism from above" camp. Their identification of China with socialism depends, above all else, on the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains in charge. To the PSL, the CCP is, ultimately, the embodiment of socialism, rather than anything to do with the Chinese working class.

Therefore, at those points when the CCP bureaucracy was at odds with the mass of the Chinese working class, the PSL sides with the CCP--even when that means defending indefensible repression and violence by China's state machine.

Ultimately, PSL's socialism from above drives people like Becker to ever greater--and ever more shrill--twists of logic and distortions of fact about Tiananmen Square.

THIS IS clear from the beginning of Becker's response to my article, when he takes offense at my distaste for the Chinese National Anthem--a sign, he says, of my "cultural arrogance, jingoism and apparent ignorance."

Besides being born in Hong Kong, I lived on the mainland as well, where I attended public primary school. Since I actually had to listen to the Chinese National Anthem weekly during the flag-raising ceremony at school, I might have some basis for my personal opinion. Perhaps even a stronger one than Becker has for his.

In fact, in my article, I pointed out that China's anthem, unlike those of other countries, calls on the people to "stand up" and refuse to be slaves. But it's worth mentioning that the author of these lyrics, Tian Han, died in 1968 while in prison for "standing up."

This was during China's Cultural Revolution, which Becker refers to as a period of "debate [and] fierce polemics." Tian Han was on the wrong side of those debates--he was denounced as a "poisonous weed" and charged with opposing the CCP in 1964. He refused to recant and remained in prison until his death at age 70. During this time, the national anthem was changed to "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman," which ends with the line "Mao Zedong Thought is a sun that never sets."

Becker's gripes about me and China's national anthem serve as a jumping-off point for the complaint that I'm hostile to "the Chinese Revolution in its entirety"--back to the 1949 revolution and the victory of Mao's Red Army after the "Long March."

Leaving aside the fact that my article is about a rebellion in China 40 years later, the truth is that the ISO does view the 1949 revolution as a step forward in having driven out the colonial powers and ended the imperialist occupation of China.

But that doesn't mean we have to say China is a socialist society. It's possible to support the Chinese Revolution, but also believe it wasn't a revolution that put the working class in power--which is the ISO's definition of a socialist revolution, and more to the point, Karl Marx's.

The mass of Chinese workers played no role in the 1949 revolution--"socialism" was imposed from above in classic fashion, by the victorious Red Army--and they have never exercised any real authority since then in how China was run. That authority has stayed in the hands of the leaders of the CCP.

Becker spends yet more time on another point in China's history that preceded the Tiananmen revolt--the Cultural Revolution. Though initiated by Mao against other members of the CCP leadership, says Becker, the Cultural Revolution sparked a "truly mass movement--first among young people and later among Chinese workers." He also states that "millions of mainly young Chinese engaged in fierce struggle within the CCP, and against some of its top leaders, including Deng."

This begs a question about the Tiananmen rebellion in 1989. While it wasn't started by a CCP leader to further a faction fight within the bureaucracy, the Tiananmen movement did take root among "millions of mainly young Chinese," and "later among Chinese workers." It engaged in "fierce struggle" against the CCP and "some of its top leaders, including Deng."

So why does Becker hold up one as an example of open debate and free thinking, and the other as something only George Bush Sr. and the CIA could love? What exactly is the PSL's criteria for supporting or opposing a movement from below in a supposedly socialist country? One can only infer that because the Cultural Revolution was initiated by Mao--rather than a mass popular movement from below, as in the case of Tiananmen--it has merit to the PSL.

An issue of PSL's Socialism and Liberation magazine that focuses on China characterizes the Cultural Revolution as an "advance and retreat"--with the "old capitalist roaders" ultimately successful at defeating Mao and his allies, some of whom supported a "commune-style state."

So for the PSL, the Cultural Revolution was a mixed bag of positives and negatives--while the right-wingers won, it was at least an example of the freedom to dissent in socialist China. Neither Becker nor the Socialism and Liberation writers mention how, from the end of 1968 until Mao's death in 1976, tens of millions of youth were deported to the countryside to halt the Cultural Revolution--and tens of thousands were simply killed. Nor that Mao himself closed ranks with the rest of the CCP leadership to put an end to the Cultural Revolution, out of fear that society would get out of control.

SOME SELF-described Maoist organizations view Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution as the end of socialism in China. But for the PSL, even this is going too far.

Despite the fact that the "capitalist roaders" have run China without any significant resistance within the leadership since 1976, the PSL still maintains that the CCP should not have been overthrown in 1989. According to PSL leader Brian Becker in Socialism and Liberation, the process of capitalist class relations becoming entrenched in China is "unfinished," and "as long as the [CCP] retains its hold on political power, there is a possibility, however great or small, that this trend can still be reversed."

On this basis, the Tiananmen movement is slandered, and the CCP is defended for crushing the uprising by students and workers--with the same logic that the PSL and its forerunner, the Workers' World Party, used in supporting USSR assaults on Hungary to put down the 1956 revolution and on Czechoslovakia in 1968 against the Prague Spring.

It would have been a step forward for Chinese workers if the 1989 uprising had won more rights. Becker snidely dismisses this suggestion by me as "some rosy, democratic and affluent future where everyone could vote for various millionaire politicians." I wonder if he would make the same argument about Black people in the U.S. who struggled against murderous Jim Crow racism for the right to vote?

Becker views the continued rule of the CCP as more important than the right to free speech, protest or, yes, even voting. He sides with CCP leader Li Peng, who said there were "sufficient human rights" in China--just prior to ordering troops to crush the Tiananmen resistance.

Having the rights to free speech, to protest and to organize independent trade unions isn't the end of the matter, of course. But it is certainly better to have them than to be rounded up in the middle of the night and carted off for talking to your coworkers about working conditions.

When it comes to insisting that few people were killed in the suppression of the Tiananmen protests, Becker quotes selectively from his dependable sources in the U.S. corporate media, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Despite his recognition that the "capitalist roaders" were in charge in China and were developing commercial ties with the U.S., Becker seems unable to comprehend that the U.S. ruling class might have had an interest in downplaying the bloodshed at Tiananmen. There was, after all, money to be made, and after a short period of token protest, the U.S. government and Corporate America got down to the business of making it in China.

No one knows how many people died in the Chinese military's crushing of the Tiananmen revolt. What we can say for sure is that the protesters and ordinary people in Beijing suffered the brunt of the violence--not the Chinese military, as Becker absurdly claims.

Whatever the exact body count, this is a question of which side you're on--the state and its repressive apparatus, or the resistance. The actions of the student and worker protesters of Tiananmen deserve our support, not the Chinese government. No amount of political contortions can excuse being on the wrong side about Tiananmen.
Well it's haraam for Muslims to fight each other and take each others properties.

But besides the scenario, it's permitted to have Muslim/Mumin slaves. Allah speaks about believing slaves in several ayahs of the Quran.

In Surah al-Baqara 2:221 =

And do not marry polytheistic women until they believe. And a believing slave woman is better than a polytheist, even though she might please you. And do not marry polytheistic men [to your women] until they believe. And a believing slave is better than a polytheist, even though he might please you. Those invite [you] to the Fire, but Allah invites to Paradise and to forgiveness, by His permission. And He makes clear His verses to the people that perhaps they may remember.

Surah an-Nisa 4:92 =

And never is it for a believer to kill a believer except by mistake. And whoever kills a believer by mistake - then the freeing of a believing slave and a compensation payment presented to the deceased's family [is required] unless they give [up their right as] charity...

So Allah speaks about believing slaves while they are enslaved. There's nothing wrong with having slaves in general as long as you treat them properly and give them their rights.
With the help of EB Games and numerous A-League football clubs, Livewire In-Hospital recently hosted a series of launch nights for FIFA 14; the most recent release in the incredibly popular soccer video game franchise.

The launch events were held in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle, with the participation of players from Perth Glory, Adelaide United, Melbourne Victory, Sydney FC, Western Sydney Wanderers, and Newcastle Jets.

Patients in the hospitals were given the opportunity to play FIFA 14 on the day of its release, meeting some of their favourite A-League players, and going head-to-head with them on the game. As it turns out – some of the professionals really met their matches in the video games, with the kids coming out on top on numerous occasions!

EB Games provided Livewire with copies of the game, as well as vouchers for prizes. Sydney FC was kind enough to donate some awesome seats to their games for the patients, and all of the clubs bought some sweet swag along to the events.

All of the players involved had a great time experiencing the Livewire program too – beyond playing FIFA, players were given the chance to hit the wards (one patient at Sydney Children’s Hospital decked out his room with a plethora of Sydney FC merch – the guys were impressed), do some origami, play some drums, and participate in some of Livewire and Starlight’s favourite pastimes old (Uno Championships) and new (the Head’s Up app is proving immensely popular recently).

This series of FIFA 14 launch events was an incredible success for the Livewire program, the clubs involved, EB Games, and most importantly, the patients admitted to hospital nationally. Livewire has plenty more planned for the coming months – hopefully, we can work with clubs again prior to the release of FIFA 15.

Livewire is showcasing some of the stuff that we do on Instagram – so check us out there by following @starlight_livewire.

Livewire In-Hospital is one of Starlight’s adolescent programs, which is proudly supported by nib Foundation. Livewire In-Hospital aims to bring fresh and exciting workshops to the wards, and empowers hospitalised teenagers to be social and have fun during their admission.

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Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill has submitted draft legislation to her state legislature’s General Administration and Elections Committee that would establish a system of automatic voter registration through its Department of Motor Vehicles offices.

The legislation is modeled after similar laws that recently went on the books in Oregon and California. Including Connecticut, automatic voter registration bills have been proposed in fifteen states in 2016 alone. In 2015, 20 states, plus Washington, DC and the federal government, considered automatic voter registration legislation. In New Jersey, Chris Christie vetoed an AVR bill that passed both houses of the state legislature, although activists in the state have vowed to put the proposal on the statewide ballot and pass it via referendum.

Oregon began implementing its automatic voter registration system last month, and has already reported that its rate of voter registration has skyrocketed. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “Oregon officials reported that based on preliminary data, Oregon Motor Voter added 4,300 people to the rolls in the first six days – more than double the previous average number of registered voters per month.”

According to Secretary Merrill’s office, “The data provided to the DMV would populate a voter registration form. An ‘e-signature’ program would permit an electronic signature to be collected so the client could certify citizenship; accept or refuse to register to vote or affiliate with a party. The registration applications would be electronically transmitted to the Registrars of Voters.” The inclusion of an e-signature in their process underscores the fact that, in response to one of the most commonly-raised objections to the policy, automatic voter registration really won’t lead to a large number of undocumented immigrants being added to the voter rolls.

As I’ve written before, there aren’t any good arguments against automatic voter registration, although there are a few bad ones. The United States remains one of the world’s only modern democracies that places the burden of registering to vote on the citizen, as opposed to the state. This hurdle keeps millions of Americans who would otherwise vote from casting ballots every year.

To that point, a recent report from Demos projected that automatic voter registration via the DMV would add 312,000 people to the state’s voter rolls. The margin of victory in the state’s 2014 gubernatorial race was just over 27,000 votes.
No one at Nabisco’s corporate headquarters in New York City had any idea why members of the National Organization for Women were lined up outside. It was the fall of 1971, and the manufacturer best known for their Oreo and Chips Ahoy! snacks had not made any obviously sexist advertisements or taken any particular political stance. They sold cookies.

Then they read the signs: “Sick toys for children make for a sick society.”

That May, Nabisco had attempted to diversify by purchasing Aurora Company, the West Hempstead, New York model kit maker best known for their plastic kits of Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and other horror film icons. The cheap plastic toys came in pieces and could be glued together and painted.

Unknown to Nabisco, Aurora had recently branched out and begun offering entire model kit dioramas. Instead of a single figure, consumers could buy detailed “sets” for their monsters to interact with. There was a guillotine, a razor-sharp pendulum, and a laboratory; a female protagonist, referred to in the copy as “the Victim,” was scantily-clad and ready to be dismembered, beheaded, or trapped in a spiked cage. Kids could also opt to have Vampirella, the top-heavy villain licensed from Warren Publishing, operate the winch and pulley while her plastic captive was shackled to a table.

Each kit also contained a comic, which instructed builders on how to assemble the torture scenes for maximum enjoyment. A narrator named Dr. Deadly seemed to opine on the appeal of the Victim once she was fully assembled. “Now that you’ve gotten her all together, I think I like the other way. In pieces … yesssss.”

In addition to Fig Newtons, Nabisco realized it had also been peddling tiny torture racks.

Z1DO4U via YouTube

Since its inception in 1952, Aurora had seen enormous success by exploring the horror genre. As television came into prominence and late movies screened the classic Universal monster films of the 1930s, a new generation of monster buffs had been nourished. Kits featuring Dracula, the Mummy, and even Godzilla were cheap to produce and sell. (Many models retailed for just 98 cents.) Having the consumer construct them with contact cement and model paint gave them a sense of accomplishment.

Aurora held contests for custom kits, highlighting winners in monster magazines. By the 1960s, they had started noticing that a lot of submissions revolved around expansive, morbid scenarios: a mad scientist’s laboratory, or an execution motif. To Aurora, it was a clear indication that their consumers wanted context for their models.

In 1964, the company unveiled its Chamber of Horrors Guillotine, which featured an unfortunate male sentenced to death via a chopping blade: once activated, his head could be retrieved from the basket, re-attached, and executed once again.

While the toy did have some precedent in 1700s France—a two-foot-tall guillotine was popular among children, some of whom used it to decapitate rodents—there was some minor furor from parents, and Aurora didn’t pursue the line.

Six years later, the company felt the cultural climate was ready for something more provocative: They began developing a line dubbed Monster Scenes. Using generic characters like the Victim, designers concocted elaborate scenarios that put the unfortunate captives in mortal peril.

One scenario had a mad scientist hovering over his captive with a tray full of hot coals and a set of tongs; another designed after Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum featured a swinging blade that would cleave the Victim in two. (Or at least nudge her side; once assembled, the toys didn’t easily come back apart.)

Aurora also pursued the license for Vampirella, a buxom vampire featured in James Warren’s horror periodicals: Warren sold a lot of Aurora kits via his mail order business, and a decision was made to include his character in the line rather than risk dissolving a partnership. Unpainted, she appeared to be virtually naked. Her counterpart, the Victim, sported hot pants and a halter top; a dress or flowing skirt was deemed impractical in order to have her fit on the torture rack.

In a big departure from previous kits, the Monster Scenes featured snap-on parts, the better to lure in consumers who were concerned over fumes from glue or contact cement. Once assembled, the characters could be placed in the Pain Cage, the Pain Parlor, and other disturbing scenarios.

Eager to trumpet their daring new line, Aurora’s marketing made the unfortunate choice of plastering each box with a stamp: “Rated ‘X’ for Excitement!” In an included comic book, Vampirella quells concern that someone might hear the Victim screaming by saying, “Don’t worry—this is New York. No one will help her.” (The gallows humor was later interpreted to be a reference to Kitty Genovese, a woman who was murdered in 1964 while apartment-dwellers nearby did nothing.)

Monster Scenes debuted at the Hobby Industry Association of America’s trade show in February 1971. Aurora hired model Nina Anderson to demonstrate the playsets, which attracted a stream of curious media members. Anderson, not particularly versed in the features, made a show of lopping off arms and legs before an angry Aurora executive told her the parts weren’t meant for that.

But Anderson had perfected her sales pitch. Of Vampirella, she told the Chicago Sun-Times that the busty character could be placed in a cage to “make her a go-go girl.”

Still, Aurora thought they had a hit. They even began to sketch out plans to license DC Comics's Lois Lane as a marquee “victim.”

Aurora began shipping the kits in March 1971. The characters—Vampirella, Doctor Deadly, the Victim, and Frankenstein—were $1.30, while the dioramas retailed for $2. There was no overestimating adolescent interest. By the fall, approximately 800,000 of the kits had been sold.

According to Aurora, the toys were paradoxically healthy for young consumers, allowing them to overcome fearful scenarios by having control over them. The company said it had consulted with psychiatrists prior to producing the torture scenes and found no objection.

But parents objected plenty. Letters came in to syndicated newspaper columns and to company headquarters. Kids wrote, too, but with requests for more sets to be added; they wanted gallows, a bed of nails, man-eating plants, and wheels of torture.

In her syndicated advice column, Ann Landers weighed in:

"For $1.99 you can own a doll named Vampirella. She comes equipped with a beaker of blood. If all this isn’t symptomatic of a warped society, I’d like to know what is."

Under fire by NOW and other activism groups, Nabisco was horrified to see headlines in The New York Times and other papers calling attention to the fact that one of its subsidiaries was peddling toys of victimized women in shackles.

Under corporate pressure, Aurora began toning down the line by identifying “the Victim” as Doctor Deadly’s daughter, a slightly less generic personification. They also began shipping Vampirella in red plastic instead of the neutral, skin-toned gray that led some critics to declare her nude out of the box. The Pendulum was deemed beyond hope and pulled entirely.

The furor over the toys reached television: Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In got a reaction from a joke about the torture toys. By December 1971, Nabisco had endured enough. After promising media they would cease production of the toys, they began to announce a recall of inventory already in stores. Treated like a contaminated product, Monster Scenes had lasted a paltry nine months.

As the 1970s wore on, Aurora returned to less controversial kits. Nabisco, flustered by the negative publicity, cut their development budget before selling the company to Monogram in 1977. Plans for a prehistoric line of kits and an extension of Monster Scenes were curtailed in the process.

The kits eventually became embraced by collectors, some of whom tried to recreate the store displays or make modifications to the existing kits. Aurora employees queried about the project expressed amazement that the toys had been perceived as sadomasochistic or misogynistic—they felt they were simply delivering the kind of exaggerated play premise that adolescent kids loved.

Decades later, toys like Electric Chair Marv—a character from Sin City who could be electrocuted on command—from McFarlane Toys would invite a similar level of controversy, though nothing that quite reached the levels of Aurora’s misstep. Their product had helped compel California legislature to pass a toy ban into law on July 1, 1972 prohibiting “torture toys” and replica grenades from being sold in the state.

As for the excess inventory: when Nabisco made the call to discontinue the kits, the remaining stock was hauled to Canada. The boxes removed the “Rated X” endorsement but kept another bit of fine print: “For ages 8 and up.”

Additional Sources:

Aurora Monster Scenes: The Most Controversial Toys of a Generation.
Guardian investigation reveals death toll over 12 months with many desperately trying risky routes into UK to escape makeshift camps without sanitation at French port

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Calais migrants: ‘Get to England or die trying’

At least 15 migrants in and around the French port of Calais have died in the past year as an influx of young men and women from east Africa take ever greater risks to get the UK, according to an investigation by the Guardian.

Growing numbers of young families, some with children as young as three, have also arrived in the French town in the past few months and are living in makeshift camps without sanitation or running water.

The European director of the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) described the situation as shameful and warned more people will die in the refugee camps in the coming weeks as temperatures plummet.

“The conditions are totally unacceptable and are not consistent with the kind of values that a democratic society should have,” Vincent Cochetel from the UNHCR told the Guardian. “This is a shameful situation to witness in the heart of the Europe Union.”

The French authorities do not generally keep a record of the migrants who die in Calais, but local charities and the UNHCR say at least 15 people, including young women and teenagers, have died in the past 12 months.

Last month one man died after attempting to jump from a motorway bridge onto a moving lorry, and two more were killed in nearby Dunkirk when the truck they were hiding in caught fire. Earlier this month an Eritrean man was knocked down and killed as he looked for a lorry to board.

Cochetel said he believed conditions in Calais were now worse than those at refugee camps in Turkey, where hundreds of thousands of people arrive each month to escape the bloodshed in Syria. He said the British and French governments had yet to appreciate the severity of the situation.

“You will have people dying of cold and even more desperate people taking even more risks,” he said. “Some of the people there are becoming so tired and desperate that they are ready to do very dangerous things.”

The French port has repeatedly hit the headlines in the past year, amid an increasingly hostile debate in the UK around immigration and asylum. As more people arrived in Calais – and conditions deteriorated – clashes erupted between different groups of migrants and politicians on both sides of the channel called for ever tougher measures to secure the port.

Despite this the harsh reality of life for the people in the camps has been largely ignored. Today a Guardian investigation also reveals:

• More and more teenagers and young children – some just three years old – have arrived over the past few months, mainly from East Africa.

• Young women living in the camps are being sexually exploited often by trafficking gangs which are offering a route into England in exchange for sex.

• New camps are springing up along the coast and around the entrance to the Euro Tunnel as French and British authorities step up security at the Calais port.

Juliette Delaplace, who works for Secours Catholique, a charity that has been assisting migrants in Calais for 10 years said: “No other year has seen as many migrants die. They are jumping on lorries and taking more risks.” Most – but not all – of these deaths in the Calais area happened as migrants attempted to make the perilous journey to the UK.

In the event of a migrant death the charity helps to raise money from local community groups to repatriate the body. The charity receives no support from local authorities in this process. Those families and friends who can not raise enough money to repatriate their bodies are buried in unmarked graves in cemetery plots usually reserved for the homeless.

Migrants, mainly from Eritrea, have gathered their tents in an abandoned warehousein Calais. Many try to hop on trucks to get to England. Photograph: Etienne Laurant/EPA

Hussain, an agricultural engineer who left his wife and two young children in Egypt to try to find work to provide for his family, said a friend of his, a 32-year-old from Sudan, died earlier this year after holding onto the underside of a lorry for three hours. “He just couldn’t hold on any longer,” said Hussain who has been in the camp nicknamed “the jungle” for two months and tries every night to get onto a lorry bound for the UK.

Cochetel said it was typical of the growing risks people were prepared to take.

“We are seeing more and more people taking crazy risks because they feel they have nothing to lose so they take whatever chance they can to get to a place where they feel their life is going to be better or to where they think they will be protected.”

Migrants also told the Guardian that trafficking gangs were openly operating in Calais and offering to smuggle people into the UK for between £800 and £2,500. Some said traffickers were coercing vulnerable young girls into having sex in return for being smuggled into the UK.

Cochetel said: “We know that it is going on. For a few of them it might be what is termed “survival sex”, a sort of strategy, for others yes it is in-kind exploitation by smugglers in exchange for getting them on the back of a truck.”

A 23-year-old Eritrean woman who has been living in Calais for two months told the Guardian she was fearful: “I am not safe living in the jungle. There is a lot of drinking in the camp and this creates problems. It is very dangerous for a woman living here.”

Earlier this year more than 100 migrants broke through port security in an attempt to force their way onto ferries bound for the UK. There have also been clashes between different groups of migrants in the town. The UK government has pledged £12m to help secure the port but Cochetel said that was not enough, arguing that people would “always find a way around fences”.

He said the UK – along with other northern European countries - had to “provide a mechanism” that allows those with legitimate claims to seek asylum when they first arrived in southern EU countries.

And he warned that until there was concerted EU-wide action the situation in Calais was likely to deteriorate further. “There will be more deaths and more tension… in the mid term it is just bad news coming for these people,” Cochetel warned.

• Additional reporting: Anne Penketh

Escaping from Calais camp: ‘I risk my life – whatever if takes’

With his face lit by the flames from the small campfire Mohammed, a 23-year-old who fled the conflict in Gaza earlier this year, quietly explains how he ended up in a squalid camp just 20 miles from the English coast.

“I had no choice but to leave and try and find something better,” he says. “Our house was destroyed …we had nothing, I just wanted to feel one moment of safety, one moment when I am not cold, when I am not treated like an insect.”

Migrants in Calais gather food and supplies during the day, waiting for the night or a traffic jam to hop on trucks on their way to England Photograph: Etienne Laurent/EPA

Tonight, as on every other evening for the past month, Mohammed and his four friends – two Syrians and two Egyptians, who met on a smugglers’ boat crossing the Mediterranean – will set off on their nightly quest; pitting themselves against the French police and private security guards protecting Calais’s lorry parks and motorways in an attempt to find their way onto the back of a truck and what they hope will be a better life in the UK.

“It is dangerous and difficult when you have not had food or sleep but every night we must try,” Mohammed says with a smile as he pulls his hat down against the biting cold. “We have left our homes to find a better life. We can not stay here and put up with this.”

He gestures behind him to the muddy field stretching into the distance, spotted with campfires and covered with makeshift shelters. Beyond the tents are piles of rubbish, and beyond that, the strip of wasteland used by the hundreds of people who live here as a toilet.

Mohammed and his friends are among thousands of people who, having fled war, persecution and poverty beyond Europe’s borders, are living in increasingly precarious conditions in makeshift camps across northern France – waiting and hoping for their chance to make it to the UK.

Many more people seek refuge in other European countries but the concentration of those waiting here and the conditions in which they are living set Calais apart.

According to local charities and the UN’s refugee agency at least 15 people, including young women and teenagers, have died in the past 12 months.

As first light spreads over the largest camp in Calais – known as the jungle – Mohammed and his friends make their way back to their shelter along a disused railway track after another fruitless night. During the early hours they were chased by police and one of Mohammed’s friends, Hussain from Egypt, was pepper sprayed, before falling into a ditch. His plight prompts gentle mocking from his friends but the atmosphere is sombre. The men have just been told another of their friends – a 32-year-old from Sudan – has died.

The group, exhausted and cold from a night tramping the dual carriageways and lorry parks that surround the French port, falls silent. They know it is a fate that could befall any of them.

Over the past few months it is not just the numbers of people arriving in Calais that have caused alarm among politicians and aid workers – it is their age. Following the chaos in Libya since the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime thousands of young people have used the failed state to flee oppressive regimes in east Africa in search of a better life in Europe.

Among the dirt and makeshift shelters of the jungle, three-year-old Adiam watches her mother Winta, 18, cooking over a small fire of twigs. In one pan are two potatoes, in the other coffee. Adiam plays on a filthy plastic trike as her father Ataklti, 24, explains how he left Eritrea to escape compulsory military conscription and a brutal regime that Amnesty says is responsible for widespread human rights abuses.

He takes a battered picture from his wallet of himself smiling next to another man. “He killed himself rather than stay or get locked up and so I knew I had to leave,” says Ataklti quietly.

The family left their home in Eritrea a year ago, heading first to Sudan before paying smugglers to take them across the Sahara desert, through Libya and onto another smugglers’ boat bound for Europe.

Like many of those in the camp he is reluctant to reveal too many details in case the Eritrean authorities take action against his remaining family. But in a halting voice he says the worst part of the journey was crossing the Sahara, where they had little water and seven of the people they were with died. He says the gangs in Libya “treated them like dogs”.

And now sitting in the camp in northern France in the cold he admits he faces a fresh challenge: getting onto the back of a lorry with his three-year-old daughter and young wife. If he does not succeed, the family – who have never experienced a north European winter – face months of freezing conditions sheltering in a derelict sports hall at the centre of the jungle with little food.

“It’s very difficult here with a young child because we are trying to get onto lorries which is very dangerous, but I would do anything for her, for her future. I will risk my life whatever it takes,” says Ataklti.

According to the UNHCR Adiam and her family are among about 3000 migrants in and around Calais – three times the number at the beginning of the year – who are taking greater risks to try To get to the UK. Most of them live in makeshift camps like the jungle or in squats scattered around the town and survive on one meal a day provided by local charities.

The French authorities have pledged to open a new day centre in January to help the most vulnerable people. Opponents have claimed this will only attract more migrants to the town. Those in the camps are sceptical it will ever open and say even if it does it will be too little, too late.

Whether the centre does help or not it is clear the problem is no longer confined to Calais. The Guardian spent time with truck drivers who say their lorries are regularly targeted by smugglers in car parks more than 125 miles (200km) from the French port. Migrants have also set up smaller camps across the region from the fields near the entrance to the Channel tunnel to a small wood near a shopping centre in Dunkirk.

At one lorry park about half way between Calais and Paris, Matthew, who works for a UK-based furniture removal company, checks his lorry for the final time before turning in for the night. He seems overly paranoid as he points to the hedge surrounding the car park. “They will be in there now watching and waiting to see which lorries look the best bet.”

But as dusk settles he is proved right. There is a movement in the hedge and Matthew goes for a closer look in time to see three young men in their late teens or 20s sitting in the bushes.

“Even here so far from the coast they are trying to get on now. It is getting beyond a joke.” Two weeks later his firm decide to stop using Calais altogether.

For many UK politicians the answer to the unfolding crisis in Calais seems to be two-fold: build bigger and higher fences and make life for those who do make it through to the UK as uncomfortable as possible. Others suggest that only closer co-operation at EU level – with countries from northern Europe working much more closely with those in the south to offer asylum to refugees and return others when they first arrive – can the problem be addressed.

However, as record numbers of people flee poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa it seems unlikely that people will stop leaving their homes in search of a better, safer life in Europe for the foreseeable future.

“When I get to England I will study and then get a job and work so my daughter can have a better life,” says Ataklti, who a few weeks after we spoke discovered his wife was pregnant with their second child.

As he settles down to his one meal of the day as the night closes in on the Jungle he remains sure he is doing the right thing, despite the risks. “We did not have a life at home and we do not really have one here. So we must keep trying.”
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“No freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

These words were first written in the Coronation Charter, also called the Charter of Liberties, which was a proclamation by Henry I issued in 1100. In 1100! Just think about that for a moment. 915 years ago on this island, uniquely in the world, great men were laying the philosophical foundations of a special type of liberty and striving to restrain the power of their rulers.

It marked the beginning of an historic struggle for the soul of England that took place over centuries while absolutism and tyranny was established unchallenged on the continent.

When the struggle was won this great country of ours was the freest in the world. Freeborn Englishmen were envied and admired around the globe for the constitutional liberty they enjoyed and the spirit of freedom that thrived here like nowhere else. Sadly, that is all part of history now and we must fight this struggle once again.

It is a sign of the times that a British Prime Minister, and a Conservative at that, can say something like this:

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’”

Did our Prime Minister really think about what he was saying when he uttered these disgraceful words when addressing British citizens? It is astonishingly blinkered to not realise just how dangerous this kind of rhetoric is and what the wider implications are.

The British people have been numbed to shockingly illiberal rhetoric such as this, it’s just a continuation of the Blairite authoritarian mantra. It is the equivalent to when Blair said, let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing”. Well, the rules are changing again and we are close to sweeping away every last vestige of British liberty.

As long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone should be a slogan for the British state to forever abide by because it is a basic tenet of a free society. The Prime Minister should remember that he works for British citizens and he is not our master.

Sadly, the majority election win is being seen as a mandate to clamp down on civil liberties in the name of security from the Islamist bogeymen. A ghastly combination of paternalism, New Labour style authoritarianism and the restless government urge to be seen to be doing something is the dominant force in the Conservative Party now. There are no longer any restraints on Theresa May and she is preparing anti-terror measures that trample over our freedoms.

A counter-terrorism bill including plans for an “extremism disruption order” is to be included in the Queen’s speech. This had previously been blocked by the Liberal Democrats on the grounds of protecting free speech, which is a stand worth remembering and giving credit for.

The police will be given powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the “harmful activities” of someone they deem to be an “extremist individual”. The worryingly elastic definition of “harmful” is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”.

Those deemed to be “extremist individuals” will be banned from broadcasting and will be required to submit in advance to the police any publication intended to be printed or placed on the internet. Extremist groups deemed to be undermining democracy or indulging in hate speech in public places will also be banned.

The measures have been stretched beyond stopping those who incite violence to those who are perceived by the authorities to be espousing views or undertaking harmful activities for the “purpose of overthrowing democracy”. How vague, if it to be made illegal to not believe in democracy, should anarchists and purist libertarians be worried? Are revolutionary socialist groups to be illegal?

The “extremism disruption orders” are designed to criminalise the intent to promote terrorism, or give hate speeches, and whether an individual has that intent will be based on the judgement of ministers. Essentially the measures are expanding the definition of people who could potentially be imprisoned or have their freedom restricted from those who do things, to those who think things. The language of the Police gets a bit Minorty Report-ish when they speak of targeting individuals who operate in what they call “pre-criminal space”.

These new measures have a terrifying potential to be used zealously to the point that they are used in situations in which certain “bad” or “extreme” thoughts never actually led to any action being taken and were perhaps never going to lead to any action being taken.

It could mean British citizens being prosecuted in our courts on the basis of their thoughts. The age old test of criminal liability according to Common Law, actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty) will be violated as the courts prosecute based only on the guilty mind (mens rea) in the absence of action (actus reus).

Thought crime has become part of our public life and discourse and we already arrest people simply for what they say, or tweet. All the old customs of English liberty are fading into memory. Now we seem set to officially introduce thought crime into our legal system.

To override the many difficulties of prosecuting thought crime in our criminal justice system (which is set up to protect the rights of the individual) and to pre-empt all the legal challenges it would likely inspire, it is the Home Secretary and ministers who will make judgements, further breaking down the barriers separating the government and the courts that are in place to prevent exactly the abuse of power that these measures represent.

“…because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands power to execute them” – John Locke

The Terrorism Investigation and Prevention Measures will restrict the individual’s freedom of movement and expression without guilt being proven at a fair and public hearing. We have witnessed the erosion over time of Habeas Corpus, jury trial and the presumption of innocence- the finest safeguards of liberty ever conceived- and we are now witnessing their abolition.

These restrictions are also violations of our much ballyhooed “human rights” but luckily these rights come with the conditions, caveats and get out clauses necessary for the government to remove them at will. The Human Rights Act didn’t protect us from New Labour’s bonfire of liberties, it won’t protect us now.

The test that should be applied before introducing legislation in the name of security is to hypothesise whether we can foresee this government, or any future government, and the all the authorities it empowers, potentially abusing these new powers in the future. Any thinking and sceptical person can see these measures have a huge potential for serious abuse.

Throughout history liberty has been abolished and totalitarianism imposed in a sudden revolution or invasion to the tune of marching jack boots. We feel safe and secure in the knowledge that this is unlikely to happen in Britain but we have been lulled into a false sense of security. Our liberal democracy will not be abolished through a flash of violence; the state will become totalitarian incrementally, measure by measure, introduced with consent of a timid and fearful populace cowering from the terrorist threat.

It is unjust and totally contrary to our values for restrictions to be placed on individual freedom without due process. I urge every liberty minded Conservative to dissent; you cannot stand up for, and conserve, British values while violating them in a climate of fear and intimidation.

With the exception of incitement to violence, in all cases speech must be free. In a genuinely free society it is only after a crime has been committed that the law becomes involved. Nor do the authorities have any right to pre-approve speech or publications before they are expressed. Just think of what a sad state of affairs it would be for the police to be poring over speeches and articles for signs of “extremism”. Curbing free speech is setting us on to the road to serfdom and tyranny, a road paved with good intentions and calls for greater security.

By allowing fanatics to speak and publish openly they can be identified, observed and their networks monitored. If we oppress opinions we are merely ensuring that they are expressed in secret, which is dangerous.

The free competition of ideas is essential for societal development and progress, and therein lays the answer. If we allow those who we perceive to have abhorrent and “extreme” views to express them openly we can combat them fiercely. For we know that the ideals, principles and values we hold dear are superior and will endure (if we conserve them).

Our timidity is betraying young Muslims lured into temptation by false prophets and corrupt ideology. The ideas and views of Islamists are not just immoral and disgusting; they are downright stupid, ridiculous and laughable.

Let us speak up for British values and all the virtues of our free society. We have all the cultural muscle we need to face down these pretentious Islamist dogmatists in the open exchange of ideas. Let them speak openly, and we can defeat them through criticism, refutation, ridicule and satire.

By readily betraying our values in the face of terrorism, we are defeated. We are letting them win and we are proving right their assertion that we are weak and hypocritical.

It has been said repeatedly that the proposed security measures are designed to protect “British values”. Well, upholding British values means protecting the principles of equality before the law and freedom of expression.

If David Cameron and Theresa May are unsure as to what constitutes a British value, I’m happy to offer the following examples:

“We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held.”

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

“If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”.

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Celebrate the Magna Carta – and the continuing importance of liberty – with us on June 10th.
Apple will add all iPhone 4 models, the late 2010 13-inch MacBook Air, third-generation AirPort Extreme, and mid 2009 AirPort Time Capsule to its vintage and obsolete products list starting October 31, according to Japanese website Mac Otakara Apple products on the vintage and obsolete list are no longer eligible for hardware service, beyond a few exceptions. Apple defines vintage products as those that have not been manufactured for more than five years but less than seven years ago, while obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than seven years ago. Each of the products added were released between 2009 and 2010.The report specifically pertains to Apple's vintage and obsolete products list in Japan, but the new additions will more than likely extend to the United States, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and Europe regions.Apple already obsoleted CDMA models of the iPhone 4 around the world last month, while the late 2010 MacBook Air joins the mid 2009 iMac, 2010 Mac mini, and mid 2010 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro among Apple's recently obsoleted notebooks.macOS Sierra remains compatible with the late 2010 MacBook Air, while the iPhone 4 cannot be updated beyond iOS 7.1.2. Read how to identify your MacBook Air model or how to identify your iPhone model The current MacBook Air has not been updated in 584 days. Refreshed models with USB-C ports are expected later this month at the earliest.
I know this is not everyone’s dish of tea William Weld, former Massachusetts governor, uttered this one on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when he introduced the topic of climate change. This is a mashup of “not one’s cup of tea” (not one’s preference) and maybe “dish it out” (to dispense something, often verbally)? Or was the speaker just thinking of “cup and saucer” and got the two confused? No one knows except Mr. Weld, and perhaps he doesn’t either. On that note, I think I’ll have a “disha”. A big thanks to two people who heard this one and sent it in almost simultaneously: David Stephens and Donna Calvert. Thanks David and Donna! Advertisements

They would jump on a bullet for him This was uttered when discussing the blind loyalty of Trump supporters. It is a congruent conflation of “take a bullet for (someone)” and “falling (or jumping) on a grenade for (someone)”, both meaning to accept a personally harmful or sacrificial task to protect someone else. Jumping on a bullet doesn’t seem like a great sacrifice to me, so perhaps this speaker was not such a loyal follower. A big thanks to John Kooser for hearing this one.

The Manafort situation throws the whole incentive system on its head Columbia Law School professor Berit Berger uttered this one on the MSNBC show “The 11th Hour with Brian Williams”. She was discussing the pardon system and the Manafort case. This is a mashup of “turn (something) on its head” (to alter something in an unexpected way) and “throw it out the window” (forgotten, disregarded). “Turning” and “throwing” seems to have caused the mixup here. A big thanks to Frank King for hearing this one.

Is it “Defend On Your Own” night? The contributor says her husband says this when she doesn’t feel like cooking for dinner. The malaphor prompts a visual of the family opening the refrigerator and fighting for the best leftovers. This is a mashup of “stand on one’s (own) two feet” (act independently) and “fend for (oneself)” (take care of oneself without the assistance of others). I suppose the speaker was thinking of the word “fend” but uttered “defend” instead. A tip of the hat to Lori Snider for sending this one in!

My hackles were ruffled This was overheard at a nearby table at breakfast. This is a brilliant congruent conflation of “ruffle (ones’) feathers” and “raise (one’s) hackles”, both meaning to make one irritated or angry. “Ruffle” and “raise” both begin with the letter r, possibly contributing to the mix. By the way, do you know what “hackles” are? Hackles are the hairs on the back of an animal’s neck, which stick up when the animal feels fearful or angry (late 1800s). So, the two expressions involve some type of body covering sticking up, a perfect explanation of the mashup. A bravo to Sam Edelmann who heard this one all the way from India.

I’m worried stiff Heard on the MSNBC show with Chris Hayes. This is a conflation of “scared stiff” (utterly terrified) and “worried sick” (very concerned about a person or situation). I have heard this one a lot. “Sick” and “stiff” are similar sounding words, contributing to the mashup. A big thanks to Frank King for hearing this one! If you liked this one, check out my book on malaphors, “He Smokes Like a Fish and other Malaphors”. It’s available on Amazon for a cheap $7.99. Just click on the link – https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692652205
Defending World Champions, European Champions in 2008 and 2012, success at the age-group level, Real Madrid and Barcelona continually top or near the top of the wealthiest clubs list and home grown players much sought after around the world – this is a Golden Age for Spanish soccer ........or is it?

Last week there was a very public reminder that success has not brought benefit to all. Because for all the success achieved over the last 10 years or so Spain has an unsustainable system by which the top two teams – Real Madrid and Barcelona - siphon off so much money that the others are faced with accepting the inevitably of irrelevance or incurring so much debt that bankruptcy becomes just another milestone in the business plan.

Along the way suppliers go unpaid, taxes owing to governments mount and players and support staff are surprised if a pay check arrives on time.

Racing Santander is not a well known name having never won a top honor in their one hundred year history. Fans in North America are more likely to recognize the name on account of US international defender Carlos Bocanegra playing on loan at Santander last season before signing for Chivas USA.

Others with a slightly longer memory may remember when Ukrainian-American businessman Dmitry Piterman bought the club in 2003.

There is nothing particularly unusual with a foreign businessman buying a Spanish soccer team but Piterman was not content to just own the club he wanted to run and manage every aspect of the club.

A short while after buying a 24% stake and controlling interest in the club a TV interviewer asked Piterman is he was not cutting a bit more off than he could chew with his all-encompassing management style/ego-trip.

His response was to say the least sharp and to the point; “There’s a dork running the most powerful country in the world without a qualification to his name. And you ask me for a diploma to run a football team? Give me a break.”

However, Piterman could not get the Spanish Football Federation to budge on the technical qualifications to actually coach the club but they were no match for Dmitry. Piterman employed someone with the appropriate qualifications and installed his stooge as a figure-head coach.

Meanwhile, Piterman accredited himself as the club photographer albeit one who sat next to the bench and barked instructions to his players. The first and possibly only owner/coach/photographer in the game.

Piterman later bought Deportivo Alves but by 2007 he was gone from Spanish soccer. Nonetheless, he is still regarded as being one of the weirdest characters ever to own a Spanish team and that is no mean achievement in a business that spawns them.

But back to this current edition of Racing Santander. Last Thursday, Santander, currently in the third tier of Spanish soccer after suffering two successive demotions took to the field for a Copa del Rey quarter-final second leg match against top flight Real Sociedad.

But that was about as far as it got.

A few days before the scheduled game the Santander players had issued a statement stating that unless the club president and the board of directors resigned en masse, they the players would refuse to play.

The players’ beef was that despite many promises to the contrary the club had not paid them for months.

By kick off time the resignation of the board had not been forthcoming. So when the referee blew for the game to start, Santander, rather than competing for the ball simply stood around the centre circle, arms locked in unison, offering their version of Roberto Duran's famous "No Más."

After a rather one sided 30 or so seconds in which Sociedad knocked the ball around (100% pass completion rates no doubt), referee Jesus Gil Manzan was left with no option but to abandon the match.

The stand taken by the Santander players drew unqualified support …well almost. The Spanish Football Federation (SFF) took a dim view of the players’ actions and banned Santander from next season’s Cup competition and fined the club $4,000.

Most right minded people would point out that rather than making an issue of the Santander protest the SFF is far more culpable for allowing it to get to that stage.

But the situation has become so prevalent that it is doubtful that the SFF would no where to start. Non-payment of wages has been a festering sore for Spanish soccer for many years. Just over two years ago it led to a players strike and at that time it was estimated that players in the top two levels of the Spanish game were essentially subsidizing their respective clubs to the tune of anywhere between $40M to $80M.

Industrial action lasted just one week at the start of the 2011/12 season after both sides agreed on a deal to protect players’ salaries in the event of clubs declaring insolvency.

Nonetheless, unpaid wages and a litany of clubs seeking bankruptcy protection continue to haunt Spanish soccer at all levels. In fact, Spain leads all other leagues with the unenviable record of the most bankrupt teams.

Unpaid taxes have hovered around the $1B for a number of years with the top 20 indebted clubs at the end of the 2011/12 season owing a cumulative total of $4B to creditors.

Underpinning the financially dysfunctional model is a TV rights deal that currently sees Real Madrid and Barcelona pocket around 42% of the revenue while the remainder is split between the other 18 clubs.

Actually, it is not so much a TV deal as a series of deals. But with one eye to the Barclays Premier League (and now Serie A) where TV rights are sold as a package and the money is distributed more equitably although not equally, Spanish clubs have accepted, in principle at least, the selling of rights collectively and that the distribution of income must change.

But accepting a concept in principle is one thing, actually tailoring a binding agreement is something else. Barcelona and Real Madrid have made it clear that they will not accept a deal that gives them less money than they currently receive.

So although there has been talk of the big two receiving a smaller percentage the percentage may drop but Barca and Real except/need the TV pie to grow significantly in order to generate the same or greater cash flow.

The other issue is that the Spanish top league seems intent on re-enacting Nero’s show stopping one night performance in Rome from a few thousand years ago. The intention was to have the new system in place for the 2015/16 season but now the talk is of 2016/17.

Already, La Liga only generates around 50% of the Premier League’s broadcast income and around 75% of what Serie A generates. In the intervening years these gaps are only likely to grow ever larger with every team outside of the big two bearing an excessive burden.

There is, however, one group who changed the way they do business. From 2014/15 onwards 35% of all domestic television revenues will be deducted at source and remitted to the Spanish taxman.

Post-script

One bit of redeeming news is that over the weekend the Racing Santander board was replaced. Conversely, carrying debts of over $65M the future looks bleak for all concerned.
Your marriage has come to an end, and now that you have decided to divorce, you are in the situation of hiring a lawyer. You may even wonder if your services are necessary. Here we will explain why they are.

Surely you know cases of cordial divorces and on good terms, and other catastrophic. In addition to the personality of those involved, this also has to do with the expertise of the lawyers in charge. In general, the less you need to go to court, the less painful and faster the divorce is. But anyway, even when you and your spouse have agreed to divorce, it is advisable that both have legal advice.

And this is because, beyond the emotional consequences that lead to the dissolution of the marriage bond, there are also legal aspects that cannot be ignored. A lawyer specialized in divorces will know how to guide you through this process, solving the pitfalls that arise along the way. Start by asking for references to family and friends. And when you meet with the lawyers, ask about their experience and credentials. Serious lawyers will always be able to provide you with references from other clients.

If you and your spouse have been able to agree on important points such as home, child custody, and joint property, it is even possible for a single lawyer to resolve minor legal issues, such as paperwork. However, if a disagreement arises between the clients, the lawyer has an ethical obligation to transfer at least one of them to another lawyer.

In the most complicated divorces, as if there had been physical or verbal abuse, infidelity or addictions, it is essential to have the services of a lawyer, especially to protect children

Division of property

The more property you and your spouse jointly own the more complicated this process will be. Washington is a community property state. By these statutes, all goods acquired during the marriage, including those made in the name of an individual, are seen as belonging to both parties. In the case of divorce, this means that everything can be divided between you and your spouse equitably. The assets will be distributed so that each party leaves in relatively equal conditions.

Custody of the child

One factor that often causes problems in a divorce is custody of the child. You and your spouse will have to solve these problems. When children come into play, things often heat up and mess up.

The use of an experienced divorce lawyer in these cases can be a great benefit. Not only can it help calm tense situations, but a professional can fight to secure their rights as a parent, protect their guardianship, claim custody, visitation, and much more.

Child support

If there are children involved in your divorce, child support may also come into play. These payments are designed to provide ongoing care for minor children and to cover food, clothing, housing, education and other needs. In general, the party with the most nights will receive payments from the other party.

How do you choose a good family lawyer?

The first thing to look for is the lawyer’s experience in this field. Experience is always a degree. An experienced lawyer knows the repercussions that a certain decision or action can have, knows the family judges, which foot they hobble and which should be the most appropriate strategy to apply in the case in question, knows the casuistry, the details, and their solutions

The second thing to keep in mind is to have “chemistry” with the lawyer. “That you understand and that you understand. This is fundamental. Without trust, the thing does not work.
Ten Years on, New Estimates of the Economic Cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. What have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States to date? What additional bills will come due in the future? Economists and budget analysts have made many estimates since the early 2000s. Only one regularity has emerged from their work: Each new round of estimates is higher than those before.

Last week the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University released a new set of estimates. The numbers are summarized on the web site of the institute’s Cost of War project and detailed in a paper by Professor Neta C. Crawford. The institute’s estimate of the total cost of the two wars now comes to just under $4 trillion.

It wasn’t supposed to cost so much

The wars were not supposed to cost so much. As the administration of President George W. Bush was building a case for the Iraq war in 2002, with some 5,000 American troops already deployed in Afghanistan, the question of cost naturally came up. In September of that year, Lawrence B. Lindsey, then Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a new Iraq war would cost $100 billion, maybe $200 billion at a maximum.

With a midterm election on the horizon, the White House viewed that estimate as shockingly high. The President quickly dismissed Lindsey. Many observers saw his war cost estimate as a major reason. Later that year, Mitchel E. Daniels Jr., then head of the Office of Management and Budget, told the New York Times that $50 to $60 billion would be a more realistic figure, the same or a bit less than the cost of the 1991 Gulf War.

As it turned out, the cost of the Iraq war came to $770 billion over the next twelve years, measured by Defense Department appropriations alone. DoD appropriations for Afghanistan added another $609 billion, pushing the cost of the two wars to well over a trillion, or $1,379 billion to be exact. The following chart, which gives the year-by-year tally, makes Lindsey’s estimates, let alone Daniels’s, look preposterously optimistic.

Getting to Four Trillion

$1,379 billion is a lot of money, but it still isn’t $4 trillion. How do we get from the total DoD appropriations to the larger cost figure that Crawford gives?

We start by adding in three budget items that represent war expenditures by agencies other than DoD. The State Department and U.S. AID spent some $84 billion on reconstruction and development aid in Iraq and Afghanistan. Next comes $19 billion in military aid to Pakistan. Operation Noble Eagle added another $29 billion, largely for mobilizing the National Guard for homeland security operations. That brings the total to just over $1,510 billion.

There is more. The Watson Institute study attributes several more expenditure categories either to the war itself or the climate of war that shaped U.S. policy decisions after 9/11. These include:

$135 billion for medical care and benefits of Iraq and Afghan war veterans.

An estimated $743 billion in additions to the Pentagon’s base budget. Although these funds were not spent directly in the war theaters, the researchers believe they would not have been appropriated had the wars not been undertaken.

$455 billion for homeland security. Again, the assumption is made that much or all of this spending would not have been undertaken but for the war and climate of war.

$130 billion in additional spending on war operations and war-related base budget for 2014.

We are now up to $2,973 billion, roughly $3 trillion, through the projected end of Afghan combat operations in 2014. However, the costs of war will have a long tail that extends for decades after American troops come home. One of the biggest components will be future expenditures for medical care and other benefits for war veterans. The Institute estimates those at $754 billion through 2053, for a total of $3,727 billion.

Finally, there are interest payments. For the most part the wars were financed by borrowing, so the above costs added directly to the federal debt. The Institute study calculates the interest costs of war borrowing at $254 billion through the end of FY 2012. We have now arrived at Watson Institute’s figure of just under $4 trillion.

The Institute suggests that possible future interest payments might eventually add as much as $7 trillion more, but that is far more speculative. Although we can fairly say that war costs added directly to federal deficits in the early years, more recently the size of those deficits and the accumulated debt have begun to affect both taxes and spending for other programs. Without past war expenditures, the federal debt at the end of 2012 would have been about 51 percent of GDP rather than the actual 71 percent. That would have reduced the pressure to raise taxes as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012 and to cut spending by letting the sequester go into effect in 2013. From 2012 on, then, it becomes less reasonable to say that the federal debt would be dollar-for-dollar lower without the wars. Saying that does not diminish the budgetary opportunity cost of war expenditures. It just means that as we go forward, we may bear them in the form of a squeeze on other programs or higher taxes rather than as interest payments on war debt.

What about the cost of human life?

The Watson Institute study addresses only the budgetary costs of the war. Beyond that, there are human costs. Most people would agree that the human costs of war are beyond quantification, and for the most part, I would go along with that. Still, to help put the budgetary costs of the war in perspective, we could try applying statistical value of life methodology to war casualties.

Various U.S. agencies apply statistical values of life to evaluate costs and benefits of life-saving policy measures like improving road safety or reducing air pollution. Courts use statistical value of life numbers in awarding compensation for accidental death. The values of life used in such situations come, among other sources, from studies of the extra pay required to compensate for differences in risk of death among various occupations. These highly imperfect numbers tend to run in the range of $6 to $8 million for the life of an American of working age. The same method can be used to calculate proportionately smaller values for the reduction in quality of life as the result of disability.

Just as a back-of-the envelope exercise, suppose we imagine what the additional budgetary cost would have been if the U.S. government had paid a death benefit of $7 million dollars for each service member killed in action and a $1 million cash benefit for pain and suffering to each person wounded in combat. Applying those numbers to 5,200 killed and 50,000 wounded would add about another $85 billion to the cost of the war. That does not include the statistical value of life of more than 1,000 American soldiers and contractors who died from noncombat causes in the two war theaters, or the almost 1,400 allied military personnel who died there.

The Watson Institute also estimates that between 158,000 and 202,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan during the war. I won’t even pretend to suggest what statistical value of life would fairly compensate those war victims and their families. Pick your own number, multiply it out, and add it to the total.

The bottom line

Many people will object to the entire premise of the Watson Institute study and of this post. They will say that the dollar cost of the war and the statistical value of the lives lost in it are completely beside the point. The war was never about economics; it was about national security, national honor, and bringing peace and democracy to oppressed peoples in far-away lands.

Still, one can’t help but wonder. If Congress had been told that the price tag would be not $50 billion, but $4 trillion, would it have voted so overwhelmingly for the Iraq War Resolution of October 2, 2002?
Jon Hunstman Sr. watches as his son, Republican presidential candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman announces his withdrawal from the race, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, in Myrtle Beach, S.C. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Jon Huntsman, Sr., a wealthy industrialist and a Republican, is endorsing Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) over Republican rising star Mia Love in Utah's 4th congressional district.

"The Matheson and Huntsman families have enjoyed three generations of respected association," Huntsman said in a statement released on Friday afternoon, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. "[Rep. Jim Matheson] is a conservative 'Blue Dog' congressional leader from Utah who represents our state very well."

Huntsman is the father of Jon Huntsman Jr., who previously served as Utah's governor and ran in the Republican presidential primary this election cycle.

Another Huntsman son, David, also endorsed Matheson, as did Abby Huntsman, who is the daughter of Jon Huntsman Jr. and works at HuffPost Live.

Although the Salt Lake Tribune notes that Huntsman Sr. is a "lifelong Republican," he has occasionally donated to Democrats in the past, including fellow Mormon Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Love is one of the Republican Party's top prospects, and she is narrowly leading Matheson in the most recent poll.
The Dane completed another solid day of testing for the French works team at Barcelona on Tuesday, logging 119 laps before running out of fuel and stopping out on circuit in the dying stages.

With only one day left in the car before heading to Melbourne, Magnussen says a clearer idea of where Renault stands in the competitive pecking order is beginning to emerge.

“I think we’re just around the points, maybe just outside, on a good day,” he told media at the end of the day. “If we can get points in Melbourne, that’s a good weekend.

“We’re running different tyres [to our rivals]. If you look at the field today, many people were on mediums, some were on softs, so it’s difficult to say.

“But it looks quite close around the midfield, hopefully it will be close so we can make a difference.”

Ready for Melbourne

Asked what the RS16 was still missing, Magnussen added: “The same as any F1 car – downforce and power. The more of that you have, the faster you go, so that’s always what you look for.

“We can fine-tune what we have, and there’s room for improvement, but we’ve come on a long way the three days I’ve been in the car.

“I feel ready for Melbourne – you can never feel 100 percent ready, but I’d be happy to go there now.”

Magnussen said there would be no major upgrades on the RS16 for Melbourne, but mentioned that there is a new front wing in the pipeline.

“We have a new front wing to try out, hopefully at the end of the week with Jolyon [Palmer],” he said. “So we’ll see how that works. But [besides that] nothing too big for the first race.”
He would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for that elastic waistband.

Tazviona Maluge Bhebe, 40, entered a London liquor store last January, wielding a kitchen knife and disguised with a pair of light blue boxer shorts over his face, according to the Telegraph. Police say the Zimbabwean man then threatened to "use the knife" if store employee Harry Mahalingham, 34, did not give him money.

Mahalingham, however, was not about to give in to demands from a talking pair of underwear. The sales assistant leapt over the counter, grabbed a display sign, and proceeded to beat Bhebe with it, the New Zimbabwe reported.

Ultimately, Bhebe's disguise failed him. Security camera footage shows the boxer shorts slipping off the robber's head, revealing his face. Police identified Bhebe based this footage as well as DNA samples from the underwear, which the would-be thief discarded as he fled the shop, according to UPI.
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Following the publication of Bloomberg political correspondent Joshua Green’s report from within the “Trump Bunker,” former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders noticed a pertinent passage about voter suppression. The outspoken-yet-critical Hillary Clinton surrogate was especially interested in a quote from a senior official touting the Trump campaign’s plans for at least three different campaigns designed to discourage potential Clinton voters from showing up at the polls on November 8th.

The pertinent passage from the Bloomberg article doesn’t mince words. “Voter suppression” is explicitly mentioned, and according to Green’s reporting, that’s because a top adviser said those two exact words together, in the same sentence, while being totally serious:

Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, [Stephen K. Bannon] and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

Green goes on to list specific examples of Trump campaign personnel purchasing ad time at television and radio stations with predominantly African-American or Latino audiences, and inundating the airwaves with materials designed to turn those inclined to vote Democrat away from the polls.

Despite the use of the perilous phrase, however, nothing in Green’s article suggests the Trump campaign is physically preventing people from participating. Even so, Sanders was none too pleased with the report and aired his grievances on Twitter Thursday morning:
By

Speaking at the “A Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity” conference sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the IMK Macroeconomic Policy Institute in Washington on Monday, Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Janet Yellen admitted in her speech that the official unemployment rate of 7.9 percent is actually incorrect because of a variety of factors.

According to Yellen, who is considered a potential successor to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, stated that the unemployment rate is actually 14.4 percent. This number includes about 800,000 discouraged workers who have given up seeking employment and roughly eight million workers who are in part-time jobs but would prefer to work a full-time job.

“The unemployment rate now stands at 7.9 percent. To put this number in perspective, while that’s a big improvement from the 10 percent reached in late 2009, it is now higher than unemployment ever got in the 24 years before the Great Recession,” said Yellen in her prepared remarks.

“Moreover, the government’s current estimate of 12 million unemployed doesn’t include 800,000 discouraged workers who say they have given up looking for work. And, as exhibit 6 shows, 8 million people, or 5.6 percent of the workforce, say they are working part time even though they would prefer a full-time job. A broader measure of underemployment that includes these and other potential workers stands at 14.4 percent.”

The former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco also conceded that the poverty rate is a lot higher than it had been for the past decade and presently stands at 15 percent of the general population in the United States. The results of the recession, says Yellen, have been consequential for these individuals.

“Even those today who are fortunate enough to hold jobs have seen their hourly compensation barely keep pace with the cost of living over the past three years, while labor’s share of income – as measured by the percent of production by nonfinancial corporations accruing to workers as compensation – remains near the postwar low reached in 2011,” stated Yellen. “It will be a long road back to a healthy job market. It will be years before many workers feel like they have regained the ground lost since 2007.”

Despite Yellen’s admission that the federal government’s unemployment numbers are suppressed, her figures, according to other economists, are several percent lower than other projections. The unofficial unemployment rate is seen at 22.5 percent.

Indeed, the unemployment statistics have been revised since the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Officials either insert or delete specific equations, workers and numbers to match their public policies and provide the nation’s citizens false data to generate support from voters.

Economic Collapse News reported in October that John Williams of ShadowStats.com noted that if the federal government measured unemployment the way the U.S. did during the time of the Great Depression then the numbers would be dramatically higher.

Nevertheless, Yellen also admitted that even though the Federal Reserve has taken numerous actions, like implementing low interest rates, which she pointed out hasn’t done much to increase spending, the recovery has been slow.

“After a lengthy recession that imposed great hardships on American workers, the weak recovery has made the past five years the toughest that many of today’s workers have ever experienced,” added the former Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors in the President Bill Clinton administration.

In December, the Fed confirmed that it will keep key short-term interest rate at or near zero percent as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent. However, it all depends on how the U.S. economy gets to that unemployment level. If the jobless number, for instance, dips below 6.5 percent because workers are exiting the labor force then Bernanke would still not raise rates.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, stated in a video at the time that Bernanke is throwing the U.S. dollar over the currency cliff with his policies.

“The only variable is: how long can Ben Bernanke get away with lying and pretending there is no inflation? How much inflation can he create?” asked Schiff in his video. “By expanding your balance sheet by over $1 trillion a year, that’s massive inflation that is the definition of inflation. He is inflating the money supply. Prices are going to rise in response to that. The question is: how long can he convince the world that prices aren’t rising, despite all the inflation he is creating?”

This content has been created by Economic Collapse News and is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can supply a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact sgo@economiccollapsenews.com.
Edoardo Mortara has taken pole position for the FIA GT World Cup qualifying race in a close-fought qualifying session dominated by Mercedes-AMG GT3s at Macau on Friday afternoon.

The Mercedes-AMG Team Driving Academy driver posted a time of 2:17.565 in the closing stages after battling with Daniel Juncadella, Raffaele Marciello, Augusto Farfus and Robin Frijns throughout the 30-minute session.

Juncadella will line up alongside Mortara after setting a lap time 0.282 seconds slower than the five-time Macau winner.

The top four grid positions were secured by Mercedes-AMG drivers.

Maro Engel and Marciello will start from third and fourth in their GruppeM-run Mercedes, with Audi Sport Team WRT’s Nico Mueller the best non-AMG entrant in fifth.

Frijns looked set to take a strong grid position after topping Free Practice 2 earlier in the day but a collision with the barrier took him out of contention for much of the session.

As a result, the No. 1 Audi R8 LMS will take the start of the qualifying race from 17th.

The qualifying race will get underway at 12:25 p.m. local time on Saturday.

RESULTS: Qualifying
Even as the freshly minted Obama administration was pledging a "new era of open government" in 2009, officials were quietly adding new rules that had the potential to slow down public requests for documents.

Those rules, detailed in memos reviewed by FoxNews.com, could even trip up present-day efforts to dig into the IRS' practice of targeting conservative groups. The rules detailed in the memos largely emanated from the Treasury Department and, specifically, the IRS.

"It would seem to repudiate this notion that this is going to be the most transparent government in history," said Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, the group that first obtained the memos.

[pullquote]

The memos follow reports about the administration's use of private email accounts, and coincide with ongoing debate about government transparency -- particularly with recent disclosures about widespread surveillance programs.

More On This...

Epstein said the document request procedures are "troubling" since the media are "really concerned about the limits of government power."

According to the documents, the Treasury Department in 2009 set up an additional review for requests involving "sensitive information," which covered a broad range of items. The White House sometimes got involved, slowing down the process. The IRS also acknowledged having another review process for requests from "major media," but not for requests from private individuals.

Members of the media often try to obtain documents not readily available by citing a law known as the Freedom of Information Act. The Treasury Department, though, in late 2009 erected speed bumps for some so-called FOIA requests.

The rules were detailed in a November 2010 memo and report sent from the Treasury inspector general to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

The documents showed the Treasury Department set up an additional "formal level of review" for requests for "sensitive information." This category would cover everything from emails to memos to calendars to travel logs for top department officials, legal advisers, senior advisers and others.

Once a request was deemed "sensitive," it would then go before a "review committee," made up of officials from several Treasury offices.

Further, the document said a special report would be prepared for IRS requests from "major media." This covers requests from traditional news media as well as bloggers, and according to the report covered information that "was likely to attract news media or congressional interest, involved large dollar amounts, or involved unique or novel issues."

This report would then be sent to a higher-up in the division who decided whether the material should be disclosed.

The report repeatedly said that, in most cases, political appointees were not involved in these decisions, and that the agencies have no procedures to allow that.

But Epstein said these rules could cause problems as Congress and the media dig deeper into the origin of the IRS practice of singling out conservative groups for additional scrutiny.

He pointed to another memo, dated April 15, 2009, from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig that urged "executive agencies" to consult with his office "on all document requests that may involve documents with White House equities." Craig said this pertains to everything from FOIA requests to congressional requests to subpoenas.

This practice apparently dates back to 1993. The Treasury IG memo cited this, and described the White House involvement as "minimal and limited." However, the report also said the White House involvement "was responsible in several cases for adding a significant processing delay," which in Treasury's case slowed them down.

"It actually is heavily ironic in the realm of transparency," Epstein said.

He pointed to edicts and memos early on in the first term of the administration stressing transparency. Obama issued a January 2009 directive calling for an "unprecedented level of openness."

Attorney General Eric Holder in March 2009 directed all Executive Branch departments to use a "presumption of openness" when dealing with FOIA requests.

To that end, the administration has instituted several other transparency initiatives. It has followed through on requiring Cabinet secretaries to hold Internet town hall discussions, set up a comprehensive website to track stimulus spending, and set up a national declassification center.
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The Democratic ground has shifted in New York. Yes, the polls suggest Hillary Clinton will win, maybe even handily, Tuesday in what, for want of a more compelling alternative, must be called her home state.

But let’s cut to the chase. Going back to the 1950s, the New York primary was the stop on the national schedule where the candidates pledged their loyalty to Israel. I remember very clearly the first New York primary I ever covered, in 1988. That was the year that Ed Koch, then the mayor, famously said that Jews would have to be “crazy” to vote for Jesse Jackson.

But New York has changed, and its Democratic party has changed dramatically since Koch endorsed Al Gore, who, stuck in third place in a three-way race, opened New York’s contest by accusing Michael Dukakis of putting “public pressure on Israel” due to his a “naive legalism, an exaggerated faith in the United Nations, and a seeming reluctance to ever have the United States act on its own when necessary.”

From there, it was off to the races as Koch endorsing Gore and firing some wild shots at Dukakis and especially Jackson.

That 1988 primary was the worst, but in just about every New York primary since, candidates in both parties have competed to out-Israel each other, which has usually meant adopting not merely pro-Israel talking points but pro-Likud ones.

I expressed the fear after Sanders won Wisconsin that Clinton might try to turn New York into an Israel referendum. She could have. And maybe she would have if the polls were closer. But she has not.

Not only that. The needle moved significantly, and astoundingly, in the other direction. Here, Sanders deserves tremendous credit.

He said at last Thursday’s debate: “As somebody who is 100 percent pro-Israel, in the long run—and this is not going to be easy, God only knows, but in the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.”

An acknowledgement that Palestinians are human beings—during a New York primary, no less!

Clinton could have—and 12 or so years ago, undoubtedly would have—responded by saying something like until the Palestinians get better leaders and stop teaching hatred to their children, my posture won’t change. Not only did she not do that, but Sanders forced her to acknowledge the point.

She said: “As Secretary of State for President Obama, I’m the person who held the last three meetings between the President of the Palestinian Authority and the Prime Minister of Israel. … Three long meetings. And I was absolutely focused on what was fair and right for the Palestinians. I was absolutely focused on what we needed to do to make sure that the Palestinian people had the right to self-government.”

Sanders is to be commended for this anti-pandering—it could herald the start of a positive change in the way Democrats at least talk about the Middle East. But he was also able to get away with it because New York has changed so much. In 2011, Ed Koch came from seemingly nowhere to hijack the special election to replace Anthony Weiner in the House, turning it into a nationally viewed referendum on Obama’s Israel policies and costing Democrats what had seemed like a safe seat in the process. That was his last hurrah, and may have also been the last one for the staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrats who were once a dominant force in the party’s politics.

The Jews who remain in the party, especially those younger than 40 or so, are much more anti-Likud than the generation that’s been dying off (if Koch were still alive, he’d probably have popped off about Sanders’s comment, and we’d have stormed our way back to 1988 again).

On that one, Sanders showed that he’s more in touch with the current mindset of a crucial New York constituency than Clinton is. But with regard to African-American and Latino voters, especially those older than 40 (which is to say most of them), he still displays no feel at all for them, and no intrinsic empathy. Carrying on as he has about the South being “conservative” is, as I wrote last week, insulting to black voters everywhere. I’d have to bet this is a big topic of discussion on New York black radio, and was Sunday in the social halls of AME churches from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

If Clinton wins, the margin will again be provided by these voters. I’ll be very interested to see what the tallies are in state’s three political regions: the city, the suburbs (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam), and upstate. If the polls are right and Clinton wins by double digits, she should carry them all; and with 247 total delegates at stake (not including the supers), the difference between a 12-point win and a three-point win could amount to 12 or 13 delegates—a huge difference at this point in the campaign.

I was standing in that field on Pat Moynihan’s farm that day in July 1999 when Clinton first put herself out there as New York’s future senator. She served the state by all accounts well, well enough that the Republicans couldn’t muster up a serious candidate against her when she ran for reelection, and well enough, if the polling holds up, to push her across the finish line tomorrow.

But if this New York primary is remembered in the future for anything, it’ll be remembered as the one that finally buried some nasty ghosts from 1988, and it’ll be Sanders who will deserve the credit for that.
Call Goes Out for Bellator Reality Series Tryouts

Along with Bellator Fighting Championships’ move from MTV2 over to Spike TV in January, the promotion has also announced that it intends to air a new reality series on its new network.

There have been few details released about the new reality series, but Bellator on Monday put out the call for open tryouts.

The tryouts are open for the 155 and 170-pound weight classes. Any fighter that applies must have at least three professional victories on their record and must not have an equal or greater number of losses than wins. All applicants must also be over 21 years of age.

The Bellator open tryouts are slated for Nov. 10 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the American Top Team gym in Coconut Creak, Fla.

Applications can be downloaded at http://2.images.spike.com/downloads/bellator/Bellator-Long-App.pdf and video submission sent to CastingBellator@gmail.com.

The man in charge of developing the Bellator reality series is award-winning producer Bertrand van Munster, who was behind the CBS hit The Amazing Race and several other series.

The reality series format has been a big hit in the past for Spike TV when it partnered with the UFC for The Ultimate Fighter.

Stay tuned to MMAWeekly.com for more Bellator news and updates.
Uruguay is set to introduce legislation allowing the state to sell and distribute marijuana, a first in Latin America.

The measure was one of 15 measures to fight crime presented by President Jose Mujica's administration.

The goal was for "strict state control over the distribution and production" of cannabis, said Defence Minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro.

The government will also urge that marijuana sales be legalised worldwide, Huidobro said, adding the measure could discourage the use of so-called hard drugs.

Marijuana consumption is already legal in Uruguay.

"We want to fight against two different things: one is drug consumption and the other is drug trafficking. We think the ban on certain drugs is creating more problems in society than the drug itself," the minister told a news conference.

"Homicides related to settling scores have increased and that's a clear sign that certain phenomena are appearing in Uruguay that didn't exist before," he said.

The bill would legalise and set rules for the production and sale of marijuana but would not allow people to grow the plant for their own personal use.

The proposals also include increased prison time for cases of police corruption, and tougher sentences for criminal youths.

The government did not however give details on how the new system would work.

In Uruguay about $75m changes hands each year in the illegal marijuana trade, according to official estimates.

As of last year, 20 per cent of people between 15 and 65 years old reported they had smoked marijuana at least once and about 5 per cent of respondents were habitual users.

A government survey puts the percentage of the population that consumed marijuana over the last year at 8.3 per cent, compared to one per cent who consumed cocaine in the same time.

The proposal to legalise the marijuana market is one of 15 crime-fighting measures that include tougher penalties for police corruption, crack-cocaine trafficking and juvenile offenders.
CLOSE Anheuser-Busch InBev sealed a deal months in the making to acquire its biggest rival, SABMiller, for $105 billion. Video provided by Newsy Newslook

Belgium's Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns Budweiser and is the world's largest brewer, has agreed to buy No. 2 SABMiller of Britain for $107 billion. (Photo11: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

Anheuser-Busch InBev on Wednesday formalized a deal to acquire its British-South African rival SABMiller for $107 billion, creating a gigantic global beer company hoping to reach deeper into developing markets.

The companies had been weighing a deal since mid-September, with SABMiller rejecting several overtures from the Belgian-based AB InBev before accepting the deal. It still faces approval by regulators.

The acquisition gives Budweiser maker AB InBev access to many emerging markets. SABMiller gets 35% of its revenue from Latin America and 34% from Africa.

“We've admired this company for a very long time. The company has a strong portfolio of brands," AB InBev CEO Carlos Brito said on a conference call. "Together, AB InBev and SABMiller create a truly global business."

AB InBev will pay about $67 per share in cash for most of SABMiller's stock, though shareholders can also elect to receive alternative compensation involving a mix of cash and stock.

As part of the deal, Molson Coors will buy out SABMiller's 58% stake in their joint venture, called MillerCoors, in a deal valued at $12 billion in cash, reflecting an effort to appease regulators concerned about the combined giant's size.

Together, a combined AB InBev and SABMiller would control almost 30% of global beer sales. Brito declined to estimate the combined company's global market share following the sale of MillerCoors, saying that most of its business "is done through local brands."

But the combined company will have total revenue of about $64 billion, excluding SABMiller's joint ventures.

Brito told investors that the two companies have a "largely complementary" footprint and that the new company will "take its place as one of the leading consumer products companies."

He said the company would seek expeditious regulatory approval and hopes to close the deal in the second half of 2016.

SABMiller's London-listed shares were up 1.9% after the announcement. AB Inbev's shares rose 0.8% in Brussels.

AB InBev is betting that it can leverage the broader footprint to pursue growth opportunities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also expects to save $1.4 billion per year by combining operations. SABMiller had already signaled plans to shed $1.05 billion in costs, which will continue.

Brito said 35% of the "synergies" will come from administrative overhead and overlapping headquarter operations. The company also plans to save money through increased purchasing power, packaging and brewery distribution.

The company is paying a premium of about 50% above SABMiller’s stock price on Sept. 14, the last day before media reports disclosed the acquisition talks.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.

CLOSE Francesco Curto, of Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, and Bloomberg's Matt Campbell, discuss AB InBev's formal offer to buy SABMiller and what it means for investors. They speak with Manus Cranny on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse." Bloomberg

Kim Hjelmgaard on Twitter: @khjelmgaard.

Nathan Bomey on Twitter: @NathanBomey.

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Crusader Kings II : The Middle-Earth Project mod 0.3.1b has been released, you can download the new full build below.

Posted by Lonhaldar on Jul 27th, 2014

Middle Earth Project 0.3.1b

Download CK2:MEP 0.3.1b

This is a full update of the Middle Earth Project mod for Crusader Kings II. This update is compatible with version 2.1.6 of Crusader Kings II.

This is a beta and there will be bugs. Nothing is set in stone and we will appreciate any input that you think might improve the mod. An Extended Map

Look into Belegaer, the Great Sea of the West, and discover the borders of the lost lands of Beleriand and Numenor. New islands, like Tol Fuin or Tol Morwen appears now. We reworked too some areas, like Bellakar, or the areas of Gundabad and the Misty Mountains.

Welcome to Gwaihir, the Lord of the Eagles, and all his kin in Rosroval, the "Peak of the Eagles". The Line of Golfimbul is still alive, and Mount Gram can prepar to war once again. All Eriador fears the new powers of the orcs of the North now!

Create your own kingdom of middlemen in Enedwaith, and become the High King of Isenvale, to balance the power of both Arnor and Gondor!

Craft your own objects !

As a Dwarf or a Noldor craftsman, you're now able to craft your own objects. Create some jewels, forge weapons, and improve your skills to be the proud heir of Telchar of Nogrod, or Celebrimbor of Eregion !

As a Noldor master or legendary craftsman, reconquer Ost-in-Edhil, and try to rebuild the Gwaith-i-Mirdain, the brotherhood of Celebrimbor, where were forged the Rings of Power. Gather the other craftsmen, and together, you'll give prestige and glory to your kin !

Use the Rings of the Dwarves to create more wealth in your mines, or try to find the One Ring, and maybe you'll find a Lesser Ring, these rings forged by the Noldor of Eregion as essays of the Rings of Power.

The Palantiri

Now, the Palantiri are all created, one trait by Stone. Try to keep the stones in your dynasty, and gain a lot of prestige with them !

As one of the guardians of the Palantiri, use your Stone during Wars to call your friends to the battlefield !

As an elf or a numenorean, travel to Elostirion, and try to see the Lights of Tol Eresseä through the Stone of Elendil, the only one who wasn't connected with the others in Middle-earth. You can gain more prestige, or become more depressed... Will you be as perceptive than Elendil the Great?

More corrections...

- Fixed some bugs, like the "the Old" for elves and dwarves

- Random generated numenoreans characters will now have some chance to gain one of the blood of numenor

- Colonize and Purge the provinces of your vassals

There is much more, and you can read the full changelog included with the download. That's all for now, we hope you enjoy this next step in the MEP ladder.

Want to help? We are still in need of modders in scripting and events, as well as other things.Contact Redit or Lon here or on the Paradox Forums if you are interested in joining the MEP team.
BOSTON -- When the Toronto Marlies of the American Hockey League helped out with a reading program in a number of local schools last season, the experience was a little different for one of the players than the rest.

The kids were tasked with doing projects on one of 8-10 books chosen for the curriculum, which was sponsored by the Marlies along with Scotiabank and First Book Canada; the winning class got to go to a Marlies game. One of the options was "The Bambino and Me." Another was "Hockey Hero."

Each was written by Hyman.

Becoming an author wasn't exactly what Hyman had planned to do with his life. His goal was to become an NHL player, a dream he reached with his debut on Feb. 29; that it was with the Toronto Maple Leafs was doubly special for a kid who grew up in Toronto. That was what he would have said, had he been asked, about his aspirations back in elementary school or middle school or high school. Hockey was always his first love.

But somewhere along the way Hyman found a parallel path, one that might last beyond the 24-year-old's playing days.

"I didn't really expect much from writing," Hyman said Saturday. "I wasn't trying to go out there and be an author. But it's a big passion of mine and I just really, really enjoyed it, so once everything came together it was a no-brainer for me that I wanted to keep pursuing writing."

It started when Hyman was in seventh grade, when he wrote the story that would become the basis for "Hockey Hero" for a short-story competition. He won. His father helped him explore the idea of self-publishing the book, which he eventually did. Inquiries led the pair to freelance book editor Janice Weaver, who often works on children's books.

They began working together on "The Bambino and Me" when Hyman was in high school. The book is built, in parts, around real-life quotes from Babe Ruth.

"What I really liked about that project, the thing that kind of struck me about it first, was that Zach had used so many of Babe Ruth's own words to tell the story," Weaver said. "I thought it was a really nice way of bringing the factual elements into a fictional story and giving you a good flavor for what that larger-than-life person was like. I thought it was clever and I thought it showed a maturity in his writing that you don't expect to see in a story written by a high school kid."

The collaboration with Weaver eventually led Hyman to work with Penguin Random House with "The Bambino and Me" and, eventually, the revamped "Hockey Hero" being published under the Tundra Books imprint.

That's not all.

His third book, "The Magician's Secret," is in its final stages, with just the art to be completed; Hyman expects it to be published in the beginning of 2017. It's expected to be followed by a fourth book with a basketball focus. "The Magician's Secret" is his first book without a sports theme.

The books are written in the many off-hours of a hockey player's life, at home and in the summers, when a break from training gives Hyman the time and ability to sit with the words.

Then he gets to share them.

"It's fun to write for kids because I remember when I was a kid and I always used to love reading children's books and looking at the pictures and being all excited. It's a lot of fun when you read the books to kids and see their faces light up," Hyman said, his own face aglow.

"That's definitely a big reason why I write children's books. It's fun for me too."

It's clear that Hyman's other career impacts his writing, his sense of hard work and goals and dreams. He has been through it. He has seen how that translates into real life, into finding himself in exactly the place he always hoped he would, playing for his hometown hockey team, serving as a role model to the kids he entertains, whether on the ice or in his books.

"One of the things I really love about the books is they have a sort of old school message to them," Weaver said. "A simple kind of nostalgic, in some cases, message to them. And a lot of the messages of the books are about dreaming big, following your dreams, working hard to achieve your dreams.

"I think that's very much reflective of the way -- from what I know of Zach -- of how he lives his own life and how he conducts himself in terms of his athletic career, so I think there's a real dovetailing there between the way he lives his life and what he believes on a daily basis and tries to put into action, and the messages that he's trying to convey through his books."

It means something to him. It's something that's real to him.

As Hyman's career has taken off on the ice -- he has four goals and five assists in 27 games for the Maple Leafs -- he continues to learn the lessons that likely one day will be encapsulated in future books, future labors of love.

"It's just a big passion of mine and I'm fortunate to be working with awesome people who help me out along the way," Hyman said. "Just focusing on hockey and writing is something that I'll obviously continue to do.

"Writing is going to last longer than hockey. You can't play hockey forever, but [you] definitely can write forever. Just enjoying it; it's amazing. I get to live the life of a hockey player and also have writing. It's pretty special. I'm really lucky."
Sharp Uptick in Wildfires Strains Great Plains Agencies

The Great Plains had long been spared the agony of frequent wildfires — until recent years.

A satellite analysis published by scientists this week showed the number of large wildfires burning up swaths of the Great Plains rose 350 percent during 30 years, while the total area burned each year increased four-fold.

Smoke from a 2016 wildfire in South Dakota.

Credit: orientalizing/Flickr

“There haven’t really been very many large wildfires in the Great Plains — until recently,” said Victoria Donovan, a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska who led the analysis, published Friday in Geophysical Research Letters.

A variety of factors are thought to be behind the wildfires, including warming caused by fossil fuel pollution, growing populations and the expansions of cities and towns, invasions by fire-prone weeds, and the after-effects of a century of firefighting, which allowed flammable trees and dry grass to build up in wilderness and rural areas.

“Obviously it’s being driven by some sort of change,” Donovan said. “It’s largely been seen as a low risk area for wildfire. We’ve had highly successful suppression efforts over the past century.”

The spreading rash of fires across the flat and grassy states west of the Mississippi River has jolted a region unaccustomed them, even as it has been overshadowed in the news and dwarfed in firefighting budgets by bigger wildfires tearing up the West Coast.

“The low frequency tends to lull all of us into a sense of complacency,” said Michele Steinberg, manager of wildland fire operations at the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association. “We have a long way to go with education, particularly for folks where they have not seen a lot of fire.”

Because wildfires have been relatively rare in the Great Plains until recently, many states and counties have come to depend heavily on each other for assistance when they strike. “They rely on their neighbors,” Steinberg said. But the shared firefighting resources are becoming strained as more fires need to be fought.

“You’re seeing conditions that are just right for not only ignition of fire, but also fire spread,” Steinberg said.

The new analysis also examined rising instances of wildfires in states from Texas to North Dakota, altogether spanning nearly a third of the country, including some of its most remote areas.

The study showed there had been a “pulse” during the last decade in the number of fires and acres burned in the Great Plains, said Dirac Twidwell, another University of Nebraska scientist involved with the study.

“It’s not individual fires getting bigger, like some might expect, it’s just a result of having more fires,” Twidwell said. “Fire departments don’t have the kinds of staffing and resources that states with a history of wildfire do.”

The rise in wildfires in the Great Plains mirrors similar changes underway elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad as the climate and environment change, and as humans spark fires at times of year when they wouldn’t naturally strike, reshaping landscapes and ecosystems.

“2016 was a big fire year in the Great Plains, and 2017 has been no slouch,” said John Abatzoglou, a University of Idaho scientist. He wasn’t involved with the new analysis; his research has shown fire risks are greatest in the Great Plains when hot and windy conditions follow wet years. “The increases over the past three decades in the region are similar to those in neighboring regions.”

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Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to fires in Arizona. They were not part of the Great Plains analysis.
These discussions will continue in coming weeks with other Times editors and reporters.

Translating the Paper to the Web

Q: I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with the publisher of the local daily paper here (there is only one local daily paper here). I told her of my preference to get my local and national news online, browsing several news sites as a part of my morning routine. However, I quickly discovered that I was missing important stories that had prominent placement in the print version but were impossible to find in the online version. In trying to explain my difficulty with her site, I could only think of The Times as an excellent example of online news reporting.

So, my question is, what makes your site such a great online version of your print product? Where are they going wrong? Why can’t I explain it clearly to someone else (don’t answer this)?

Also, you use a serif font that I think is difficult to read in general, although it does not bother me on your site. Why did you choose what I think is such an non-traditional font for your site?

A: First, thanks for the kind words. Whatever success we've had with making NYTimes.com a useful and engaging source for online news, in my opinion, comes from realizing that we're not just trying to re-create what's available to readers in the printed newspaper.

Rather, we're trying to create something that's true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.

This means we pay a lot of attention to how people use our content online. That is, not just how they read it, but how they make use of it: how they might scan the page haphazardly rather than diligently reading from top to bottom; what parts of the page they look to first and last; what they expect to change from visit to visit; which visual cues are meaningful for them and which design flourishes they find useless.

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There are a multitude of factors like these that we’re continually evaluating, though I admit that as an online business we’re certainly not alone in being mindful of them. I think what we do differently from any number of other sites, whether established news organizations or young companies, is that we very expressly try to maintain continuity with a brand that’s over 150 years old. So, sometimes we may purposefully approach a design problem differently from how our colleagues in the print art department might, but just as often we’ll try to bend the technology so that it makes sense when seen through the lens of The Times’s visual legacy. That might be the intangible quality you’re talking about.

Visual Consistency

Q: Regardless of platform or browser, NYTimes.com looks the same. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because of inconsistencies between browsers and how they handle HTML and CSS. How do you do it and with which tools?

A: It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

One of the things that makes my job here so satisfying is that, among all of these many different kinds of collaborators, there’s a healthy respect for design. Everyone is committed to putting the best face forward for The Times — including paying close attention to visual integrity of the site. Regardless of the tools you use, it's really only that kind of commitment that makes it possible to maintain consistency on a site as sprawling as ours.

The Sources of Inspiration

Q. I was wondering how much influence the design of other media Web sites has on your design choices for The New York Times's Web site? For instance, I think The Guardian has one of the most visually appealing front pages of any online news outlet I've ever seen — though the underlying pages are not nearly as beautiful. Do you look for direction or inspiration from other sites?

A. We definitely look at the competition from other news organizations, both for how design informs the way they present the news, and for how they've designed and integrated tools for making the news more useful to their audiences. (And yes, over at The Guardian, their creative director, Mark Porter, and his team are doing some really terrific work that we admire greatly.)

However, that's only part of the homework we do. I think it would be a fallacy for us to think that we're only competing for the attention of a discrete "media" audience. Internet usage is very eclectic by nature, and it's the responsibility of my team to be conscious of that.

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So, just as often, we draw inspiration from what's happening in digital media at large, regardless of whether or not a news organization is explicitly involved, and often regardless of whether a given digital product deals in the news at all. That means that sites of miscellaneous classification like YouTube, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook — and countless others, many of which might have only recently emerged from their founders' garages — are of as much interest to us as top-shelf competitors like The Guardian and our other peers.

What Does a Design Director Do?

Q. Can you give a little more insight into exactly what you do as a design director ­ does it involve actual production work, is it purely supervisory, or does it fall somewhere in the middle?

Also, what do titles and terms like information architect, design technologist and user experience mean? I've heard of them used elsewhere, but what does it mean for The Times?

A. The question of "What do you and your design team do?" is pretty hard to answer without resorting to a tremendous amount of off-putting and, frankly, loopy jargon. I'm going to try, but forgive me in advance if I lapse back into it.

When most people hear "design" and "NYTimes.com" together, they usually think of the wonderful interactive graphics or multimedia storytelling done by our colleagues on the graphics and multimedia teams. (In fact, Steve Duenes, the graphics director, offered lots of insight into much of this work in his own Talk to the Newsroom session some weeks ago.)

Though we do work with these teams in a support capacity, it's not the core of what we do. If you think of their work as design for the content that appears on our site, then you can think of the work that my team does as design for the framework for that content. Which is to say, we create the underlying platform on top of which the content sits.

Even setting aside the vast amounts of original reporting that we publish every day, our site is still under more or less continuous revision, so that framework is constantly being tended to. We're always looking at ways to improve various sections of the site, tweaking our templates, adding new features and tools and removing impediments to people's consumption and use of the news.

As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).

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You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it's used by visitors to the site. Of course, it's not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it's really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.

Finally, my job doesn't involve as much hands-on design work as it would in an ideal world. The majority of my day is spent either in a supervisory capacity, reviewing and discussing work done by my staff, or sitting in meetings, planning for upcoming enhancements to the site and how design can make them happen. The way I usually put it is that my job as design director isn't actually to do great design, but rather to help create and sustain the conditions under which great design can happen.

The Design of Blogs

Q. I love all the blogs springing up on NYTimes.com. Can you talk about their design and specifically their logos?

A. I'm especially proud of the design work that's gone into our blogs for many reasons, but especially for how our designers have dealt with sheer scale. Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we've created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.

The challenge is even more complex when you consider that, though each blog has its own needs, the vast majority must be based on a single template (within WordPress, our Web log publishing system) that manages all of the blogs together. As you can imagine, that requires that the template be very versatile and that our designers be very nimble.

So by virtue of the fact that we're constantly launching new blogs, we're also in a perpetual state of revision and refinement. We're fine-tuning the typography, adding new features to the right-hand column, incorporating new kinds of media content into the articles, etc. All of which is work that may then be reflected back on the other blogs. Jeremy Zilar, the design technologist in my group whose primary responsibility is to develop and support these blogs, said, "Every blog we launch seems to bring something new to our template that every other blog can benefit from."

As for the the logos that we've developed for the blogs, that too has been an evolution. In the beginning, we were very liberal with our use of art, and gave illustrators lots of creative leeway to render a distinct visual identity at the top of each new blog.

Over time though, we've refined our approach so that the the typography is more or less consistent, and that each logo has a compact, iconographic illustration to identify it. In one of my favorite examples of our Web staff working with our colleagues in the print art department, almost all of these logos are a tight collaboration between Rebecca Paterson, one of our very talented digital designers, and Nicholas Blechman, who art directs the Book Review section.

Photo

For each new blog, they work together to brainstorm a concept, select a freelance illustrator, and art direct its execution. Within that fairly restrictive formula we've set for the art, I think they've done an amazing job cultivating a great variety of artful logos.

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The Publishing Software

Q. I was wondering how permissive the New York Times's content management system is with custom layout. Is there only one template that an article must follow, or are there exceptions? If there are exceptions, how do you handle them?

Q. How involved are you in the design of the content management system that feeds the NYTimes.com front end? The posting of news and videos to a popular media site in a timely manner requires a highly usable and dummy-proof solution. Is your back end as user-friendly as your front end? Cheers from a fellow Otis grad.

A. Our content management system — the software that we use to publish our articles on our Web site — is based on a finite number of templates. So in large measure we're resigned to working within those pre-determined layouts. The range of expression that you see day to day on the home page and on our various section fronts is really a credit to the editors and producers who do the actual publishing of the articles. They use the C.M.S. the most and have learned to be very creative with it. (My design group is focused on the site as a platform, and we don't often get involved with the daily layout of the news.)

If there are any shortcomings in the range of expression that those templates offer, it's the job of my design group, working with our technology team, to create new ones that better suit the needs of the editing staff. This can be a lengthy and involved process. Often it doesn't make sense to invest the effort in creating a brand new template if the needs it will address are singular or short-term.

So we will often — not frequently, but often enough — try to work around the limitations of the existing templates using custom code, essentially "hacking into" our own templates to achieve a unusual presentation. A great example of this is the work that our design technologist Bart Szyszka did for our recent series on China and the environment, "Choking on Growth."

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These work-arounds aren't ideal of course, so we try to be sparing in our use of them. We want to maintain as much design flexibility as we can, of course, but we also have to be practical about the technical implications. Pushing the C.M.S. too far in these ways would be untenable. Our director of content management systems, Brad Kagawa, said, "The need to structure data" — encode the content in such a way that it makes sense to our systems — "is sometimes at odds with the desire to have custom layouts. With the C.M.S. publishing to dozens of delivery channels (Web, RSS, mobile, Times Reader, the Times archive, various partner feeds, Amazon Kindle, etc.) we have to store everything in a structured and non-Web-centric way but at the same time retain that flexibility."

As a result, the design team is actively involved in the design and planning of our next generation C.M.S. Alex Wright, the information architect who is heading up the design aspect of it, said: "As you might imagine, it's a large undertaking. We're constantly making adjustments to the interface as we develop new ideas about how to streamline the publishing process while supporting the complex requirements of a large news-gathering organization."

Interaction With Reporters and Editors

Q. You have stated that you and your staff are involved with what you describe as the framework for NYTimes.com. To what extent do you and your staff interact with reporters and editors? How does that work? Assuming you do work with the reporters and editors, is that the same as what happens with the graphics team? In any case, how does your team work with the graphics team?

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A. We do work with editors and reporters quite a bit. More often than not, in fact.

Going back for a moment to the subject of the last question: blogs are a great example of how we work together. Each blog we create begins as a conversation between editors and designers. Because they're so highly focused on specific subject areas, we really try hard to create the right design solution for those particular editorial needs.

For some of our more standard journalism, our teams work together to create special layouts of our home page or section fronts. This tends to happen only when we have at least a few days' advanced notice, so ongoing stories like the presidential campaign, big events like the Pope's visit to the United States or special series like "Choking on Growth" are good examples of that. Those happen regularly if not frequently, but we're always eager to design for the news when we can.

At the same time, we're continually collaborating with editors and reporters on what I described before as the NYTimes.com platform. Editorial input is really a key component on these design challenges. An obvious example would be the section fronts we've overhauled over the past year or two, e.g., Health and Movies. Similarly, for last year's major overhaul of how we present our slideshows, editors and photo editors were deeply involved in establishing the requirements that guided that redesign. Even platform projects that aren't explicitly examples of delivering Times journalism, like our My Times product, were designed from scratch with the input of the editing staff from the very start

Personas in the Design Process

Q. Do you use personas and/or a goal-directed design process to craft your interaction design? If so, how do you go about your user research, given that you have such a broad base of users?

A. Every time we add a new feature to the site, redesign an existing section or create new digital products of any kind, we start with the premise that our primary "clients" are the people who will actually be using it, and not necessarily our staff of journalists, technologists, businesspeople or designers.

It's kind of an obvious assumption, but it really is the hardest part of the process for any design team, regardless of the industry: setting aside your own familiarity with the content, your own expertise and envisioning a solution through the eyes of those whose relationship with your product is much more casual.

When I say "design team" here, I mean it in the larger context, including product developers, software programmers, project managers, marketers as well as reporters, editors and many more. Everyone here is involved in the design process, so everyone has to be able to make that leap into "user-centered design" thinking.

We employ a lot of research for this. We have a customer insight group that pays a lot of attention to site metrics: the traffic we get, how the site is being used, and the overall statistical patterns for that usage. We also work with them frequently to perform usability tests, where we bring in real people to our in-house testing facilities to watch how they interact with new design solutions we put in front of them.

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Sometimes this research feeds into the "personas" method of designing, in which we write detailed descriptions of archetypal users and make design decisions around the goals and needs of those actual personas. Personally, I have mixed feelings about the effectiveness of that technique, though I don't question the basic premise that understanding our users is the single most important start to any solution.

We like to be flexible, though. Alex Wright, information architect, said: "Different projects call for different design approaches; we try to avoid locking ourselves into a one-size-fits-all design process. For major projects (like section redesigns), we do use personas and scenario modeling methods. For other projects, we use a mix of different methods: field studies, eye tracking, online surveys, card sorting and, of course, traditional usability testing."

Some Pet Peeves

Q. It's hard to find the link to the Obituaries section on the front page of NYTimes.com. Why is it listed on the lower part of the lefthand column in small print along with Blogs, Crosswords, etc., when it deserves to be placed higher up in the column and in larger print along with other newsworthy sections such as Sports, Science, Arts and Style?

Q. Other papers, notably The Seattle Times and The San Francisco Chronicle manage to include pictures and graphics from their stories in the printer version that shows up on the browser. It would add a lot in some cases. Why can't The Times manage to do this (going forward, if not for past stories)?

Q. A lot of times I enjoy the New York Times videos and would like to share them with some of my colleagues. But I find that NYTimes.com doesn't have the embedded source like YouTube does. Blogs nowadays embed all sorts of YouTube videos and other videos from different host sites and it makes it easier for people view things without actually visiting the site. My question is, why doesn't the NYTimes.com include embedded sources and will we see that in the future?

A. I'm going to try to answer these three questions with one general answer, and by extension, hopefully address several other questions that were sent in by readers who also requested changes to or expressed frustrations with various parts of NYTimes.com.

I don't necessarily disagree with most of the suggestions and criticisms that people have about the functionality of our site. They're quite valid and they'd almost always go a long way toward improving the overall experience on the site for users. In fact, if you cornered me in conversation, it wouldn't take much effort to elicit from me a long list of my own NYTimes.com frustrations and peeves, things I'd very much like to see fixed.

At any given time though, my design group is working on roughly a dozen or more projects of nontrivial size, while simultaneously watching for urgent problems cropping up across a site of significant volume and breadth. That keeps us very busy. So as a matter of resources — having enough designers to take care of everything — it's almost impossible for us to implement every change or improvement we'd like to see happen.

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Even if the design team doubled or tripled in size (and I actually believe that beyond a relatively small staff count, most larger design teams are actually less effective than smaller ones), we can't implement these changes on our own. For many of them, we'd very much need the collaboration and support of our colleagues throughout the company, especially those in our technology group, and they have their hands full as well.

Luckily, a lot of our projects are actually focused on overhauling and improving existing areas of the site that have been long neglected. So in a sense, we're continually trying to root out these imperfections. It just may take us a while to get to the ones mentioned in these questions.

Recommended Course of Study?

Q. What course of study would you recommend at the graduate or undergraduate level for someone looking to work in your field? Or, failing that, what practical experience do you think most prepared you for your current job?

A. I don't presume to be an educator, so it's probably best for me to answer this question in terms of what I look for when hiring a new employee. It's actually quite a complex mix of varied skills: an ideal applicant would have very strong traditional graphic design skills; in-depth training in usability and interaction design; practical experience coding XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash; a commercially viable comfort level with database and application programming; and last but not least sound news judgment based on a deep understanding of current affairs.

Mind you, almost nobody possesses this exact combination of skills. If there's a school or curriculum somewhere that's turning out these kinds of candidates regularly, I'd be very interested to know. (Besides, I tend not to pay nearly as much attention to where a candidate was schooled as I do to that candidate's portfolio of work samples and practical experience.)

So obviously I look for people who can combine as many of these skills as possible. I'm not sure it would be fair to say that any one skill is more important than the other because they're all vital, but I can say that having a particularly weak foundation in traditional graphic design — lacking an understanding of typography, color, composition and visual storytelling — more or less disqualifies one immediately.

There are a few other intangible qualities that I look for, too. The ability to effectively articulate one's ideas about design is a big plus; translating design's subjective nuances into plainspoken explanations is a critical requirement for this job. Agile problem-solving skills are also an imperative; being able to think about a design problem in a larger context than one's own role as a designer only makes it easier to pull off ambitious solutions. And maybe most important of all is enthusiasm for the work; there's no substitute for a designer who feels truly invested in the work.

All the News and Links That Fit?

Q. Could you talk about balancing the multitude of links to options, services, newspaper sections, etc. on a page with the actual content of the paper? When is it better to make readers click through one or two levels to find something instead of cluttering the front page with links? Is there a science to this, or is it design instinct?

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

A. There's no question that there's a lot of stuff on our pages. In fact, to speak frankly, I'd say that often there's just too much stuff. Too many links, ads, extra features and even too much text. We often hear from users — and even from our own staff — that we should be seeking to reduce the number of visual elements on each page.

However, throughout virtually the entire site, we have to achieve a delicate balance between the concerns of our newsroom, our business, our technological infrastructure, our brand and, most important, the people who use the site. Just about anything that appears on any given page is tied to some intricate combination of editorial judgment, revenue, technical restriction and user behavior.

You can think of it as an elaborate logic puzzle, with the onus on my design staff to solve the puzzle using as few elements as possible, in as aesthetically pleasing a manner as possible. We strive to distill every template that we create down to its core parts, and actively debate the placement of nearly every element.

There's no magic formula for this, unfortunately. In some cases we do find it better to design a feature so that people are required to click through it. In other instances, we find scrolling or simply presenting all of the available options up front is the better course. And at times there are design solutions that everyone feels are the simplest and best, but that can't be implemented due to some pragmatic constraint imposed by any of the many interdependent factors driving the site.

As you can imagine, it's no easy feat — which isn't meant as an excuse. This difficulty of the situation, while not always enjoyable, is a big part of the reason many of us have signed on for this job. It's an interesting design challenge because it's a hard one. We're under no illusions that what you see on the site is the best possible design ever. We look at it as a work in progress, and something that can be continually improved.
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The mother of a 26-year-old man who suffered from bipolar disorder said on Sunday that she questions the police department’s version of what led up to the fatal shooting of her son at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Ruben Jose Herrera was shot at the hospital, in unincorporated Torrance, around 2:30 p.m. Saturday after police said he reached for a gun.

Herrera’s name was confirmed by his mother, Graciel Herrera, and the coroner’s office on Sunday.

The ordeal began hours prior, when someone reported a man was throwing bottles against an apartment complex, the Los Angeles Police Department said.

In the department’s version of the events on Saturday, the vandalism suspect took a fighting stance when officers arrived, kicking and punching at them, and eventually reaching for a gun.

The man’s mother said Sunday that Ruben had been sitting and putting air in his bicycle's tires when police arrived, and that he cooperated with them.

Police responded by beating her son — using pepper spray, a Taser on him twice, and socking him multiple times in the face and back, she said.

“My son was doing everything he was told. I told them to stop. My son was bipolar. You know, ‘please, don’t hit him,’” Graciel Herrera said. “He (an officer) just told me to shut up and go inside.”

Ruben Herrera was then taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and was initially said to be cooperating with police, LAPD Cmdr. Phillip Tingirides said.

It was not known what he was treated for, but his mother said he suffered injuries to his face and knees.

During treatment, Herrera was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital’s emergency room.

His handcuffs were briefly taken off around 2:30 p.m., when Tingirides said the suspect picked up a metal chair and began swinging it.

Witnesses told police the man reached for an officer’s gun, prompting an officer to fire a single round.

Medical responders at the hospital attempted to save Herrera’s life, but he was pronounced dead at the scene, Tingirides said.

The man’s mother says the officers should have treated her son differently.

“If my son is bipolar, and they know he’s in danger, why do they unhandcuff him? I know my son didn’t do that. They’re just lying,” Graciel Herrera said.

She then claimed police were telling a version of the story that would protect themselves.

“They didn’t have to kill my son. My son was only 26. Regardless of whatever they say, they shouldn’t have taken his life like that,” she said.

Police have not said whether or not the altercation was captured on video.

Graciel Herrera was informed of her son’s death around 9 p.m., and after police had told her daughter around 3 p.m. that Ruben had been released from the hospital, she said.

Ruben Herrera was the 20th person in 2015 to have been shot and killed by an on-duty LAPD officer, and 35th to have been shot, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The case was being investigated by the Officer of Inspector General.
A Derry man who smashed a window “head-butted his own reflection”, Derry Magistrates Court heard today.

The court was told Gerard McGaughey, of Rosskeen Park, was drunk when he committed the offence in a city centre bar on May 2, causing over £500 of damage.

The court was told he could not remember what happened.

“The whole sorry incident is captured on CCTV,” defence solicitor Seamus Quigley told the court.

“The prosecution suggest he turned around and was almost spooked by his own reflection in the door.

“If the prosecution theory is correct, he may be fortunate that he is not charged with attempted assault.”

McGaughey pleaded guilty to criminal damage and was ordered to pay £548.40 compensation to the bar and was given a two year conditional discharge.
Touch typing

Hi, my name is Roman, and I am addicted to tools.

Do you type for hours every day like I do? Then let me share a year-long journey to the holy grail ergonomic typing. Touch typing can change your life (in a good way). If you're looking for a new keyboard or considering learning an alternative layout, you should definitely keep reading.

Long story short

I "touch typed" with seven fingers for decades and managed to type at average speed with pretty poor accuracy. I tried so many times to learn proper technique, but I always gave up in a week. A year ago I decided it was now or never. I had only one goal: to type faster, like 100 WPM. Spoiler: I'm not there yet. Back then I was using QWERTY on an Apple Wireless keyboard.

This was my method: "Okay, roll up your sleeves, and just memorize every key for all ten fingers." It took two days. I memorized all the keys during that weekend. Typing speed plummeted to 10 WPM on the first day; I was "thinking" before pressing almost every key. I could type with 100% accuracy without looking, but it was very very slow.

Next phase: typing lessons every day for an hour. From time to time I typed with my seven (favorite) fingers when I needed to get work done, but in a few days I switched to the ten-finger method cold turkey. I continued practicing every day at Keybr and Keyhero and finally reached 40 WPM in two weeks.

Phew...

As soon as I returned to my original speed and accuracy, I decided to upgrade my keyboard to an ergonomic one. Two months later ErgoDox arrived. And of course, I wanted to try an alternative keyboard layout on it. After a quick analysis, I picked the Norman layout: it's easy to learn, and it significantly reduces distance traveled from the home row.

Relearning. My speed dropped to 10 WPM, and recovered to 40 WPM in three weeks. I switched to the ErgoDox full time and played with ErgoDox layers, ending up with a single-layer solution. I reached 50 WPM in 40 days and stopped all typing lessons.

Today I am a happy ErgoDox user. My average speed on Norman is 60 WPM, and it's increasing every month, slowly but steadily.

Lessons learned

Fast and accurate typing is a must-have skill for a programmer. I wish I'd switched to the right path earlier.

I am not the fastest typist, just a bit quicker than average. My achievements in terms of words per minute are very humble. Still, I can say the return on investment is overwhelmingly high.

Proper typing style

Better typing speed saves me a few hours every week on code documentation, notes, and emails. Fast typing enables blogging: you can find an hour for a draft, but it is harder to find two. So a difference of 20 WPM can affect your productivity quite significantly.

If you are an average typist, you should invest few minutes a day in typing lessons. Focus on accuracy and practice every day. Totally worth it.

Ergonomic keyboard

If you have a Mac, there's a good chance that your keyboard is excellent. Apple keyboards are robust, compact, and quiet.

ErgoDox is louder and bigger. The primary benefit of ErgoDox is ergonomics. (Surprise!) As with any split keyboard, you can sit (or stand) straight, so your posture is healthier, and it's simply more relaxing.

My initial goal was just to improve my typing speed. Of course, high speed is necessary, but when I started using ErgoDox, I realized that comfort is the primary reward: my hands, shoulders, and back are much happier now. Yes, ErgoDox costs three hundred dollars, but it's the best keyboard available today for that price, and the keyboard is the most important part of my workplace. If you're typing all day long, you can connect your awesome keyboard to any cheap computer and be productive in no time.

Alternative keyboard layout

I use Norman and like it better than QWERTY. I haven't tried any other layouts, and honestly, I'm not sure that learning alternative layouts is worth it. What I am 100% sure of is that I can learn any keyboard layout and be productive in two weeks. Layouts and keyboards do not limit my speed; my fingers can move faster than I can compose words in English.

Why not stick with QWERTY on all my keyboards? Switching to a different layout and keyboard helped me break my bad typing habits. It's easier to learn correct technique from scratch on an entirely new instrument than it is to to fix those bad habits deeply wired into your brain.

How did I choose Norman? Two sources. First, people who already who use multiple layouts for years: Gary Bernhardt, Aaron Patterson, a good review by Ted. Second, I compared Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, Norman, and even my custom layout with a keyboard layout analyzer (made by Patrick Gillespie). Norman performed slightly better than the others on my custom corpus of text.

One more reason I picked Norman: It's easy to switch to QWERTY and back to Norman in few minutes. (I use QWERTY when I travel.) Norman is just a fifteen-key difference from QWERTY.

I use Vim with both QWERTY and Norman, and I do not remap anything in Vim. In the beginning, I had one annoying issue: HJKL on Norman are in weird locations. I was hitting U instead of J . That was such a painful week. Now everything is just fine.

Looking back, I am not entirely sure if all these layouts made any difference in my case. I can learn any crazy layout and reach an average speed in few weeks, but it won't increase my speed beyond that level. Maybe I should try QWERTY on ErgoDox someday.

Level up

If you need to type at high speed for hours at a time, then you should probably follow Mirabai Knight and learn stenography. Beware: the learning curve for steno is steep and you need a steno machine (or for the first time you can use NKRO keyboard, e.g., ErgoDox).

Conclusion

Typing can be fun if you fix your bad typing habits. The earlier you start learning, the more rewarding it can be. Teach kids to touch type as soon as they start playing with the computer. This skill will stay relevant for at least one more generation.

If you want to take away only one thing from my story, it's this: Learn proper touch typing technique today.

Recipe

Take a typing test on Keyhero. Slower than 40 WPM? Practice 15 minutes every day for a month. If your accuracy is lower than 95%, slow down and try to type as accurately as possible.

If you type more than four hours every day, you should use an ergonomic keyboard.

See also

Typing with pleasure by Pavel Fating, Programming's dirtiest little secret by Steve Yegge, Norman layout by David Norman, My keyboard layout on GitHub

© 2008–2019 Roman Zolotarev User Agreement Privacy Policy
Show of hands, please: Who thought, back in February, that we’d be approaching Memorial Day with the Baltimore Orioles in possession of the second-best record in the American League? Uh-huh; not many of you. Now: Who thought instead, three months ago, that the 2016 Orioles would be fortunate to end the season with 75 wins? A few more, and we are among you.

We won’t revisit our thinking, if you can call it that. We will point out, though, that the Orioles will certainly come partway back to earth. First of all, none of the other teams in the AL East are going to be pushovers. More importantly, the Orioles have been somewhat fortunate so far this year, just as they were somewhat unfortunate last year. Their record today is 26-17; their Pythagorean projection (we’ll assume you know what we mean) has them more like 24-19. Conversely, the 2015 Orioles finished 81-81, whereas their Pythagorean projection had them more like 83-79—which, over 43 games, makes for 22 wins. The small difference between the seasons can be fully accounted for by the acquisition of Mark Trumbo and the advent of Kevin Gausman.

We confess to being mistaken about the Orioles not only in bulk but at retail. Sure, we (sort of) touted Joey Rickard before (we think) anyone else, and we’re proud of it (although he certainly has cooled off). But we didn’t envision a bounceback by Chris Tillman. And the guy we absolutely adored on draft day was Pedro (.191/.300/.351) Alvarez. You know how MLB might try to make games shorter by using automatic intentional walks? We propose automatic strikeouts, starting with Pedro. Don’t even bother having him approach home plate.

So our Orioles picks have been wrong. But perhaps our next Orioles pick will be right. In fact, we’re sure it will be: Mike Wright, starting pitcher. His story so far, in telegraphese: right-handed, 26 years old, former good-not-great prospect, 6.04 ERA in 9-start audition last season, 4.97 ERA in 7 starts this season, durable, hard thrower, good stuff, command problems, misses too few bats, owned in 1% of Yahoo and ESPN leagues. A compelling addition to your Fantasy squad, correct?

Wright is nonetheless extremely interesting, because he and his surroundings have a virtually pharmaceutical purity if you’re inclined to see them, as we are, as elements of a laboratory experiment. Our regular readers, if there are any, know that we are somewhat unhinged on the subject of 5-inning starting pitchers. In our monologues on the subject, we commence by noting that a fair number of starting pitchers are good for five and only five innings, and turn to pumpkins if they stay around longer than that. We add that, while long-winded starters get scarcer, each year’s harvest of relief pitchers capable of throwing 15 or 20 pitches at 97 MPH every couple of days seems more abundant than the last. We then mention that the success of the Kansas City Royals, who don’t push their starting pitchers and have an unprecedentedly deep and impermeable bullpen, has inspired imitators and will inspire yet more as the tactic proves effective generally. And we opine that managers who want to keep their jobs will have to begin—and will begin–to deploy these redoubtable bullpens preemptively. That is, they won’t wait until the starter gets in trouble in the sixth or seventh inning, but instead will bring in the cavalry at the start of those innings, even if the starter has been pitching effectively and has thrown relatively few pitches. When—not just if—that occurs, starting pitchers who can go only five good innings before detonating will have significantly more value, in both Fantasy Baseball and Reality Baseball.

The Orioles have exactly what they need to effect this strategy. Wright is a 5-inning pitcher to the tip of his cleats. He’s made 7 starts this season. His numbers for the first 5 innings: 35 IP, 31 H, 10 W, 13 ER, 25 K, 3.34 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 6.43 K/9. His numbers as a starter in the innings thereafter: 5 1/3 IP, 11 H, 4 W, 10 ER, 5 K, we can’t even bring ourselves to do the rest of the math.

Baltimore’s of course also got a formidable bullpen to take over where Wright leaves off. Here are the aggregate 2015-2016 stats for the bullpen’s Big 4 of Brad Brach, Mychal Givens, Darren O’Day, and Zach Britton: 315 1/3 IP, 2.00 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, 10.82 K/9.

So we’ve got a five-inning starter and a bullpen full of reliable hard throwers—two of the three preconditions for our experiment. Do we also have a manager who’s not afraid to yank Wright after he throws five good innings, whatever Wright’s feelings on the subject may be? Not so far, but we have hope. Buck Showalter has let Wright pitch into the 6th in 6 of Wright’s 7 starts, with generally unhappy results. But Showalter’s an attentive manager, and has never been scared to rely on his bullpen, even when that bullpen’s been less formidable than the one he’s got now. So perhaps he’s gotten the message, or will soon get it.
For other uses, see Californication

1999 studio album by Red Hot Chili Peppers

Californication is the seventh studio album by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was released on June 8, 1999,[2] on Warner Bros. Records and was produced by Rick Rubin. Californication marked the return of John Frusciante, who had previously appeared on Mother's Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, to replace Dave Navarro as the band's guitarist. Frusciante's return was credited with changing the band's sound altogether, producing a notable shift in style from the music recorded with Navarro. The album's subject material incorporated various sexual innuendos commonly associated with the band, but also contained more varied themes than previous outings, including death, contemplations of suicide, California, drugs, globalization, and travel.

Californication is the Chili Peppers' most commercially successful studio release internationally, with over 15 million copies sold worldwide,[3] and more than 6 million in the United States alone.[4] As of 2002, the album had sold over 4 million copies in Europe.[5] The record produced several hits for the band, including "Otherside", "Californication" and the Grammy Award-winning "Scar Tissue". Californication peaked at number three on the U.S. Billboard 200.

The record marked a significant change in style for the band: Rolling Stone's Greg Tate noted that "while all previous Chili Peppers projects have been highly spirited, Californication dares to be spiritual and epiphanic".[6] Another critic, Billboard's Paul Verna, mentioned that the album brought out "the group's softer, melodic side," as opposed to their previous six albums.[7]

Background [ edit ]

In 1984, the Red Hot Chili Peppers started off as a "funk-punk band, driven by Kiedis's exuberant rapping and Flea's manic slap-bass" (Sanneh, 2002). Guitarist John Frusciante, who had joined in 1988 at the age of 18, left the band in the middle of a 1992 tour that promoted their critically acclaimed album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.[8] It took over a year for the band to find a new guitarist with whom to record officially. Dave Navarro, formerly of Jane's Addiction, was invited to join the Chili Peppers after Arik Marshall, who had finished the remaining tour dates for Blood Sugar Sex Magik, was fired.[9] Navarro influenced the band's ensuing album, One Hot Minute, by incorporating various elements of heavy metal and psychedelic rock,[10] which was something for which the Chili Peppers had not previously been notable. Compared to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, One Hot Minute was a commercial disappointment, selling only half of what Blood Sugar Sex Magik had originally sold.[11][10][12] Navarro and the band parted ways in early 1998, clearing the way for Fruciante's eventual return.[13]

In the years following his departure from the Chili Peppers, Frusciante had developed a vicious addiction to both heroin and cocaine that left him in poverty and near death.[14] Friends convinced him to enter drug rehabilitation in January 1998.[15] In April 1998, following Frusciante's three-month completion, bassist Flea visited his former bandmate and openly invited him to re-join the band, an invitation Frusciante readily accepted. Within the week, reunited for the first time in six years, the foursome gathered to play and jump-started the newly reunited Red Hot Chili Peppers.[16] Through a number of lineup changes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had released multiple compilation or greatest hits albums prior to Frusciante's return; Frusciante pushed for the group to change their "funk-punk" sound and become more of a "mellow-progressive rock act" for Californication.[17]

Writing and composition [ edit ]

"Around the World" "Around the World", the second single from Californication, combined harder, more abrasive guitar progressions with a deeply melodic chorus representative of the band's stylistic shift. "Otherside" Californication, was one of the darkest recordings following One Hot Minute due to Kiedis' continuing drug addiction which considerably affected his songwriting. The track prominently features a sparse guitar arrangement that Frusciante played on a 1955 "Otherside", the third single from, was one of the darkest recordings followingdue to Kiedis' continuing drug addiction which considerably affected his songwriting. The track prominently features a sparse guitar arrangement that Frusciante played on a 1955 Gretsch White Falcon Problems playing these files? See media help.

Much of the album was written in the band members' homes in the summer of 1998. Kiedis and Frusciante often spent days together discussing song creation, guitar riffs and lyrical content. Bass and percussion aspects of the record were constructed through jam sessions and the individual work of Flea and drummer Chad Smith.[18]

Most of the material and lyrics throughout the songs in the album came from the "personal and professional turmoil" that different members of the band went through/were currently going through at the time. This resulted in the "sensitive approach that one might not expect from a band whose followers are skate-punks and fraternity boys". Anthony Kiedis's main point behind this album was to "tell tales of wandering souls who've lost their way searching for the American dream in California".

Californication's lyrics were derived from Anthony Kiedis' ideas, outlooks, and perceptions of life and its meaning. "Porcelain" resulted from Kiedis's meeting with a young mother at the YMCA, who was attempting to battle her alcohol addiction while living with her infant daughter.[19] Kiedis also had a love interest in Yohanna Logan, a fashion designer whom Kiedis met while she was working in New York City. Kiedis involvement with Logan influenced his multiple examinations of love throughout Californication, in songs such as "Porcelain" and "This Velvet Glove." [20] Sarcasm was a concept that Kiedis had dealt with in the past, and he ultimately crafted a song around it. He was inspired by former bandmate Dave Navarro, whom he considered to be the "King of Sarcasm".[21] Frusciante approached the guitar line present in "Scar Tissue" as an attempt to use two notes that are played far apart, but produce a "cool rhythm".[22] He had explored this technique on his first solo album, 1994's Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt. Frusciante considers "Scar Tissue" to be a "very simple example of the technique, but I think it's a style that sounds like me". The guitarist made use of slide guitar-playing for the solos in the song.[22] The song "Emit Remmus", which is "summer time" spelled backwards, was inspired by Anthony's brief relationship with Melanie C of the Spice Girls.[23]

"Get on Top", a song which contains significant use of a wah pedal, was formed after a jam session conducted shortly after Frusciante had listened to Public Enemy: "I came up with [the rhythm to the song] on the way to rehearsal—just tapping it out with my foot."[22] The understated guitar solo played in the middle of the song was originally intended to be more noticeable, according to Frusciante, who was playing screaming guitar solos. He changed his thought process after listening to Steve Howe's guitar solo on Yes' "Siberian Khatru": "the band sounded really big—and they're playing really fast—and then this clean guitar solo comes out over on top. It's really beautiful, like it's on its own sort of shelf. For 'Get On Top' I wanted to play something that contrasted between the solo and the background."[22] "Savior", a song found towards the end of the album, features heavy effects, most notably an Electro-Harmonix Micro Synth with 16-second delay.[22] Frusciante notes that the sound is "directly inspired by Eric Clapton's playing in Cream. If you listen to the actual notes, they're like a Clapton solo—they just don't sound like it because of the effects."[22]

The hit "Around the World", which harkens back to the Chili Peppers' funk-influenced sound, was constructed by Frusciante at his home. The rhythm and beat, however, are intricate; this required him to play the song with the rest of the band rather than alone for them to understand it.[22] The bass lick was composed in "maybe 15 minutes," according to Frusciante: "Flea is the best bass player in the world. His sense of timing and the way he thinks is so crazy."[22] The title track of the album was among the most difficult for the band to complete. Frusciante felt compelled to write an appropriate guitar ensemble that would appropriately complement the poignant lyrical content, but encountered difficulty.[24] The song was barely making progress, and would have been scrapped had it not been for Kiedis' urgency to include it on the album. Frusciante completed the final riff two days before recording, after drawing inspiration from The Cure's soundtrack song to "Carnage Visors".[22][24] The title track was intended to represent Californian lifestyles and, more specifically, the "fake" nature which is associated with much of Hollywood. It references Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and uses considerable imagery to capture the evocative nature of California.[24]

The record was a change of style for the Chili Peppers, especially compared to their previous album, One Hot Minute, which combined various elements of heavy metal and psychedelic rock. Although Californication still contains some funk rock songs (such as "Around the World", "Get on Top", "I Like Dirt", "Purple Stain" and "Right on Time"), it leaned towards more melodic riffs (for example, "Scar Tissue" and "Otherside") and focused on songs with implemented structure rather than jams.[25]

Outtakes [ edit ]

The album featured a few outtakes that didn't appear on the studio album. "Gong Li" and "Instrumental #1" were released on the "Scar Tissue" single. The instrumental "Teatro Jam" was released on the "Around the World" single while "How Strong" was featured on the "Otherside" single. "Instrumental #2" was released on a bonus disc for the album. In 2006, iTunes exclusively released "Fat Dance," "Over Funk" and "Quixoticelixer" along with the album for download. "Slowly, Deeply" an instrumental track, would later be released as a b-side to the "Universally Speaking" single in 2003, while "Bunker Hill" would be re-worked on during the band's Greatest Hits sessions in 2003 and released on the "Fortune Faded" single that same year.

In August and September 2014, unreleased demos from 1998 were leaked to the internet. Many of the demos were of songs that made the final album or released as b-sides; however, some were different from the final album version with the most notable differences being a reggae influenced version of the title track with different lyrics and a very different vocal melody, a version "Scar Tissue" with a longer intro, a slower version of "Purple Stain" with added lyrics and different chorus, "Porcelain Alice", the original version of "Porcelain" with different lyrics, an instrumental version of 'Quixoticelixer' (with the working title "New Wave Song"), "How Strong Is Your Love", the original version of "How Strong" and the original demos for "Fat Dance" and "Bunker Hill" (originally titled "These Are Not My Dreams of Bunker Hill"). The leaked demos also included never before heard songs such as "Plate of Brown", "Tellin' a Lie", "Mommason", "Andaman & Nicobar", "Boatman", "Sugar Sugar" and "Trouble in the Pub". In February 2015, a collection of rough mixes of outtakes from the Californication sessions was leaked. This group of songs, which were recorded on April 21, 1999 at The Village Studio, contains a version of "Trouble in the Pub" with vocals along with "Blondie", a song Frusciante mentioned in an interview as an album outtake however the song turns out only to be a rough mix of "Instrumental #2". An unmastered mix of the album also exists that features alternate versions of some songs, such as extended endings ("Easily"), extra verses ("Savior"), alternate choruses ("Around the World") and different guitar mixes ("How Strong").[26]

Promotion and release [ edit ]

Rick Rubin had produced their two previous albums. However, the Chili Peppers decided to look for other producers for Californication.[27] David Bowie had shown great interest in working with the band and asked to produce the album; however, the Chili Peppers chose to remain with Rubin for Californication.[27] Rubin had, in the past, granted the Chili Peppers creative freedom on their recording material; this was something they thought necessary for the album to be unique, and could only occur with his return.[28] Recording took place at Cello Studios in Los Angeles. In early 1999, following the recording process, the band played "Scar Tissue", "Otherside", and "Californication" to their managers, and it was decided that "Scar Tissue" would be the lead single for the album.[29] To support their reunited line-up, the band played various proms across the country to promote Californication.[29] It sprouted a competition, which called upon high school students to write essays on "how they could make their schools better, safer, happier, more rocking places, so that they didn't have to go to school afraid. If you wrote the essay, you got a free ticket to the show."[29]

Californication was released on June 8, 1999, debuting at #5 but peaking at #3 on the Billboard 200 chart. In Europe, the album peaked at #5 on the UK Top 40, #1 on the Finnish, Austrian, Swedish and New Zealand charts, and #2 on the Top 40 of France and The Netherlands. It was certified gold just over a month later, on July 22, 1999, and its continuing sales have resulted in it being certified six-times platinum.[30][31] In March 2006, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums were made available to purchase on the iTunes Music Store.[32] Albums bought there included new previously unreleased tracks ("Fat Dance", "Over Funk", and "Quixoticelixer").

Commercial performance [ edit ]

In the United States the album debuted and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 the week of June 26, 1999 with 189,000 copies sold.[33] The next week it dropped to number seven and it was present on the chart for one hundred one weeks.[34] It was certified six times platinum by the RIAA on June 28, 2016 for shipments of six millions.[35]

In the United Kingdom it debuted and peaked at number five on June 16, 1999, the next week it fell off to number seven; the album remained on the chart for one hundred sixty nine weeks.[36] It was certified four times platinum by the BPI on September 2, 2016 denoting shipments of one million two hundred thousand units.[37]

In Germany, it was the band's best-selling album, staying on the Media Control Charts for 114 weeks (more than 2 years) and selling more than 750,000 copies, reaching 3× Gold.[38]

Critical reception and legacy [ edit ]

Californication received favorable reviews in contrast to its less popular predecessor, One Hot Minute, and it was a greater success worldwide.[39] Rolling Stone credited Kiedis for his drastically improved vocals: "[his] vocal cords have apparently been down to some crossroads and over the rehab, and returned with heretofore unheard-of range, body, pitch, soulfulness, and melodic sensibility."[6] Songs such as "Otherside" and "Porcelain" were called "Pumpkins-esque", while the album as a whole was "epiphanal" and the "RHCP furthermuckers are now moving toward funk's real Holy Grail: that salty marriage of esoteric mythology and insatiable musicality that salvages souls, binds communities and heals the sick."[6] Other critics credited the album's success to the return of Frusciante. AllMusic's Greg Prato said that the "obvious reason for [the band's] rebirth is the reappearance of guitarist John Frusciante", considering him to be the "quintessential RHCP guitarist".[39] The album as a whole was "a bona fide Chili Peppers classic".[39] Entertainment Weekly also credits Frusciante with transforming the band's sound into a "more relaxed, less grating, and, in their own way, more introspective album than ever before".[25] Mark Woodlief of Ray Gun commented that "'This Velvet Glove' strikes an intricate balance between a lush acoustic guitar foundation and anthemic rock," Woodlief continued "the disco intro to 'Parallel Universe' gives way to a scorching Western giddy-up motif in the chorus, and Frusciante's Hendrix-like excursions at the song's close."[47]

While many critics found the band's new sound refreshing, NME criticized the Chili Peppers for rarely using their trademark funk sound, asking: "Can we have our brain-dead, half-dressed funk-hop rock animals back now, please? All this false empathy is starting to make my removed rib tingle."[48] Pitchfork, while considering the album a triumph over One Hot Minute, felt Californication lacked the funk that was ever-present in Blood Sugar Sex Magik.[44] It went on to scrutinize some lyrics for being overly sexual, but also considered Frusciante to be "the best big-time American rock guitarist going right now".[44] Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a one-star honorable mention ( ), describing the band as "New Age fuck fiends" and citing "Scar Tissue" and "Purple Stain" as highlights.[49]

Over the years, Californication has maintained its popularity. "Scar Tissue" won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song in 2000.[50] The album was ranked number 399 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and, in 2006, the Chili Peppers recorded a five-set playlist for AOL Sessions that included "Scar Tissue" and "Californication".[51][52][53] The album produced many staple hits for the Chili Peppers; five of the sixteen songs on their Greatest Hits album were taken from Californication.[54]

Waveform of bootlegged "unmastered" version of " Otherside " (top) versus waveform of original CD release version (bottom), showing difference in volume levels.

The album received criticism for what Tim Anderson of The Guardian called "excessive compression and distortion" in the process of digital mastering.[55] Stylus Magazine labeled it as one of the victims of the loudness war and commented that it suffered from digital clipping so much that "even non-audiophile consumers complained about it".[56] An early, alternately mastered version of the album with a different track listing and mixing, probably a pre-release candidate, has been circulated on the internet.[57]

Accolades [ edit ]

The information regarding accolades attributed to Californication is adapted from AcclaimedMusic.net[53]

Tour [ edit ]

Immediately following the release of Californication, the band embarked on a world tour to support the record, beginning in the United States. To culminate the US leg of their tour, the Chili Peppers were asked to close Woodstock '99, which became infamous for the resulting violence.[64][65] The band was informed minutes before arriving that the crowds and bonfires in the fields had gone out of control.[64] When the Chili Peppers performed a tribute to Jimi Hendrix's song "Fire" to finish their set as a favor to Hendrix's sister, the disruption escalated into violence when several women, who had been crowd surfing and moshing, were raped and nearby property was looted and destroyed.[66][67][68][69] Kiedis felt that "It was clear that this situation had nothing to do with Woodstock any more. It wasn't symbolic of peace and love, but of greed and cashing in ... We woke up to papers and radio stations vilifying us for playing 'Fire'."[67]

To kick off the band's European tour, the band staged a free show in Moscow's Red Square, on August 14, 1999, to a crowd of over 200,000.[70] Kiedis recalled the situation: "Red Square was so filled with wall-to-wall Russians that we needed a police escort to get near the stage."[70] Following the European leg, the group did a show in New York City, at the Windows on the World, for KROQ radio contest-winners, and then at the Big Day Out festival in Australia following several Japanese tour dates.[71] Flea, however, began to feel the repercussions of touring causing the band to set up concerts that were less strenuous, and consequently less financially rewarding, for them. These shows would finish the remainder of the Californication tour.[72] As one of the last shows before the release of their next album By the Way, the Chili Peppers played Rock in Rio 3.[73]

Track listing [ edit ]

All tracks written by Red Hot Chili Peppers (Flea, John Frusciante, Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith).

Japanese edition bonus track No. Title Length 16. "Gong Li" 3:43

iTunes bonus tracks No. Title Length 16. "Fat Dance" 3:40 17. "Over Funk" 2:58 18. "Quixoticelixer" 4:48

Australian edition bonus disc No. Title Length 1. "Gong Li" 3:43 2. "How Strong" 4:42 3. "Instrumental #2" 2:43

Personnel [ edit ]

Red Hot Chili Peppers [ edit ]

Additional musicians [ edit ]

Production [ edit ]

Lindsay Chase – production coordinator

Mike Nicholson and Greg Collins – additional engineering

Greg Fidelman – additional engineering

Jennifer Hilliard – assistant engineer

Chris Holmes – mix engineer

Ok Hee Kim – assistant engineer

Vlado Meller – mastering

Rick Rubin – production

David Schiffman – additional engineering

Jim Scott – engineer, mixing

John Sorenson – additional engineering

Design [ edit ]

Lawrence Azerrad – art direction

Sonya Koskoff – photography

Red Hot Chili Peppers – art direction

Tony Wooliscroft – photography

Charts [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

Bibliography [ edit ]

Dimery, Robert. 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die . New York, NY: Universe, 2006. ISBN 0-7893-1371-5.

. New York, NY: Universe, 2006. ISBN 0-7893-1371-5. Kiedis, Anthony and Larry Sloman. Scar Tissue . New York, NY: Hyperion, 2004. ISBN 1-4013-0101-0.

. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2004. ISBN 1-4013-0101-0. Larkin, Colin. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication." Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th ed. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 27 Sep. 2016.

Sanneh, K. (2002, Jul 14). A band even better cooled down. New York Times (1923–Current File)
Prepare to be merry: Brooklyn Nine-Nine has nabbed Jerry.

Jim O’Heir — who scored laughs as the loveable-yet-hapless Jerry (Terry/Larry) for seven seasons on Parks and Recreation — is guest-starring in the second episode of the police comedy’s fourth season. He will pop up as a cop who crosses paths with Jake (Andy Samberg) and Holt (Andre Braugher) while the two are hiding out in witness protection in Florida.

O’Heir is the second main cast member of Parks to appear on Brooklyn. Nick Offerman guest-starred as an ex-boyfriend of Holt last season. Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-creator Michael Schur also co-created Parks and Recreation.

O’Heir’s recent TV credits include Veep, Hot In Cleveland, Another Period, and The Bold and the Beautiful. He also starred in the indie comedic thriller Middle Man.

The second episode of Brooklyn‘s fourth season also features a guest spot by Ken Marino, who will play the precinct’s not-so-sharp replacement captain while Holt is in a witness protection program. The premiere episode, which airs Sept. 20 on Fox, also boasts a few celebrity guests, such as Maya Rudolph, Rhea Perlman, and Jorma Taccone.
For the ribbon-cutting at the Washington Heights Library this month, the son of a former custodian returned to his old home. He grew up in what used to be the caretaker’s apartment on the third floor. While his father shoveled coal at night to heat the place, he would go downstairs to read about boat building and navigating by the stars. Ronald Clark went on to become the first in his family to graduate from high school and college, and decades later he built himself a boat and navigated by the stars that he had learned about in the library under him.

A few years ago, library officials hired the architect Andrew Berman to revamp the two upper stories of that Andrew Carnegie-era branch on 160th Street. Mr. Berman has now turned the third-floor apartment into a clubhouse for teenagers, and the whole second floor into a double-height palace for young children, with seating nooks and lime-green sofas under towering windows. A snaking, pale-wood bookshelf divides the room into cosseting quadrants, scaling it down for pint-size patrons. Smart, sunny and simple, the redesign feels lofty and homey at the same time, rebooting Carnegie’s original grand-populist vision for the branches.

In ways big and small, architects like Mr. Berman have changed New York City this year. Projects like the library branch made it a little more livable and humane.

What follows is nothing nearly as disciplined or logical as a list of 2016’s architectural highs and lows in town. It’s more a kind of belated thank you note for a few projects that kept faith with architecture’s ideals and the city’s better self.
There haven't been as many articles nationally complaining about the new scoreboards being installed at EverBank Field as one would imagine, but I was alerted to a special one from ESPN today on Twitter. It's penned by Gregg Easterbrook, who doesn't have the best reputation as far as integrity goes, but it's also one of the laziest ones I've seen.

I've blockquoted the paragraph below, with their HTML in-tact in case they try to ninja edit the egregious errors.

The fleecing of taxpayers continues:Jacksonville just agreed to pay $43 million to spruce up the stadium where the Jaguars play. Owner Shad Khan, net worth estimated by Forbes at $3.8 billion, will contribute only $20 million. A new hotel tax will fund the giveaway: Ordinary people using hotels in the Jacksonville will pay more so that a billionaire can have a new toy. If the gigantic scoreboard to be funded by the tax sells more tickets, the billionaire will keep the gains. And will hotels in Jacksonville lose business owing to the new tax, or hotel workers face layoffs triggered by an NFL owner's subsidized toy? Meanwhile a Jacksonville public school district needs $51 million in facility upgrades. The same month Jacksonville had no problem finding $43 million right away for a gift to the NFL, local politicians said the school money could only be supplied over several decades.

The first big error is Easterbrook's notion that this is a new tax that will put burden on local hotels, which could potentially cost people their jobs. The problem with that notion is, is it ignores that it's not a new tax. It's an existing tax that has been in place for a few years already, since oh... 1984. It was modified in 1994. It's not changing. It's not increasing. There is no new burden that wasn't already there.

It's not going to cost anyone their job Gregg. Don't worry.

If you click the "several decades" hyperlink, you'll notice something peculiar. When I initially clicked it, I was a bit confused. I'd never heard of the My Journal Courier in Jacksonville. That's probably because it doesn't exist in Jacksonville, Florida... but rather Jacksonville, Illinois.

In case their copy winds up fixed, it went to this article about the Jacksonville, IL school district.

There are certainly arguments on both sides regarding using public funds for sports arenas, but good God man. You didn't even get any of it right.

Honestly: How does this get through copy edit? How do you not realize that a tax you're calling new isn't new? How do you not realize you're linking to an article about schools in the state of Illinois and not Florida?

I don't understand.

Update, 3:52 PM:

It appears Gregg Easterbrook tried to fix his mistake, but no where in the article does it acknowledge that an egregious error was made in the first place.

There's not a notation for a foot note, an asterisk, a note from the editor that an error was made. Nothing.

Not only did Easterbrook try to ninja-edit the lazy error away, but he still failed to acknowledge the fact that this isn't a new tax and it's not going to have any bearing on any hotel employee's jobs. Not only that, but I failed to mention the first time that it's not the NFL owner's toy, it's the city's toy, which will allow them more events at the municipally owned stadium that will in-turn pay for the scoreboards.

He tried to save his initial erroneous point by linking to the 2013-2014 Duval County school budget plan with zero context of what it means or where that money comes from or the fact that neither have anything to do with one another. One is being paid for with a revenue bond, which in-turn pays for itself. Though, again, a little research would have lead Mr. Easterbrook to that conclusion. It's clear he still hasn't done any outside of simple Google searching, while utterly failing at it the first time.

Update 9:10 AM, 11/21/13:

@BoldCityCap Use of word "new" corrected -- thank you for pointing out. — Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) November 21, 2013

It appears Easterbrook once again attempted to correct his mistake, once again without any notation or acknowledgement of a mistake being made. In this correction, he literally just removed the word "new" when he called the bed tax a new tax. But, even his corrections are lazy because he didn't change the corresponding sentences which continue to infer that it's a new tax that will put a burden on hotel employees and businesses.

Through the whole ordeal, only one thing is clear: Gregg Easterbrook doesn't like publicly funded stadiums, which is fine, but he also has absolutely no idea how the EverBank Field scoreboards are being paid for. He also doesn't have much of a grasp as to how Florida schools are funded, which is to say they cannot be funded by revenue bonds.

He also throws in a jab about how "if the team sells more tickets, the billionaire will keep the gains," which is also false. While the Jaguars will gain more money from more ticket sales, so will the city. The city will also attract more events, which are already in the works, that the Jaguars will see no money from.

Since I published this, Gregg Easterbrook has apparently blocked me on Twitter, as well as the Big Cat Country twitter handle. There have also been users who have reported that ESPN is actively deleting comments off the article noting the mistakes that Easterbrook made.

But hey, bloggers are the big danger to journalism. Not journalists, right?

More from Big Cat Country:

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Crispy Rice Crispy Rice is unaware they can edit their status GTR.co.uk seasoned Member

Join Date: Apr 2009 Posts: 93

Accident: Don't do what I did....

I had a low speed crash into the back of a white van, it was a badly surfaced road, we were stopped, pulled away.... and the person infront of the van stopped for no reason, causing the van to tap the tow bar of the car infront and me in sympathy to do the same to the van.

Ok enough of the excuses, I am posting here to make sure noone makes the same mistake I did. I thought long and hard about posting this, but i think it is important that other GTR owners see this so they aren't stung by a careless accident and the GTR Tax!

I bumped into tho the white vans tow bar causing this small crack in my bumper...

Unfortunately it also set off the Pedestrain Saftey system, where the bonnet pops up....

Which is a one use system....

You need to replace the bumper, rams, bonnet hinges....

and of course the ECU

When the accident happened i called my dealer and asked them to collect the car and told them i would just pay for it without putting it through my insurance.

Then i found out the total cost of the repairs.

Eleven Thousand Pounds.

I'm pleased to report the car has been repaired perfectly, even if it took 5 weeks!

But I fear GTR insurance won't be so cheap next year for any of us. Sorry about that! But don't do what I did. And if you hit a pedestrain, make sure you are reveresing

Updated for new readers - 24th November 2009

This issue has been raised with Nissan UK and following their investigations they have asked me to post the following statement:

Issue of a high repair bill for a low speed front impact on a GT-R

"As a company we cannot comment in any detail on an individual customer case. This is a private matter and we are currently in contact with the customer, his insurance company and the dealer to help resolve this particular situation.

What we can confirm is that Nissan has a policy of continuous improvement, and as such is constantly reviewing parts prices, suppliers, and customers’ feedback. In this instance, thanks to the comments received, we have discovered a computing error regarding the price of the actuators and this has now been rectified.

Nissan apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused and if there should be any customers who have purchased such components at the incorrect price they will be fully reimbursed with the difference. However, based on the level of product demand we believe this was the first time such an instance has occurred.

The GT-R has been designed to meet the latest legal and safety standards for all new cars. This innovative pop up bonnet system is required as there is insufficient clearance between the bonnet and the top of the engine to comply with the European directive 70/156/ EEC as amended by 2003/ 102/ EC for pedestrian safety.

For your information the bonnet system only operates if the bumper is hit in a certain way and under a series of strict parameters. Not every time you bump the bumper, or if the vehicle is stationary."

This information will also be posted into the first post of this thread, so anyone reading it will see it.

I think we should recognise and appreciate how Nissan have fully investigated this now, stated the position and reasons for both errors in pricing and also the existence for these pieces.

They have also (as has been posted by the owner), spoken to the owner personally about this and provided a nice gesture in the form of a jacket. As far as Nissan and I are concerned this is the end of the issue.

Guy

I consider myself a fairly competent driver, I can drive reasonably quickly on a circuit, and read the road ahead enough to make good progress on the public highway. But I had an accident, and it was all my own doing.I had a low speed crash into the back of a white van, it was a badly surfaced road, we were stopped, pulled away.... and the person infront of the van stopped for no reason, causing the van to tap the tow bar of the car infront and me in sympathy to do the same to the van.Ok enough of the excuses, I am posting here to make sure noone makes the same mistake I did. I thought long and hard about posting this, but i think it is important that other GTR owners see this so they aren't stung by a careless accident and the GTR Tax!I bumped into tho the white vans tow bar causing this small crack in my bumper...Unfortunately it also set off the Pedestrain Saftey system, where the bonnet pops up....Which is a one use system....You need to replace the bumper, rams, bonnet hinges....and of course the ECUWhen the accident happened i called my dealer and asked them to collect the car and told them i would just pay for it without putting it through my insurance.Then i found out the total cost of the repairs.Eleven Thousand Pounds.I'm pleased to report the car has been repaired perfectly, even if it took 5 weeks!But I fear GTR insurance won't be so cheap next year for any of us. Sorry about that! But don't do what I did. And if you hit a pedestrain, make sure you are reveresing __________________

Last edited by Guy; 24th November 2009 at 04:59 PM .. Reason: Added Nissan UK Response
European Astro Pi Challenge: Code your ISS experiment - more details

ESA is inviting teams of students who are 16 years old and younger to join the first European Astro Pi challenge and have their experiments run on the International Space Station! Take this opportunity to learn about science and coding, just like space scientists do! Deadline to submit your registration is 13 November 2016. ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet officially launched the first European Astro Pi challenge last week. Thomas is looking forward to his first spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS) with the Proxima mission later this year, and is looking forward to assisting the Astro Pi challenge from orbit. Watch Thomas’ message in the video above!

What is an Astro Pi? Astro Pi is the name of a small computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in collaboration with the UK Space Agency and ESA. There are two very special Astro Pi’s. Their names are Ed and Izzy, and they have been qualified for spaceflight. They are now onboard the ISS for students like you to use. Astro Pi computers come with a set of sensors and gadgets that can be used to run cool scientific experiments. This set of sensors is called ‘Sense HAT’. With the Sense HAT you can sense movements, measure humidity, temperature and pressure, and detect radiation. Ed and Izzy are also equipped with a joystick and buttons just like a videogame console! Discover more about the Astro Pi Sense HAT and its sensors here and experience what you can do with them by using this web-based emulator.

Join the competition: your code may go to space! Astro Pi inside its flight case The European Astro Pi challenge invites school students to design a scientific experiment that can be run using Astro Pi Ed’s sensors, and to write the computer code with which the Astro Pi needs to be programmed in order to execute this experiment on the ISS. Ed is ready and anxious to run your code. What are you waiting for? The Astro Pi challenge is divided into three phases. You have to succeed Phase 1 in order to be selected to participate in Phases 2 and 3.

Phase 1 – Warm up and show us you are up to the Astro Pi challenge! ESA’s Astro Pi kit In this phase, ESA expects your team - with the help of your teacher - to get acquainted with the Astro Pi and its sensors (see links provided above) and to demonstrate you have a clear idea of the kind of science experiments you can run with it. In order to achieve this objective, ESA asks you to come up with an experiment idea to be run using the Astro Pi on the ISS and its sensors (Sense Hat), and to describe this idea by filling out this template. No coding is needed at this stage: only an experiment idea! Your idea can be related to different aspects of life and work onboard the ISS. Search for cosmic rays? Record a loss of altitude or measure the acceleration of the ISS? Or perhaps just detect the crew’s movement? Here you can find some ideas for using Astro Pi and doing fantastic science. Have a look and get inspired! Ask your teacher to give you guidance and help you find additional inspiration by downloading the teacher’s guide here. The more creative, rich, and original your idea is, the better you will demonstrate your motivation, and the bigger chance you will have to be selected for Phase 2 of the challenge. If your team’s experiment idea is selected, you will also receive an ESA-branded Astro Pi kit, including all its sensors and components, directly at your school for free! You have until 13 November 2016 to submit your entries. Do this by following the indications provided below in the section ‘How do I submit my application?’. The selected teams will be notified of their acceptance to Phase 2 by 25 November 2016.

Phase 2 – Take the scientific mission assigned by ESA and write your computer code In this second phase, which will take place between 25 November 2016 and 28 February 2017, Thomas Pesquet will assign the selected student teams with a scientific mission to be run on the ISS using Astro Pi Ed. To accomplish the objectives of this mission, you will have to define the steps of the scientific experiment you want to run, and you will have to write the computer code necessary to operate the Astro Pi accordingly. You will have to use the ‘Python’ programming language. Not an expert in coding? Don’t worry! ESA will provide you with supporting material and guidelines that explain how to use the Astro Pi and its sensors and to how to write a simple code in Python. This material will be published on this site by 21 November 2016. Phase 3 – Best experiments/codes are selected and run on the ISS

In this third phase, which will take place between 1 March and 15 May 2017, an evaluation panel composed of ESA, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and other national experts will select the winning experiments/codes per country that will be sent to the ISS to be run on Astro Pi Ed. On 15 May 2017, the results of the experiments will be published, and astronaut Thomas Pesquet will comment them from orbit!

Who can take part? Teams of students 16 years old and under from an ESA Member State*. Each team must be supported by at least one teacher. *ESA Member States:

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom How do I submit my application?

In Phase 1 (4 October – 13 November 2016), teams have to register online and submit their original experiment idea. The deadline is 13 November 2016. If you are a team from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, you can access the online registration form here, where you will need to provide information about your school, team and teacher. You will also have to attach the filled-in template (‘Describe your experiment idea’) in English.

If you are a team from France, you should register through the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), in French, at this link.

If you are a team from Poland, you should register through ESERO Poland in Polish.

If you are a team from Portugal, you should register through the ESERO Portugal in Portuguese. In Phase 2 (25 November 2016 - 28 February 2017), the selected teams will be notified on how to submit the experiment they propose to accomplish, as well as the computer codes necessary to operate Astro Pi. Deadline is 28 February 2017. For questions, please send an email to teachers @ esa.int with the subject: European Astro Pi Challenge. Good luck!

1st European Astro Pi Challenge – Timeline Launch of European Astro Pi Challenge 4/10/16 Phase 1 – Registration and submission of Experiment Idea 4/10/16 – 13/11/16 Publication of supporting resources and Astro Pi guidelines 21/11/16 Selection of teams who presented best experiment ideas 16/11/16 – 24/11/16 Announcement of selected teams and mission announcement Distribution of Astro Pi kits to the selected teams 25/11/16 Phase 2 - Discover the Astro Pi, design the experiment to accomplish the mission, write and submit your code 25/11/16 – 28/02/17 Deadline for submitting your experiment/code 28/02/17 Phase 3 – Best experiments/codes are selected and run on the ISS 1/03/17 – 15/05/17 Selection of the best experiment/codes to be run on the ISS 1/03/17 – 14/03/17 Announcement of the selected experiments/codes 15/03/17 Publication of the results (after the codes have been run on the ISS) 15/05/17
In cities around the U.S., there’s a growing awareness that streets are meant for more than just cars, and in fact, that streets should be safe places no matter what form of transit you choose, whether you’re a pedestrian, cyclist, bus rider, skateboarder, or pogo-stick jumper (okay, maybe not the latter).

The National Complete Streets Coalition puts out a measure every year on just how well cities are doing at forming so-called “complete streets” policies that consider these various modes of transport as equals in transportation planning.

This year’s list shows marked growth in cities adopting this progressive way of thinking about transit. (We covered last year’s list here.) In 2013, according to the coalition’s report released today, 83 jurisdictions adopted complete streets policies–making it a total of 610 that have done so over the years. “The majority of policies are in smaller suburban communities again this year. I think those are good things. There’s this mischaracterization of the complete streets idea as applying to big cities,” says Stefanie Seskin, deputy director of the coalition, a project of Smart Growth America.

Here is the group’s ranking of the top 10 complete streets policies in 2013, based on metrics including vision, design, and clear performance measures:

Littleton, MA Peru, IN Fort Lauderdale, FL Auburn, ME Lewiston, ME Baltimore County, MD Portsmouth, NH Muscatine, IA Piqua, OH Oakland, CA Hayward, CA, Livermore, CA, and Massachusetts Dept. of Transportation (tie)

The top community, Littleton, Massachusetts, got to number one for its clear look at how the idea of complete streets would work for them, how it would be implemented, and how it could work with other jurisdictions to make sure streets were safe beyond the 9,000-person town’s small borders. Last year’s list included many cities in California, this year, there is much more geographic diversity. “It really speaks to the breadth of what’s happening here,” says Craig Chester, with Smart Growth America.

One interesting development, says Seskin, is that more and more policies, such as the one recently created by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, are considering public health as a primary motivation. The growing awareness that transportation can be about promoting active lifestyles, and not just getting from Point A to B, is leading to a broadening of the policy conversation, she says.

Another positive change compared to last year is that more policies adopted include specific steps of actions to take, rather than simply vague commitments, says Seskin. But a lot more needs to be done, especially for improved policies at the state and federal level that support local work.
Story highlights David Frum: Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost power in snowstorms this week

He says this happens regularly in U.S., but not in Germany, where power lines are buried

Some say it would be too costly to bury power lines; he says cost creates benefits

Frum: It's a project that would benefit many, create jobs; our grandchildren will thank us

Congratulations: If you're reading this, there's a good chance you still have electricity. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of Americans hit by winter weather in the South this week couldn't join you. And ice and storms making their way north threaten loss of power stretching to Vermont.

Why do Americans tolerate such outages?

They are not inevitable. The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.

The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.

David Frum

There's no Teutonic engineering magic to this impressive record. It's achieved by a very simple decision: Germany buries almost all of its low-voltage and medium-voltage power lines, the lines that serve individual homes and apartments. Americans could do the same. They have chosen not to.

The choice has been made for reasons of cost. The industry rule of thumb is that it costs about 10 times as much to bury wire as to string wire overhead: up to $1 million per mile, industry representatives claim. Since American cities are much less dense than European ones, there would be a lot more wire to string to serve a U.S. population than a European one.

Cost matters.

But now reflect:

1. There's reason to think that industry estimates of the cost of burying wires are inflated. While the U.S. industry guesstimates costs, a large-scale study of the problem conducted recently in the United Kingdom estimated the cost premium at 4.5 to 5.5 times the cost of overhead wire, not 10 times.

JUST WATCHED Atlantans stocks up for winter storm Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Atlantans stocks up for winter storm 01:16

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2. U.S. cost figures are a moving target. American cities are becoming denser as the baby boomers age and opt for central-city living . Denser cities require fewer miles of wire to serve their populations.

3. Costs can only be understood in relation to benefits. As the climate warms, storms and power outages are becoming more common. And as the population ages, power failures become more dangerous. In France, where air conditioning is uncommon, a 2003 heat wave left 10,000 people dead , almost all of them elderly. If burying power lines prevented power outages during the hotter summers --and icier winters -- ahead, the decision could save many lives.

4. As you may have heard, many Americans remain unemployed. Joblessness is acute among less educated workers, many of whom used to work in the depressed construction industry. Burying power lines is a project that could put many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed to work at tasks that make use of their skills and experience.

The Obama stimulus failed to produce many projects of lasting benefit to the country. Yet even now, borrowing costs remain low for governments and large ultilities. Burying power lines is a public works project for the 21st century that our children and grandchildren would appreciate -- and that might save our parents' lives.
The Los Angeles Times published an in-depth interview with Jesse Eisenberg about his Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice role, and it has some interesting new details.

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When asked about Lex Luthor’s different hair styles in the movie, Eisenberg replied “when you see the movie, you’ll see. It’s the greatest scene that I’ve ever gotten to take part in — it accounts for the change in hair.”

That’s high praise! Eisenberg also revealed that fans will see Lex Luthor’s backstory in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

“The character has a core of reality,” Eisenberg explained. “[Luthor] has a back story that’s tragic and an emotional inner life that’s authentic. That’s in the movie. It was my interest in playing the character with a real emotional core, and this writer, Chris Terrio’s interest in creating a character that seemed viable in reality.”

Zack Snyder told The Los Angeles Times that he originally offered Eisenberg a different role (he wouldn’t say which), and Eisenberg declined. He then went back to Eisenberg with the Lex Luthor offer, which he obviously accepted.

“I feel like once [Eisenberg] found out who Lex was he embraced it,” Snyder said. “Once you kind of start digging into Lex, it’s a bit of a scary thing to be that guy. I don’t think he just goes ‘Oh, I’ll just be that guy and then when I go home I’m not him.’ I think the thing with Jessie is he wasn’t immune to the reality of playing a super-scary character.”

SOURCE: The Los Angeles Times
Freedom of religion has wrongly and unfairly been used to deny marriage rights to gay and lesbian Australians and must be strongly resisted, Labor frontbencher Penny Wong has said.

In a rallying call for the separation of church and state, the South Australian senator blasted religious fundamentalists for limiting the freedom of "those who do not 'conform' to their views".

"Religious freedom means being free to worship and to follow your faith without suffering persecution or discrimination for your beliefs. It does not mean imposing your beliefs on everyone else," Senator Wong told the NSW Labor Lawyers gathering on Tuesday night.

"And it most emphatically does not mean deploying the power of the state to enforce one set of religious beliefs. One's own views should not determine the rights of others."
Microsoft has pushed out a C# software development kit (SDK) for its in-beta language parsing API, LUIS.

LUIS – the Language Understanding Intelligent Service – is another chunk of the chatbot capability Redmond is so keen on.

It's a model-making environment which Microsoft reckons helps developers teach existing apps to understand “book tickets to Paris”, “turn on the lights” and so on.

That's covered by LuisClient: interactions are handled by the “predict” and “reply” functions. Devs can also “create handlers for each intent (as shown in the sample) and setup a router using these handlers in order to have the router handle the responses instead of doing so within the client application”, Redmond explains at GitHub.

You need an app first, though, because it's when you publish the app here that you get the app ID and app key to use Luis.

The idea is to relieve developers of as much effort as possible, with models built for Cortana and Bing doing the hard work.

“Turn on the lights” – the “intent” – needs only a simple response (“ok”), but as Microsoft explains, “I'd like to buy a black dress” needs a more nuanced response (“what size?”, for example).

That's the bit Microsoft is trying to simplify, with a developer's interface to define both the intent, and set the response parameters. Luis includes pre-built entities; the developer then trains the model, and finally publishes it to an HTTP endpoint as JSON. ®
After my exam earlier was postponed due to some problems between Pearson VUE and VMware Lab communications, I did my VCAP-DTM deploy last Friday. And it was a pass on the first attempt 🙂 Woohoo.

The exam is a whopping 3,4 (or somewhat with 205 minutes) hours getting through tasks where time management is the most important piece. Well next to actually knowing what you need to be doing. I missed some questions in the end, but 30 questions seem to be enough to barely pass. I was a bit slow as deployment is something I do differently in real life, irritated about the backspace not working (arrow del key combination is not my cookie) while my Pavlov keeps hitting that key and in the last part of the exam I had to keep pushing radio buttons several times before they got active.

Some tips for the time management when you will attempt the exam:

Prepare your exam lab experience. Do VMware Hands on Labs from the EUC mobily courses. Is it not for the subjects, is it knowing how to operate the lab environment. The exam lab is the same as the hands-on labs. I used several HOL-1751-MBL-1 and so on. Do note the Horizon are not the versions used in the VCAP6 version, but most items are still in the right place. I have also used Ravello Cloud for my labs. Bonus with the HOL’s is that you already have the password to use in the exam drilled.

Familiarize with the subjects. Read through the exam objectives and practice those in your own lab or hands on labs. These blog posts were very helpful: Going through the VCAP6-DTM Deploy Study guide several times with this blog post series: https://szumigalski.com/2016/08/01/vcap6-dtm-study-guide/. Prepare yourself about the exam lab environment with this blog post: http://sostechblog.com/2016/07/26/vcap6-dtm-desktop-and-mobility-deployment-exam-launch/.

Schedule your exam. Have something to work to. Do this before starting to study, but allow for a reasonable study preparation period.

There is no non-native English speaker time extension, 205 minutes is what everyone gets.

A VCAP study group with peers is worth it, especially working together on a shared goal and for sharing experiences, tips and tricks. At our company ITQ (http://itq.nl) we did VCAP Bootcamps were we had multiple sessions and let some of the team present an objective. Don’t have peers at your company that go for the same kind of exams? Well reach out on twitter, the community is strong in its knowledge sharing force and you will get a group in no time.

Mirage base layer and application layer capturing, restoring, as well as App Volumes capturing take time to complete. Make a note on your whiteboard and do some other questions while these are capturing. Return to see the progress.

Set your environment to a comfortable screen resolution, mine was to set the screen to 1024×768. Also change this resolution in the Remote Desktop Manager. If you happen to need console access to a virtual machine (mostly RDP will work), use the web client not VMRC or the vSphere client console as the CTRL-ALT are not working.

Once at the exam, go through the exam questions, start the capturings, complete the ones you know, skip the ones you don’t know or are not sure about. You can navigate back and forth through the tasks, but don’t go skipping in berserk mode. Have some idea what questions are for what subjects, use your white board to write done the questions, make notes and mark completed, in progress or fail.

Do take time to read the assignment, you have multiple clusters, desktops and connections servers. Don’t wasted time starting the task on the wrong component.

Don’t let slow performance get you. This is a lab environment and not running in your exam centre or even region. It can be slow, be prepared and be patience. But that doesn’t mean that if it is unworkable you shouldn’t say something about it….

Know how Horizon architecture, application capturing and desktop pools work, know your way with Identity Manager (vIDM) and Mirage, know the lmvutil and vdmadmin command line help options, and you will be a okay. And yes that time management….

– Enjoy your exam experience!

Sources: vmware.com, szumigalski.com, sostechblog.com
The handy to-do list and task management app Astrid is shutting down. What's your favorite app for simple task reminders?

Yahoo-owned Astrid was scheduled to shut down on Monday. (Photo11: Photodisc Getty Images) Story Highlights Yahoo acquired Astrid in May

The Astrid service is scheduled to shut down on Monday

Any.do is a handy replacement for simple task management

SAN FRANCISCO — Today's to-do list: Settle on a good replacer for Astrid, the handy Yahoo-acquired to-do list app that is slated to shut down today.

Done and done.

In the spirit of the handy little reminder and task management app, the Astrid team on Sunday night sent an email to users reminding us that the service is shutting down on Monday and will no longer be available. Astrid had about 4 million downloads before its purchase by Yahoo in May for an undisclosed sum.

As of Sunday night, you could download any data you wanted to retain from the service at astrid.com/home/export.

The folks at Astrid recommended several replacements — Wrike, Wunderlist, Sandglaz, and Any.do — though there are a truly exhausting number of to-do list apps available on multiple platforms.

I didn't want to spend a ton of time checking out alternatives. After a quick search in Google Play, Apple's App Store and the web a few weeks ago, I settled on Any.do and it has filled nearly all of my simple requirements.

It's simple to add a task reminder in Any.do and that is all I really want in a to-do list app — a way to quickly add tasks, prompts and lists to get me through my personal day and work day: Move the car! Edit these stories! Call this person back!

Any.do, from an Israel-based startup, does all that in a very minimalist way, much like Astrid, which I'd latched onto as much for its cheeky prompts as ease of use. I liked that I could log in with my Google account and sync tasks across my devices — whether Android or iOS or via the web (like Astrid, there's also a Chrome browser extension for Any.do). You could use it to screen incoming calls or set up meeting reminders. Any.do does all of that too, although you must either create an account or log in via Facebook rather than Google.

There is nice integration with my Gmail account with Any.do. Open an email and you see an Any.do task bar offering "What's next" options — "follow up with Margie," "set up meeting with XX".

Yahoo bought Astrid in May —— one in a dizzying string of acquisitions under CEO Marissa Mayer as part of the company's efforts to reach a younger, mobile audience.

Readers: What's your favorite to-do list/tast management app? Drop us a note at techcomments@usatoday.com.

Follow Nancy Blair on Twitter: @nansanfran.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1emqQ9Z
The geography of Canada describes the geographic features of Canada, the world's second largest country in total area.

Situated in northern North America (constituting 41% of the continent's area), Canada spans a vast, diverse territory between the North Pacific Ocean to the west and the North Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Arctic Ocean to the north (hence the country's motto "From sea to sea"), with the United States to the south (contiguous United States) and northwest (Alaska). Greenland is to the northeast; off the southern coast of Newfoundland lies Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an overseas collectivity of France. Since 1925, Canada has claimed the portion of the Arctic between 60°W and 141°W longitude to the North Pole; however, this claim is contested.[1] While the magnetic North Pole lies within the Canadian Arctic territorial claim as of 2011, recent measurements indicate it is moving towards Siberia.[2]

Covering 9,984,670 km2 or 3,855,100 sq mi (land: 9,093,507 km2 or 3,511,023 sq mi; freshwater: 891,163 km2 or 344,080 sq mi), Canada is slightly less than three-fifths as large as Russia and slightly smaller than Europe. In total area, Canada is slightly larger than both the U.S. and China; however, Canada ranks fourth in land area (i.e. total area minus the area of lakes and rivers)—China is 9,326,410 km2 (3,600,950 sq mi) and the U.S. is 9,161,923 km2 (3,537,438 sq mi).[3]

The population of Canada, 35,151,728 as of May 10, 2016, is concentrated in the south close to its border with the contiguous U.S.; with a population density of 3.5 people per square kilometre (9.1/sq mi), it is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The northernmost settlement in Canada—and in the world—is Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Alert (just north of Alert, Nunavut) on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island at 82°30′N 62°19′W, just 834 kilometres (518 mi) from the North Pole.

Climate [ edit ]

Köppen climate classification types of Canada

Arctic tundra covers parts of extreme northern Canada.

Canada has a diverse climate. The climate varies from temperate on the west coast of British Columbia[4] to a subarctic climate in the north.[5] Extreme northern Canada can have snow for most of the year with a Polar climate.[6] Landlocked areas tend to have a warm summer continental climate zone[7] with the exception of Southwestern Ontario which has a hot summer humid continental climate.[7] Parts of Western Canada have a semi-arid climate, and parts of Vancouver Island can even be classified as cool summer Mediterranean climate.[6] Temperature extremes in Canada range from 45.0 °C (113 °F) in Midale and Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan on July 5, 1937 to −63.0 °C (−81.4 °F) in Snag, Yukon on Monday, February 3, 1947.[8]

Extremes [ edit ]

Climate data for Canada Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Record high humidex 19.2 22.3 31.3 35.7 42.3 52.3 52.6 49.3 46.9 39.2 27.5 24.1 52.6 Record high °C (°F) 19.4

(66.9) 22.6

(72.7) 28.5

(83.3) 37.2

(99.0) 42.2

(108.0) 43.3

(109.9) 45

(113) 43.3

(109.9) 40

(104) 34.0

(93.2) 26.1

(79.0) 22.2

(72.0) 45

(113) Record low °C (°F) −61.1

(−78.0) −63.0

(−81.4) −54.7

(−66.5) −48.9

(−56.0) −32.2

(−26.0) −20.6

(−5.1) −8.9

(16.0) −15

(5) −31.7

(−25.1) −41.7

(−43.1) −54.4

(−65.9) −60

(−76) −63.0

(−81.4) Record low wind chill −79 −72.3 −70.1 −60.5 −40.8 −32.7 −18.6 −21 −36.9 −52.3 −57.9 −68.8 −79 Source: Environment Canada

Physical geography [ edit ]

A satellite composite image of Canada. Boreal forests prevail throughout the country, including the Arctic, the Coast Mountains and Saint Elias Mountains. The relatively flat Prairies facilitate agriculture. The Great Lakes feed the St. Lawrence River (in the southeast) where lowlands host much of Canada's population.

Canada covers 9,984,670 km2 (3,855,100 sq mi) and a panoply of various geoclimatic regions. There are 8 main regions.[28] Canada also encompasses vast maritime terrain, with the world's longest coastline of 243,042 kilometres (151,019 mi).[29] The physical geography of Canada is widely varied. Boreal forests prevail throughout the country, ice is prominent in northerly Arctic regions and through the Rocky Mountains, and the relatively flat Canadian Prairies in the southwest facilitate productive agriculture.[28] The Great Lakes feed the St. Lawrence River (in the southeast) where lowlands host much of Canada's population.

Appalachian Mountains [ edit ]

The Appalachian mountain range extends from Alabama through the Gaspé Peninsula and the Atlantic Provinces, creating rolling hills indented by river valleys.[30] It also runs through parts of southern Quebec.[30]

The Appalachian mountains (more specifically the Chic-Choc Mountains, Notre Dame, and Long Range Mountains) are an old and eroded range of mountains, approximately 380 million years in age. Notable mountains in the Appalachians include Mount Jacques-Cartier (Quebec, 1,268 m or 4,160 ft), Mount Carleton (New Brunswick, 817 m or 2,680 ft), The Cabox (Newfoundland, 814 m or 2,671 ft).[31] Parts of the Appalachians are home to a rich endemic flora and fauna and are considered to have been nunataks during the last glaciation era.[citation needed]

Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Lowlands [ edit ]

The southern parts of Quebec and Ontario, in the section of the Great Lakes (bordered entirely by Ontario on the Canadian side) and St. Lawrence basin (often called St. Lawrence Lowlands), is another particularly rich sedimentary plain.[33] Prior to its colonization and heavy urban sprawl of the 20th century, this Eastern Great Lakes lowland forests area was home to large mixed forests covering a mostly flat area of land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Canadian Shield.[34] Most of this forest has been cut down through agriculture and logging operations, but the remaining forests are for the most part heavily protected. In this part of Canada the Gulf of St. Lawrence is one of the world's largest estuary (see Gulf of St. Lawrence lowland forests).[35]

The Great Lakes from space

While the relief of these lowlands is particularly flat and regular, a group of batholites known as the Monteregian Hills are spread along a mostly regular line across the area.[36] The most notable are Montreal's Mount Royal and Mont Saint-Hilaire. These hills are known for a great richness in precious minerals.[36]

Canadian Shield [ edit ]

The northeastern part of Alberta, northern parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, as well as most of Labrador (the mainland portions of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador), are located on a vast rock base known as the Canadian Shield. The Shield mostly consists of eroded hilly terrain and contains many lakes and important rivers used for hydroelectric production, particularly in northern Quebec and Ontario. The shield also encloses an area of wetlands, the Hudson Bay lowlands. Some particular regions of the Shield are referred to as mountain ranges, including the Torngat and Laurentian Mountains.[37]

The Shield cannot support intensive agriculture, although there is subsistence agriculture and small dairy farms in many of the river valleys and around the abundant lakes, particularly in the southern regions. Boreal forest covers much of the shield, with a mix of conifers that provide valuable timber resources in areas such as the Central Canadian Shield forests ecoregion that covers much of Northern Ontario. The region is known for its extensive mineral reserves.[37]

The Canadian Shield is known for its vast minerals, such as emeralds, diamonds and copper. The Canadian shield is also called the mineral house.

Canadian Interior Plains [ edit ]

The Canadian Prairies are part of a vast sedimentary plain covering much of Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and southwestern Manitoba, as well as much of the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Slave and Great Bear lakes in Northwest Territories. The plains generally describes the expanses of (largely flat) arable agricultural land which sustain extensive grain farming operations in the southern part of the provinces. Despite this, some areas such as the Cypress Hills and the Alberta Badlands are quite hilly and the prairie provinces contain large areas of forest such as the Mid-Continental Canadian forests. The size is roughly ~1,900,000 km2 (733,594.1 sq mi).

Western Cordillera [ edit ]

The Canadian Cordillera, contiguous with the American cordillera, is bounded by the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

The Canadian Rockies are part of a major continental divide that extends north and south through western North America and western South America. The Columbia and the Fraser Rivers have their headwaters in the Canadian Rockies and are the second and third largest rivers respectively to drain to the west coast of North America. To the west of their headwaters, across the Rocky Mountain Trench, is a second belt of mountains, the Columbia Mountains, comprising the Selkirk, Purcell, Monashee and Cariboo Mountains sub-ranges.

Immediately west of the Columbia Mountains is a large and rugged Interior Plateau, encompassing the Chilcotin and Cariboo regions in central British Columbia (the Fraser Plateau), the Nechako Plateau further north, and also the Thompson Plateau in the south. The Peace River Valley in northeastern British Columbia is Canada's most northerly agricultural region, although it is part of the Prairies. The dry, temperate climate of the Okanagan Valley in south central British Columbia provides ideal conditions for fruit growing and a flourishing wine industry; the semi-arid belt of the Southern Interior also includes the Fraser Canyon, and Thompson, Nicola, Similkameen, Shuswap and Boundary regions and fruit-growing is common in these areas also, and also in the West Kootenay. Between the plateau and the coast is the province's largest mountain range, the Coast Mountains. The Coast Mountains contain some of the largest temperate-latitude icefields in the world.

On the south coast of British Columbia, Vancouver Island is separated from the mainland by the continuous Juan de Fuca, Georgia, and Johnstone Straits. Those straits include a large number of islands, notably the Gulf Islands and Discovery Islands. North, near the Alaskan border, Haida Gwaii lies across Hecate Strait from the North Coast region and to its north, across Dixon Entrance from Southeast Alaska. Other than in the plateau regions of the Interior and its many river valleys, most of British Columbia is coniferous forest. The only temperate rain forests in Canada are found along the Pacific Coast in the Coast Mountains, on Vancouver Island, and on Haida Gwaii, and in the Cariboo Mountains on the eastern flank of the Plateau.

The Western Cordillera continues northwards past the Liard River in northernmost British Columbia to include the Mackenzie and Selwyn Ranges which lie in the far western Northwest Territories and the eastern Yukon Territory. West of them is the large Yukon Plateau and, west of that, the Yukon Ranges and Saint Elias Mountains, which include Canada's and British Columbia's highest summits, Mount Saint Elias in the Kluane region and Mount Fairweather in the Tatshenshini-Alsek region. The headwaters of the Yukon River, the largest and longest of the rivers on the Pacific Slope, lie in northern British Columbia at Atlin and Teslin Lakes.

Volcanoes [ edit ]

Western Canada has many volcanoes and is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a system of volcanoes found around the margins of the Pacific Ocean. There are over 200 young volcanic centres that stretch northward from the Cascade Range to Yukon. They are grouped into five volcanic belts with different volcano types and tectonic settings. The Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province was formed by faulting, cracking, rifting, and the interaction between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. The Garibaldi Volcanic Belt was formed by subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the North American Plate. The Anahim Volcanic Belt was formed as a result of the North American Plate sliding westward over the Anahim hotspot. The Chilcotin Group is believed to have formed as a result of back-arc extension behind the Cascadia subduction zone. The Wrangell Volcanic Field formed as a result of subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North American Plate at the easternmost end of the Aleutian Trench.

Volcanism has also occurred in the Canadian Shield. It contains over 150 volcanic belts (now deformed and eroded down to nearly flat plains) that range from 600 million to 2.8 billion years old. Many of Canada's major ore deposits are associated with Precambrian volcanoes. There are pillow lavas in the Northwest Territories that are about 2.6 billion years old and are preserved in the Cameron River Volcanic Belt. The pillow lavas in rocks over 2 billion years old in the Canadian Shield signify that great oceanic volcanoes existed during the early stages of the formation of the Earth's crust. Ancient volcanoes play an important role in estimating Canada's mineral potential. Many of the volcanic belts bear ore deposits that are related to the volcanism.

Canadian Arctic [ edit ]

While the largest part of the Canadian Arctic is composed of seemingly endless permafrost and tundra north of the tree line, it encompasses geological regions of varying types: the Arctic Cordillera (with the British Empire Range and the United States Range on Ellesmere Island) contains the northernmost mountain system in the world. The Arctic Lowlands and Hudson Bay lowlands comprise a substantial part of the geographic region often designated as the Canadian Shield (in contrast to the sole geologic area). The ground in the Arctic is mostly composed of permafrost, making construction difficult and often hazardous, and agriculture virtually impossible.

The Arctic, when defined as everything north of the tree line, covers most of Nunavut and the northernmost parts of Northwest Territories, Yukon, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Labrador.

Hydrography [ edit ]

BC AB SK MB ON QC NB PE NS NL YT NT NU Drainage basins of Canada

Canada holds vast reserves of water: its rivers discharge nearly 9% of the world's renewable water supply,[38] it contains a quarter of the world's wetlands, and it has the third largest amount of glaciers (after Antarctica and Greenland). Because of extensive glaciation, Canada hosts more than two million lakes: of those that are entirely within Canada, more than 31,000 are between 3 and 100 square kilometres (1.2 and 38.6 sq mi) in area, while 563 are larger than 100 km2 (38.6 sq mi).[39]

Rivers [ edit ]

Canada’s two longest rivers are the Mackenzie, which empties into the Arctic Ocean and drains a large part of northwestern Canada, and the St. Lawrence, which drains the Great Lakes and empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Mackenzie is over 4,200 km (2,600 mi) in length while the St. Lawrence is over 3,000 km (1,900 mi) in length. Rounding out the ten longest rivers within Canada are the Nelson, Churchill, Peace, Fraser, North Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Athabasca and Yukon rivers.[40]

Drainage basins [ edit ]

The Atlantic watershed drains the entirety of the Atlantic provinces (parts of the Quebec-Labrador border are fixed at the Atlantic Ocean-Arctic Ocean continental divide), most of inhabited Quebec and large parts of southern Ontario. It is mostly drained by the economically important St. Lawrence River and its tributaries, notably the Saguenay, Manicouagan and Ottawa rivers. The Great Lakes and Lake Nipigon are also drained by the St. Lawrence. The Churchill River and Saint John River are other important elements of the Atlantic watershed in Canada.[41]

The Hudson Bay watershed drains over a third of Canada. It covers Manitoba, northern Ontario and Quebec, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southwestern Nunavut and the southern half of Baffin Island. This basin is most important in fighting drought in the prairies and producing hydroelectricity, especially in Manitoba, northern Ontario and Quebec. Major elements of this watershed include Lake Winnipeg, Nelson River, the North Saskatchewan and South Saskatchewan Rivers, Assiniboine River, and Nettilling Lake on Baffin Island. Wollaston Lake lies on the boundary between the Hudson Bay and Arctic Ocean watersheds and drains into both. It is the largest lake in the world that naturally drains in two directions.[41]

The continental divide in the Rockies separates the Pacific watershed in British Columbia and Yukon from the Arctic and Hudson Bay watersheds. This watershed irrigates the agriculturally important areas of inner British Columbia (such as the Okanagan and Kootenay valleys), and is used to produce hydroelectricity. Major elements are the Yukon, Columbia and Fraser rivers.[41]

The northern parts of Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia, most of Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and parts of Yukon are drained by the Arctic watershed. This watershed has been little used for hydroelectricity, with the exception of the Mackenzie River, the longest river in Canada. The Peace, Athabasca and Liard Rivers, as well as Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake (respectively the largest and second largest lakes wholly enclosed by Canada) are significant elements of the Arctic watershed. Each of these elements eventually merges with the Mackenzie, thereby draining the vast majority of the Arctic watershed.[41]

The southernmost part of Alberta drains into the Gulf of Mexico through the Milk River and its tributaries. The Milk River originates in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, then flows into Alberta, then returns into the United States, where it is drained by the Missouri River. A small area of southwestern Saskatchewan is drained by Battle Creek, which empties into the Milk River.[41]

Floristic geography [ edit ]

Canada has produced a Biodiversity Action Plan in response to the 1992 international accord; the plan addresses conservation of endangered species and certain habitats. The main biomes of Canada are:

Political geography [ edit ]

For historical political boundaries of Canada, see Territorial evolution of Canada

Canada is divided into ten provinces and three territories. According to Statistics Canada, 72.0 percent of the population is concentrated within 150 kilometres (93 mi) of the nation's southern border with the United States, 70.0% live south of the 49th parallel, and over 60 percent of the population lives along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City. This leaves the vast majority of Canada's territory as sparsely populated wilderness; Canada's population density is 3.5 people/km2 (9.1/mi2), among the lowest in the world. Despite this, 79.7 percent of Canada's population resides in urban areas, where population densities are increasing.[42]

Canada shares with the U.S. the world's longest undefended border at 8,893 kilometres (5,526 mi); 2,477 kilometres (1,539 mi) are with Alaska. The Danish island dependency of Greenland lies to Canada's northeast, separated from the Canadian Arctic islands by Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. The French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon lie off the southern coast of Newfoundland in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and have a maritime territorial enclave within Canada's exclusive economic zone. Canada also shares a land border with Denmark, as maps released in December 2006 show that the agreed upon boundaries run through the middle of Hans Island.[43]

Canada's geographic proximity to the United States has historically bound the two countries together in the political world as well. Canada's position between the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the U.S. was strategically important during the Cold War since the route over the North Pole and Canada was the fastest route by air between the two countries and the most direct route for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been growing speculation that Canada's Arctic maritime claims may become increasingly important if global warming melts the ice enough to open the Northwest Passage.

Similarly, the disputed—and tiny—Hans Island (with Denmark), in the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland, may be a flashpoint for challenges to overall claims of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.[43]

Natural resources [ edit ]

Canada's abundance of natural resources is reflected in their continued importance in the economy of Canada. Major resource-based industries are fisheries, forestry, agriculture, petroleum products and mining.

The fisheries industry has historically been one of Canada's strongest. Unmatched cod stocks on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland launched this industry in the 16th century. Today these stocks are nearly depleted, and their conservation has become a preoccupation of the Atlantic Provinces. On the West Coast, tuna stocks are now restricted. The less depleted (but still greatly diminished) salmon population continues to drive a strong fisheries industry. Canada claims 22 km (12 nmi) of territorial sea, a contiguous zone of 44 km (24 nmi), an exclusive economic zone of 370 km (200 nmi) and a continental shelf of 370 km (200 nmi) or to the edge of the continental margin.

Forestry has long been a major industry in Canada. Forest products contribute one fifth of the nation's exports. The provinces with the largest forestry industries are British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Fifty-four percent of Canada's land area is covered in forest. The boreal forests account for four-fifths of Canada's forestland.

Five per cent of Canada's land area is arable, none of which is for permanent crops. Three per cent of Canada's land area is covered by permanent pastures. Canada has 7,200 square kilometres (2,800 mi2) of irrigated land (1993 estimate). Agricultural regions in Canada include the Canadian Prairies, the Lower Mainland and various regions within the Interior of British Columbia, the St. Lawrence Basin and the Canadian Maritimes. Main crops in Canada include flax, oats, wheat, maize, barley, sugar beets and rye in the prairies; flax and maize in Western Ontario; Oats and potatoes in the Maritimes. Fruit and vegetables are grown primarily in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, Southwestern Ontario, the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario, along the south coast of Georgian Bay and in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. Cattle and sheep are raised in the valleys and plateaus of British Columbia. Cattle, sheep and hogs are raised on the prairies, cattle and hogs in Western Ontario, sheep and hogs in Quebec, and sheep in the Maritimes. There are significant dairy regions in central Nova Scotia, southern New Brunswick, the St. Lawrence Valley, northeastern Ontario, southwestern Ontario, the Red River valley of Manitoba and the valleys in the British Columbia Interior, on Vancouver Island and in the Lower Mainland.

Fossil fuels are a more recently developed resource in Canada, with oil and gas being extracted from deposits in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin since the mid 1900s. While Canada's crude oil deposits are fewer, technological developments in recent decades have opened up oil production in Alberta's Oil Sands to the point where Canada now has some of the largest reserves of oil in the world. In other forms, Canadian industry has a long history of extracting large coal and natural gas reserves.

Canada's mineral resources are diverse and extensive. Across the Canadian Shield and in the north there are large iron, nickel, zinc, copper, gold, lead, molybdenum, and uranium reserves. Large diamond concentrations have been recently developed in the Arctic, making Canada one of the world's largest producers. Throughout the Shield there are many mining towns extracting these minerals. The largest, and best known, is Sudbury, Ontario. Sudbury is an exception to the normal process of forming minerals in the Shield since there is significant evidence that the Sudbury Basin is an ancient meteorite impact crater. The nearby, but less known Temagami Magnetic Anomaly has striking similarities to the Sudbury Basin. Its magnetic anomalies are very similar to the Sudbury Basin, and so it could be a second metal-rich impact crater.[44] The Shield is also covered by vast boreal forests that support an important logging industry.

Canada's many rivers have afforded extensive development of hydroelectric power. Extensively developed in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Labrador, the many dams have long provided a clean, dependable source of energy.

Natural hazards [ edit ]

Continuous permafrost in the north is a serious obstacle to development. Cyclonic storms form east of the Rocky Mountains, a result of the mixing of air masses from the Arctic, Pacific, and North American interior, and produce most of the country's rain and snow east of the mountains.

Current environmental issues [ edit ]

Air pollution and resulting acid rain severely affects lakes and damages forests.[45] Metal smelting, coal-burning utilities, and vehicle emissions impact agricultural and forest productivity. And ocean waters are becoming contaminated from agricultural, industrial, mining, and forestry activities.[45]

Global climate change and the warming of the polar region will likely cause significant changes to the environment, including loss of the polar bear,[46] the exploration for resource then the extraction of these resources and an alternative transport route to the Panama Canal through the Northwest Passage.

Extreme points [ edit ]

Topographic map

The northernmost point within the boundaries of Canada is Cape Columbia, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut .[47] The northernmost point of the Canadian mainland is Zenith Point on Boothia Peninsula, Nunavut .[47]

The southernmost point is Middle Island, in Lake Erie, Ontario (41°41′N, 82°40′W); the southernmost water point lies just south of the island, on the Ontario–Ohio border (41°40′35″N). The southernmost point of the Canadian mainland is Point Pelee, Ontario .[47]

The westernmost point is Boundary Peak 187 (60°18′22.929″N, 141°00′7.128″W) at the southern end of the Yukon–Alaska border which is roughly following 141°W but leans very slightly east as it goes North .[48][47]

The easternmost point is Cape Spear, Newfoundland (47°31′N, 52°37′W) .[47] The easternmost point of the Canadian mainland is Elijah Point, Cape St. Charles, Labrador (52°13′N, 55°37′W) .[47]

The lowest point is sea level at 0 m,[49] whilst the highest point is Mount Logan, Yukon, at 5,959 m / 19,550 ft .[47]

The Canadian pole of inaccessibility is allegedly near Jackfish River, Alberta (Latitude: 59°2′ 60 N, Longitude: 112°49′ 60 W).

The furthest straight-line distance that can be travelled to Canadian points of land is between the southwest tip of Kluane National Park and Reserve (next to Mount Saint Elias) and Cripple Cove, NL (near Cape Race) at a distance of 3,005.60 nautical miles (5,566.37 km; 3,458.78 mi).

See also [ edit ]

BC AB SK MB ON QC NB PE NS NL YT NT NU Geography by province

References [ edit ]

Further reading [ edit ]

This article incorporates public domain material from the CIA World Factbook website https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html. The Barren Lands Collection, University of Toronto
Sony’s “Back up & restore” app gets hacked [Update]

Sony has a potentially serious issue on their hands as its “Back up & restore” app appears to have been hacked. Looking at the Play Store ‘My apps’ section on our Xperia Z3 reveals that the app is now managed by the “HeArT HaCkEr Group.” As a system app, there is no way to delete the app either, so given the permissions this particular app has (see below) it is a serious issue.

We’re not sure how the app has been hacked. Potentially, Sony Mobile’s Play Store account may be compromised, where the hacker has replaced the original app. However, we’ll wait to hear from Sony directly. The Google Play Store listing for this new hacked version can be found here (PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL).

At this stage, we can’t say whether this app is doing anything harmful, but we’ve contacted Sony and will let you know their response. In the meantime, check your phone to see if you are affected and we will post updates in this post.

Update: Sony has a quick update on its support forums:

“Sony Mobile takes the security and privacy of customer data very seriously. We are currently investigating these reports. More information will follow as soon as we have fully assessed the situation.“

Update 2: The app in question has been removed from the Google Play Store. Also it is no longer present in “My apps” within the Play Store app. We still await for the ‘all clear’ from Sony and an explanation on how this happened in the first place.

Update 3: Sony has released a statement explaining what has happened in this situation and that ultimately there was no risk to users:

“It appears that an unauthorised 3rd party developer created an application using the same name and identifier as our “Backup & Restore” service, and uploaded it to Google Play. As the app mirrored our ‘Backup & Restore’ service naming structure, it appeared as downloaded on some products within Google Play’s “My Apps”, when in fact it wasn’t actually installed. We don’t provide ‘Backup & Restore’ on Google Play – it is pre-installed on Xperia devices, with all version and maintenance updates handled directly through our Update Centre. This application posed no risk to users, but has since been removed from Google Play.“

Permissions of hacked “Back up & restore” app

Thanks Brad!
UFC on Fox 15: Machida vs. Rockhold was an event that saw a multitude of lower ranked fighters defeat their higher ranked counterparts. This resulted in a lot of movement in this week’s official UFC Rankings.

In his most impressive performance in the UFC, Luke Rockhold defeated former UFC Light-Heavywight Champion Lyoto Machida, and moved up three spots from #4 to the #1 spot in the Middlewight division.

Although Jacare Souza won his fight in dominate fashion, a win against Chris Camozzi doesn’t compare to defeating Lyoto Machida, as Souza dropped from the #1 spot to #2 at middleweight. Lyoto Machida dropped from #2 to #4.

The breakout star of the event was Max Holloway as he dominated the higher ranked Cub Swanson. Holloway moved to #6 at featherweight, while Swanson surprisingly stayed at #5.

Paige VanZant also had a breakout performance, dominating veteran Felice Herrig. She had the biggest jump in the rankings, moving up 5 spots to #7 in the woman’s strawweight division. Herrig fell down three spots to #11 .

Ovince St. Preux’s 1st round KO of Patrick Cummins did not give him too much of a boost in the rankings, as he stayed at #7 at light-heavyweight. Cummins fell a spot couple to #13 .

Beniel Dariush makes his debut in the UFC rankings after putting on a grapping showcase against the former #12 ranked lightweight Jim Miller. Dariush is ranked at #14 , while Miller has fallen off of the rankings.

There was no movement in the Pound-for-Pound rankings as no fighter within the Top 15 fought. Even though Rockhold and Souza are ranked higher at middleweight, fighters Anderson Silva and Vitor Belfort continue to hold their P4P ranking.

For the full rankings, click the link here, or visit UFC.com/rankings.

Main Photo
But some of the administration’s leading liberal insiders, like Harold H. Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, are pushing for the United States to join the ban. And even some Pentagon officials are said to favor a change.

In a sign of the effort’s urgency, the White House is holding regular meetings with officials from the Pentagon and State Department. The administration has summoned outside experts, like Karl F. Inderfurth, a former senior diplomat who led the delegation to Ottawa in 1997, where the United States watched as 120 other countries signed the pact.

“I’m guardedly optimistic,” said a senior administration official who favors the treaty and who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “Why stick with the status quo when we would get so much credit for even a modest move?”

A Pentagon spokesman said it would be “premature” to comment before the review was completed. It is not clear where the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, stands.

The White House said that the United States is already helping deal with the fallout from mines. “The U.S. record on humanitarian mine action shows that we share the concern of parties to the Ottawa Convention,” said Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Some analysts say the rationale for land mines is even weaker now than it was in 1997. Technological advances have enabled the Pentagon to create explosives that function like mines but are detonated remotely, making them permissible under the treaty. The United States has not used land mines since 1991, despite fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — two countries that have ratified the treaty.

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“The situation has changed significantly in recent years,” said Mr. Inderfurth, who is now a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “There is every reason to believe we could join this treaty.”

Next week, Senator Leahy plans to send a letter to Mr. Obama, urging him to join the ban. The letter notes that 158 countries have signed the treaty, including Britain and other NATO allies. It is signed by 68 senators, including 10 Republicans.

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In the 13 years since Diana, Princess of Wales, walked near a minefield in Angola to dramatize the dangers, land mines have receded as a political cause. They were not an issue in the presidential campaign or in the early days of the administration.

By all accounts, the initial land mine review was “cursory and half-hearted,” in Mr. Leahy’s words. Last November, on the eve of a meeting on the treaty in Colombia, a State Department spokesman declared, “We would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this.”

A day later, after a storm of protest from Mr. Leahy and human rights groups, the administration insisted that the review was still under way, and that the spokesman’s comments were premature. But one senior official said the “negative blowback” forced a more serious examination. The current review is being coordinated by two senior officials at the National Security Council, Samantha Power and Barry Pavel.

Another key player is Andrew J. Shapiro, the State Department’s top liaison to the Pentagon who served as an adviser to Mrs. Clinton on defense policy when she was in the Senate. Officials said Mr. Koh, a former dean of Yale Law School, was drafting legal arguments on issues like the status of land mines in South Korea, where American troops are deployed.

In the past, the Pentagon has sought a “Korean exception” that would allow it to keep a stockpile of mines in the demilitarized zone. But while those mines are there to protect American soldiers, control over them has been transferred to South Korea, which is not a party to the treaty.

The goal of those who favor the treaty is to get back to the policy of the Clinton administration, which declined to sign the treaty in 1997 but said it wanted the United States to be compliant by 2006. In 2004, the Bush administration issued a new policy that emphasized the development of safer and more sophisticated mines, but pointedly refused to go along with a ban.

Since the treaty has been in force for more than a decade, the United States would no longer sign it, but accede to its terms, a decision that would still require ratification by the Senate. The most likely outcome, several officials said, is for the administration to bring the United States closer to full compliance, while setting a goal, as Mr. Clinton did, to join it eventually.

Such a move might not satisfy the advocates, said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network, a foreign policy group. “But you definitely have people within the administration working to bring the United States closer to the spirit of the treaty,” she said.
TigerAidan Originally Posted by No one knows the reason why Cain was suspended for the Miami game so to say he needs to get it together is assuming and that is never a good thing. As far as the other 2, Lakip is a senior so his career was over after this year anyways and JJ I am afraid to say probably just sealed his fate as a Tiger but he had ample amount of time to get it together so I can't feel sorry for him. With that said there are rules that have to be followed and if you break those rules you have to be dealt with but I am not going to judge these young men on failing a drug test. I am sure the last thing any college kid wants to do is take a drug test. Hopefully it is a learning lesson for these kids but they don't need so called fans judging their lives or their decisions. They made their choices now they must live with the consequences and it isn't fair to have those fans who know nothing about them berate them because they can't help their favorite team win. If it is your first instinct to name call and tell everyone how stupid they are then you damn sure better have a clean closet....
“Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.”

- Evolving in Monkey Town, Chapter 9

If you’ve read Evolving in Monkey Town you know that some of my most serious doubts about Christianity were triggered by questions related to religious pluralism and the destiny of the un-evangelized. After witnessing the public execution of a Muslim woman from Afghanistan on TV, I began struggling with the idea that millions upon millions of people like Zarmina had been sentenced to hell for eternity, most without ever hearing the gospel.

In Chapter 9 I write:

In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people that they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony and the hands of angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it’s terrible news.

As I’ve travelled around the country talking about my experience with doubt, I’ve been approached by many people, especially college students and young adults, who relate most to this section of the book. With tears in their eyes, they confess that they too lie awake at night wondering how a loving God could damn the majority of his creation to hell, how a God who “desires that all be saved” could leave so many without hope.

In the book I explain why I think Scripture gives us reason to be optimistic about the future of humanity, but it has become increasingly clear to me over the past few months that this is a topic people desperately want to talk about.

With this in mind, I recently requested an advance review copy of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins: Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Has Ever Lived. I was especially intrigued by a video trailer for the book in which Bell asks the very questions I’ve been asking myself since childhood and the very questions with which so many in my generation wrestle:

Will only a few select people make it into heaven?

How does one become one of these few?

Are people like Ghandi and Anne Frank really in hell, along with millions and millions of other people?

Do we need a loving Jesus to rescue us from a hateful God? Is this what the gospel is all about?

Is the gospel good news or bad news?

What is the essence of God's character?

Most of us haven’t received our review copies yet, but that didn’t stop a few bloggers from issuing their opinions about the book this weekend. Without even knowing Bell’s position, they declared it outside the bounds of orthodoxy and influenced by Satan. John Piper even issued a flippant “farewell” to Bell via twitter.

The message was clear: Ask questions about heaven and hell and you will be cast out.

But as Bell’s pre-orders soared and many rose to his defense, it became clear that that what John Piper and Justin Taylor failed to realize is that we are already asking these questions. We are asking them in our dorm rooms, at our kitchen tables, over coffee, in classrooms, at Bible studies, at church, in our journals, in our hearts, and in thousands upon thousands of tearful, faithful prayers each night.

Scot McKnight said it well in an interview with Christianity Today when he noted that “Rob is tapping into what I think is the biggest issue facing evangelicalism today, and this fury shows that it just might be that big of an issue.”

Ready or not, we are having this conversation. And it’s important that a variety of views are represented fairly and accurately—from exclusivism to inclusivism to conditional immortality to universalism. The Christian tradition is rich with a diversity of perspectives regarding heaven and hell, and we should hear them all out. Most of us are not so impressionable as to simply believe whatever one or two popular theologians tell us, but to do the research and reflection necessary to make up our own minds.

At the end of the day, this isn't really about Rob Bell or John Piper or a single book or a single blog post. It's about a conversation that's been rumbling beneath the surface for a while now and has finally found the light.

May it be lively. May it be civil. And may it honor the One who prayed that our unity would reflect the sweet harmony of the Trinity…because the world indeed is watching.

***

Do you agree with Scot McKnight that that this is perhaps the biggest issue facing evangelicalism today? What sort of questions have you been asking about heaven and hell?

(Note: Please do not comment on Rob Bell’s book specifically unless you have actually read it.)
Photo: Stephen Starr

I'm on the shores of Lake Tuz, the second-largest lake in Turkey, and no one wants to talk about salt.

It took 10 minutes of pleading with a security guard, even though he'd been told that a journalist would be visiting, to gain entry to the Kaldirim Salt Enterprise's huge facility on the eastern shore of Europe's biggest salt lake.

"You can drive through and come back out again, but don't get out of the car," he warned.

Inside the yard, mountains of the blindingly bright salt are piled three stories high by a conveyer belt being fed by a convoy of trucks. Except for three men sitting around a table in the shade at the yard's edge, there are few signs of anyone willing to brave the August heat. A fourth man runs out of a beat-down building and with his arms appears to signal "get out, now."

Every spring, mineral-rich snow melt and rain flow south through Turkey's Anatolia and into Lake Tuz, adding a half-meter of water. The water evaporates by summer, leaving behind a three-inch layer of salt granules ready for harvest. The salt forms because the lake is endorheic, meaning it has no outflow.

Flamingos are seen at Tuz Lake on July 16, 2015. Dunaliella salinas, a type of halophile micro-algae especially found in sea/lake salt fields, colorize a part of the lake every summer. Photo: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

For locals, the lake is an important source of cash. Every summer farmers and large-scale producers go to work on the ethereal landscape that produces 60 per cent of all salt harvested in Turkey every year.

Lake Tuz also provides life to the largest flamingo colony in the Middle East and North Africa combined—22,000 breeding pairs in 2013—and is a crucial resting stop and sanctuary for dozens of other species migrating between Africa and central Europe.

What's more, it's a UNESCO special environmental protection area and a spectacular sight that turns red every July as a Dunaliella algae bloom explodes under the heat of the summer sun.

But Lake Tuz is disappearing.

Locals say submerging one's feet in the naturally-occurring salt takes away aches. Photo: Stephen Starr

Since the 2013 Gezi Park protests, when people took to the streets to demonstrate against the ruling AKP party's plans to destroy a popular park in central Istanbul, environmentalists and government officials have been fighting a battle of preservation versus progress.

The massive dams, highways, and bridges built around Turkey over the past decade have provided jobs for thousands of working class Turks, and helped to keep the AKP in power.

Environmentalists say the nationwide building boom is the passion project of a single man: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is pushing for Turkey to become one of the top 10 global economies by the time its centenary comes around in 2023.

The push for industrialization is evident here at Lake Tuz. A combination of falling precipitation; the inflow of wastewater from Konya, a city of 700,000 people; and upstream well drilling for crop irrigation is killing an already limited supply of fresh water.

Once Turkey's second largest lake, some conservationists estimate Lake Tuz has reportedly shrunk by half in the last 40 years—though Ozlem Aksoy, a biologist at Turkey's ministry for environment and urbanisation, says a lack of up-to-date data means little consensus has been reached on the precise amount of decline, or which activity is most damaging.

Turkish officials claim the drought is temporary or cyclical at worst, and that efforts to pump treated water into the lake are underway. The government has also pointed to its efforts in garnering Lake Tuz special UNESCO status as an example of its seriousness about protecting local habitats, including that of the flamingos.

Yet according to government biologist Aksoy, no part of an action plan involving four ministries to transfer water to stop the lake drying up has been implemented yet.

"So far these actions are not satisfactory," said Vakur Sumer, a water politics expert and international relations lecturer at Selcuk University in Konya. "The situation... is worsening."

Streams such as this, that feed into Lake Tuz, are vanishing. Photo: Stephen Starr

Three miles away on the eastern shore of the lake, there is little sense of concern. From afar, the groups of people walking across the lake's bleached white surface appear like slow-moving, tiny alien beings. Despite the wind driving salt into their hair, burning their eyes and creeping down their throats, tourists come in the hundreds to sample the homeopathic healing power the large salt granules are said to offer.

Unsurprisingly, the local developers see an opportunity: Next to a parking lot clogged by coaches are two construction sites where hotel resorts are being built.

Closer to the lake's shore, signs advertising the salt's benefits have been crudely hammered into the now-dry lakebed. Nearby, a putrid stream of water leaks slowly into the lake from behind a fast food joint. There are no flamingos to be seen anywhere.

Several flamingo colonies on the lake have already vanished, said Dicle Tuba Kilic of the Turkish conservation organization Doga Dernegi, which translates to "Nature Association."

Photo: Stephen Starr

"There is a final flamingo colony in the middle of the lake," she said. "This colony depends on Tuz Lake completely."

Water that once drained into the lake can no longer do so, she said, because of damming and crop irrigation.

Long-term research further suggests the government's efforts might not be enough. A 30-year study published in 2012 found that temperatures in the karst central Anatolian region that includes Lake Tuz have risen 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 Fahrenheit) during that time, suggesting climate change is affecting precipitation, which is contributing to the reduced amount of water available to the lake. The global increase over the entire past century has been 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.08 Fahrenheit).

With demands from farmers and factories increasing and the lake's nascent recreational value thought to be $5 million and counting, the share left for flamingos and other species is shrinking, just like the lake itself.
Iranian experts at a knowledge-based company have manufactured the Farsi version of speech recognition software.

Hadi Veysi, the managing director of the company, said the software can transcribe the user's voice and audio recordings of conference sessions into digital text.

He explained that users should ensure that microphone is connected to their computers, adding that the users need to set up computer for the speech recognition software.

Veysi also said if the user makes a mistake, the software edits it and the entire notepad is editable.

"Older versions of the software could understand input from a variety of users but with a limited vocabulary bank," he said, adding that additionally, background noise posed limiting factors on the effectiveness of speech recognition technology.

"The new software recognizes about 120,000 words and the user can say commands to turn off the system," he said.

Most people can talk faster than they move their fingers on a keyboard, so with speech recognition software they are able to work as fast as you can talk, particularly with speech-to-text systems that have high dictation accuracy.

Hands-free computing is one of the biggest advantages of voice dictation programs. Working a job that requires a lot of back-and-forth between the computer and other tasks can typing cumbersome.

It's beneficial to those who aren't the best spellers and busy parents with their hands full who just want to get that email sent.

However, one of the largest benefits is to those with limited mobility or disabilities that restrict keyboard and mouse use. The dictation-to-text software can be used easily.
When Zak Pashak moved to Detroit five years ago, he seemed to be swimming against the tide. He bought a house in a city battered by job loss, blight and crime, at a time when much of the population was on its way out.

He arrived with a plan to open a bike factory in a city long abandoned by manufacturers. He had no bike-making experience, wasn’t a serious cyclist and had left a vibrant hometown, Calgary, for a place that would become America’s largest city to file for bankruptcy.

But as an entrepreneur, Pashak was used to taking risks. Today, his company, Detroit Bikes, is a growing business and part of a lively entrepreneurial scene crucial to the revival of Detroit. The scene includes tech startups, investors, artisans, foodies, shop owners and transplants like Pashak, drawn to Detroit’s mix of grit and opportunity. Detroit Bikes appears this week on Microsoft’s #DoMore page on Instagram and kicks off a series about entrepreneurship in the Motor City.

“It’s a great city to start something in,” says Pashak, a music entrepreneur before he launched Detroit Bikes. “There’s a real culture of encouraging each other and teamwork, almost. And there’s a lot of really talented people.”

Entrepreneurs key to Detroit’s resurgence

Once the automotive center of the world, Detroit has become one of the most distressed cities in America, a decline triggered by lost jobs and hastened by the mortgage crisis. By the time it filed for bankruptcy in 2013, the city had shriveled to its smallest population since the 1910 census. Detroit emerged from bankruptcy last year and is on a long road of tackling crime, poverty and thousands of vacant lots and unlit streets.

Entrepreneurs play a key part in Detroit’s recovery, with businesses and investments revitalizing its downtown. Detroit’s business district used to be a lackluster space with empty buildings, but now bustles with office workers, a thriving tech community and a busy streetscape of retail and residents.

“The entrepreneurial scene in Detroit is amazing. It’s off the charts. You’ve got these incredible, passionate people who are pouring their heart and souls into the city,” says Josh Linkner, a founder of Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that funds early-stage tech startups in Detroit. Linkner recently stepped down as CEO of Detroit Venture Partners to focus on his career as a book author and keynote speaker.

Detroit’s woes have made it cheaper for entrepreneurs to start up, while fueling an underdog mindset and desire to help the city. That collective pride shows up in slogans like “Detroit hustles harder” and “Detroit vs. Everybody.”

“There is this Detroit grit, like we’ve been kicked down. We’re like the Rocky Balboa of cities; we’re fighting for life and glory,” says Linkner.

“I think that is in contrast to Silicon Valley – I don’t want to be disparaging anybody – but we look at them and say, ‘Oh, they’re sipping their Frappuccinos. They just got their Stanford degree. Isn’t that nice.’ And we’re like streetfighters. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but that’s the vibe here. We have this real gritty, scrappy, resilient tenacity.”

Much of Detroit’s resurgence can be traced to one man, Quicken Loans founder and chairman Dan Gilbert, who also founded Detroit Venture Partners. Gilbert’s real estate company has invested $1.6 billion in downtown Detroit. His companies have filled the area with 12,500 employees in less than five years. More than 70 tech companies exist in a single square block, many backed by Detroit Venture Partners. Gilbert’s business presence has sparked a surge of people living, shopping and dining downtown.

Gabe Karp, a partner with Detroit Venture Partners, often asks young people in interviews why they want to be in Detroit, when previous generations would have passed. Their answer relays a new buzz, a passion to be the first chapter in a comeback story of a once great city.

“They say, ‘We’re hearing about what’s going on, and it sounds really exciting… We want to be there on the ground floor, help write that chapter and be part of that story,’” Karp says.

Detroit Bikes renews manufacturing in the city

Count Detroit Bikes as part of the story. Founder and president Pashak had launched two Canadian music venues and a music festival when he decided to join Detroit’s community of problem solvers. He started Detroit Bikes in 2011, with a mission to renew manufacturing in the city.

Last year, his 50,000-square-foot factory in Detroit made about a thousand bikes. He calls them the “Honda Civics of bikes,” to distinguish them from specialty and racing bikes.

This year, Pashak expects to make about 5,000 bikes, with nearly half destined for New Belgium Brewing, the maker of Fat Tire Amber Ale. The Colorado brewery will use the bikes for employee gifts and promotions. Pashak is also opening his first retail store in Detroit.

“It’s a region filled with people who are innovative and like making things,” says Pashak, whose skilled, 20-person workforce includes bike enthusiasts and former auto workers. “So there’s a culture of getting things done that is facilitating this company’s existence.”

For Henry Ford II, Detroit Bike’s master builder, the company is a return to family roots. His grandfather worked for the Ford Motor Company and had named his son after founder Henry Ford. The son then worked for Chrysler, and much of the large, extended family worked in factories belonging to the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

“We were known as ‘the other Ford family,’” Ford says. He himself ended up in the mortgage industry until he was laid off, and then he started a house painting business.

“To come (to Detroit Bikes) to reintroduce manufacturing to the city, to make a product that gets people to move around… It still gives me goosebumps, thinking about the lineage that has come to this particular point,” he says.

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As an avid bike, parks and neighborhood advocate, Ford has been fighting the decline of Detroit for years. To see his hometown become trendy with everyone from tech developers to hipster craft-liquor distillers makes him laugh with joy.

“Being a unique individual showcasing your talent is like the new hot thing,” he says. “Everybody wants to show us what they can do. People are coming here from all over the country, because of the access to material, talent and overall attitude to get things done and see where it goes from here.”

Lead Photo: Detroit Bikes master builder Henry Ford II. Photo by Ami Vitale.
Donald Trump plans to elevate FCC commissioner Ajit Pai to lead the agency, replacing outgoing Chairman Tom Wheeler, Politico reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. An official announcement could come as soon as this afternoon.

Pai has been a reliably conservative voice on the commission

Pai, first appointed by President Obama for a Republican seat on the commission, has been a reliably conservative voice, often speaking out for deregulation and opposing progressive measures from the Democratic majority. He has widely been seen as a frontrunner in the race for a new chairman, and while it was suggested he may be made interim leader, Politico reports the move is permanent.

When the Wheeler-led FCC’s net neutrality rules were passed in 2015, Pai was one of the most vocal sources of dissent, along with fellow Republican commissioner Michael O'Rielly. After Trump’s ascent to the presidency, concluding with today’s inauguration, those rules are in danger, and Pai’s nomination will do little to ease concerns for supporters of the rules.

Pai has been critical of the commission’s net neutrality rules

At the time the rules were passed, Pai said they would lead to "higher broadband prices, slower broadband speeds, less broadband deployment, less innovation, and fewer options for consumers." He has been similarly critical of privacy rules and other regulatory measures approved by the commission.

In a speech last month, Pai vowed that the new commission under the Trump administration would take a “weed whacker” to regulations passed under Obama.
CAMBRIDGE Mass. (Reuters) - Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said he was “disappointed” at Serbian officials’ comments following a drone stunt at a soccer match this week but vowed on Thursday to push ahead with plans to meet his counterpart in Belgrade next week.

Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama is interviewed by Reuters at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts October 16, 2014. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Relations between the two countries have been tense since a Tuesday incident in which a drone bearing a flag representing “Greater Albania,” an area covering all parts of the Balkans where ethnic Albanians live, flew over a major soccer match between the Albanian and Serbian teams, prompting a brawl on the field and the cancellation of the game.

Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic earlier on Thursday claimed the incident showed that Albania was “not mature enough” to join the European community.

“We feel really sad and we feel really disappointed about what happened and about how Serbian authorities are reacting. It’s unbelievable,” Rama said in an interview with Reuters.

But he said he would not allow the remarks, or claims by Serbian officials that his brother had been responsible for the drone, to derail his plans to visit the Serbian capital on Oct. 22, in what would be the first visit to that city by an Albanian leader in almost 70 years.

“We should not be driven by this kind of politics of the past and hatred of the past. We should not be driven by what happened at a soccer game,” Rama said ahead of a speech at Harvard University, just outside Boston. “I am very determined to go ahead.”

The Albanian team fled the field at Tuesday’s match, held in the run-up to the Euro 2016 championships. Riot police were called in to disperse the crowd.

Rama noted that, in an effort to avoid any violent outbursts, Albania had sent no fans to the game other than a contingent of 45 dignitaries including his brother. The group was searched carefully by Serbian authorities, he added.

“I don’t see how someone could have brought in a drone or a flag when even scarves with Albanian symbols were not allowed to enter the stadium,” Rama said. “It’s clear that the flying object came from out of the stadium.”

He also asked why media accounts to the game played down the crowd shouting threats to kill Albanians, using an ethnic slur.

Both Serbia and Albania aim one day to join the European Union. Relations between the two have long been marked by tensions over Serbia’s former province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic-Albanian majority and declared independence in 2008.

“We are not going to respond in the same old way of a region that has suffered so much from this old way, from a region that has finally found peace,” Rama said. “We are in peace not because we became angels but because we are all convinced that Europe is our destination and we want to be part of the European family of nations as members of the European Union.”
[This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call. The start is here, and links to my other work here. It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books. I post new chapters about every two weeks, and the next chapter is planned for around November 24th.]

Previous: Chapter 13

The silence was oppressive.

Flicker’s hearing was quite acute. Her power and reaction time let her start damping the effect of loud noises while they were still in her outer ears, and she created her own shockwaves so often it had long ago become second nature. So she never suffered the gradual, subtle hearing deterioration most people did from loud music and environmental noise.

But there was no sound. No people besides Journeyman and her, no traffic, no running machinery, no birds, no insects, no running water. Not even any wind at the moment. The faint rustle of Journeyman’s trenchcoat seemed loud.

There wasn’t all that much to see, either–a large, shallow pothole in the dark. It was about twenty feet wide and maybe three deep. It was filled with a mixture of dead weeds, mud, and ice.

“There’s nothing here,” she said, after shining her flashlight around.

“Not now,” said Journeyman. "But a Siberian elm grew there, until a few years ago. The one I brought Sylvi to.“

They were near the outskirts of Pripyat, in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Flicker was back in her costume, and she checked the radioactivity again–not life threatening, but enough to keep most people away. There were a few hotter spots at the bottom of the hole. Most of it was from cesium-137–the shorter lived isotopes had decayed, in the quarter-century since the disaster.

"What happened?” Flicker turned the flashlight off, and let her eyes start adjusting to the night again.

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t continue right away, and the silence was back.

“Do you want to go somewhere else to talk?” she asked after a while.

“We probably should. I had a lot to drink, and this place gets to me. It sure got to her. That was the problem.” He sighed. "But this was the last place I saw her, and I wanted you to see it, since I’ve been telling you the story.“

"Thank you for trusting me.”

“This part… isn’t so much about trust. Just about pain. And helplessness.”

“Which requires trust, to share.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

A little while later, after a quick trip to her decontamination shower, Flicker rejoined Journeyman at his home and workshop, a converted former farmhouse located in one of the more rugged areas of Pennsylvania. She sat beside him on the couch, legs curled underneath her body, holding a mug of hot chocolate.

He stared at his cup of tea. "My idea didn’t turn out to be nearly as good as I thought. People are scared of Chernobyl. And it had plenty of trees. But a lot of them weren’t very happy trees. And that matters, to a dryad. The Red Forest gave Sylvi nightmares.“

"The Red Forest?”

“The pine trees just downwind of the plant were all killed by the fallout radiation, but they didn’t decay–they just stood there, dried out and brownish-red. The people handling the post-disaster cleanup ended up bulldozing them all and burying them in trenches, because of fears of what would happen if they caught fire. It’s still the most radioactively contaminated area in the world, though most of it is underground now.

"And Sylvi could feel echoes from it–it was like a ghost forest to her, of trees that died horribly.”

“Oh no.”

“She was always tough, but she wasn’t… all that stable, even to start with. And losing her original tree was a big blow to her sanity. Dryads don’t usually survive that–they don’t usually want to survive that–which was why Sylvi never wanted to talk about it.

"Chernobyl was a good place to hide. But it wasn’t a good place to heal, especially for someone who already suffered from depression. She wasn’t happy with her new tree–in one of her more lucid moments, she really chewed me out for the arrogance of daring to pick a tree for her. I asked what I was supposed to have done, and she said I should have let her die.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. I did what I could to help her, but it wasn’t much. I arranged a satellite net connection, but she wasn’t interested anymore. She had always had important responsibilities, even if she didn’t always like them, and without anything to do she just started drifting away.”

Journeyman took a swallow of tea, then set his cup down. "I tried to talk to her about portal theory, and other worlds, because she was sick of Earth, and dryads supposedly have a natural ability to use trees as a kind of portal–but she didn’t stay interested for very long at a time. She kept losing patience and yelling at me to just go away. To live my own life, because she didn’t have one to share, anymore.

“I still brought her cigarettes. She’d light up, then curse at me for bringing memories back, when she wanted to forget.

"And then one day, a little over a year later, I ported in to visit–it had been longer than usual since my last one, almost a week–and she was gone. And so was her tree.”

“Did you try to find her?” asked Flicker.

Journeyman met her eyes, then looked down. "I looked around a bit, in the abandoned buildings nearby where she’d been living. Most of the stuff I’d brought her was still there, but there were some clothes and personal items missing. There wasn’t any note, and I started up her computer to check that–nothing.

“And then I noticed something about the hole where her tree had been–remember how wide and shallow it was?”

“Yeah.”

“That pretty much matched the area of the tree’s root system. The area you’d have to disturb if you wanted to move the whole thing without hurting it.”

“Oh. So–”

“Sylvi must have found a way to leave–and take her tree with her. Because who else would bother? So I don’t think it was suicide. Or foul play. And since there was no note… I don’t think she wanted me to find her, wherever she went. I remembered what she’d said, all those years ago, about not trying to rescue someone who didn’t want to be rescued. So I finally listened.”

“And let–” His voice choked up and he turned away.

Flicker put her hand on his back.

“And let her go,” he whispered.

Flicker was finally learning how to listen, too. Just because someone had stopped talking for the moment didn’t necessarily mean they were done. Journeyman continued a little while later, as they shared some takeout stir fry.

“It was the thinking I did about the aftermath of the curse that made me decide to become a superhero. Because if I could do that, I absolutely needed to be thinking of consequences beyond the personal. Or I’d end up a villain by default. I was arguably already there; very few people see themselves as villains, but being willing to kill people that way was what I’d call a hint.”

“Is that when you starting talking to Doc? You were so grim and mysterious, that first visit.”

“Yeah, but I was grim because of Sylvi. Doc was way more understanding and accepting than I expected. He had a reputation for being pretty paranoid.”

“He’s good at hiding suspicion while he does a Database psych evaluation, and he had a lot of people try to fool him during the Lost Years, so he knows the patterns. And, well, you knew magic, you could teleport, you wanted to be a superhero, and you asked for his help first–did you really think he’d say no?”

“Heh. I wasn’t very sure of anything then–living off the grid most of the time means you risk missing significant changes. It’s an occupational hazard for magicians. But even the limited Database access he gave me opened up all kinds of possibilities for proper mathematical analysis of magic–I hadn’t had the resources or statistical tools before.

"And Doc was real happy to have me as a source and go-between for the magical community. He does some chancy stuff, but he listens. And he understood what needed not to go in the Database.”

Journeyman snorted. "You were the problem there. You’d think the Database was yours, not his.“

"I’ve used it as auxiliary memory from the beginning, because of the mismatch between what I want to remember and what I can actually stuff into my long term memory every time I sleep, before my high speed storage decays. So I feel very possessive– that’s why I spent so much of my money on the capacity for a complete backup.”

Flicker smiled. "But I’m willing to compromise, now–I hadn’t realized just how much of a pain magic makes computer security.“

"I didn’t fully appreciate it either, until I got the tip–I thought password stealing was the main threat. But Stella is taking care of it.”

“Yeah.” Flicker hesitated for a moment. "There is one thing I’d like to suggest. You can tell me to mind my own business if you want. Not getting closure bothers you–not as much as it does me, but still. If you didn’t find a note at Chernobyl… then you can’t really be sure Sylvi didn’t want you to know what happened. Particularly given what you said about her mental state.

“If you want to find out–even if you don’t want it going into the Database–we can talk to Lif. She’s really good at tracing threads. And we’d know where to start. Or if you’d rather I didn’t know either, you can talk to Lif yourself. I’ll give permission.”

“Um.” Journeyman stared off onto space while he considered. "I… think I’ll need to sleep on that. Thank you for the offer, it means a lot. But we should get back–I’m sure the world hasn’t stopped throwing up crises while we’ve been out of touch.“

*****

Cryptographer and privacy expert Chuck Shiner sat on the low retaining wall outside the conference center, talking on his phone. The presentations he’d been most interested in were over, his own wasn’t until tomorrow, and he was thinking of getting something to eat.

"Not bad,” he said. "But it was obvious where everyone added a bit at the beginning and a new summary slide to try to keep up with current events.“

He yawned as he listened to the response from one of his colleagues, who was currently in Japan. The last talk he’d attended had consisted of decent results presented by someone with an unfortunately soothing voice and manner, and Chuck was still shaking off the resulting torpor.

"Yes, I’m using one right now. It’s worked fine so far, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much. I’ve heard adoption estimates from about a million all the way up to half a billion. Which seems a little extreme, today, but I wouldn’t want to bet against it tomorrow, at the rate they’re spreading. No one really knows except the UPP folks, and they haven’t released any figures yet.”

Several other conference attendees sat on the wall or nearby benches, drinking coffee, checking messages, talking, or just enjoying the late afternoon sun. A steady stream of pedestrians thronged the sidewalk between them and the nearby street, and gulls pecked at dropped scraps. He looked up at the blue sky above the line of buildings, watching other birds wheel and turn against the scattered clouds.

“We picked the wrong week to be traveling. I’d like to take a closer look at the UPPfone infrastructure, but the Grs'thnk fleet and Black Swan are obviously dominating the discussion here. Did… Yes, I sent my own list to that address, but who knows.”

He frowned. A dot had just appeared from behind one the clouds, and appeared to be moving closer. Definitely not a bird–a military jet? But there was something wrong with the shape. A faint rumble echoed, just audible above the traffic noise. A sonic boom?

“How many? No I hadn’t. The news feeds have been going crazy, so I’m missing things…” He trailed off to stare.

The dot had turned into a humanoid flyer remarkably quickly. She was nearly overhead when she dove feet-first for the ground, flexed her legs to soften her landing, and stood. She was less than fifty feet away. Everyone else nearby was staring as well, and there was a screech of brakes and a near collision as at least one driver did a double take. The newcomer folded her wings and turned towards him. He felt a little thrill of fear. Those eyes…

“Uh, listen, can I call you back? There’s someone who wants to… talk to me, I think.”

He ended the call as she came closer.

“Chuck Shiner?”

“Yes?” Her voice, appearance, and manner of approach had already established her own identity beyond any doubt.

“I’m interested in your conference presentation, but I’m afraid attending it would be unnecessarily disruptive. Establishing social trust as an intelligent non-human is rather relevant to me, and I thought you might like to add an anecdotal example. I understand you have a few questions, as well. Do you have time to talk? I thought I’d buy you dinner.” She smiled.

“Sure…” His day had just turned completely surreal.

There was a fancy restaurant next to the conference center that wasn’t packed like the others, but it was ridiculously expensive–it catered to those wealthy enough to pay a large premium not to have to rub shoulders with run of the mill attendees.

“Table for two,” said the entity beside him to the maitre d’ after they entered. "I have a reservation.“

"Name?” asked the maitre d’. There were appearances to maintain, after all.

“Black Swan.”

Next: Chapter 15
The task force formed to create a set of voluntary climate-risk disclosure recommendations has more than doubled the number of companies supporting its mission in the five months since it first published its findings.

The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) now has 237 companies with a combined market capitalization of more than $6.3 trillion that have publicly committed to its goals, according to its head, Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and entrepreneur.

The TCFD was established by the group of global regulators known as the Financial Stability Board, chaired by Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney, and published its recommendations in June with the aim of encouraging companies to help investors understand the risks to their investments from temperature change, rising sea levels and natural disasters.

The companies that have signed up include more than 150 financial firms with assets of more than $81.7 trillion, the TCFD said in a statement released at the One Planet Summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. The summit marks the two-year anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, which seeks to limit the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius by reducing greenhouse emissions. President Donald Trump has pledged to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, dismaying climate activists but spurring a greater effort from the private sector to push through its goals without government help. Insurers have said anything higher than a 2 degree-temperature increase would make the world uninsurable.

In case you missed it: U.S. health insurers are in a state of denial about climate change

The companies span a broad range of industries and sectors, from construction to consumer goods, energy, metals and mining, as well as the full capital and investment chain, from companies that issue debt and equity to the largest credit rating agencies and stock exchanges. The list includes Bank of America Corp. BAC, +0.07% , BlackRock Inc. BLK, +0.36% , Citigroup Inc. C, -0.64% JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM, -0.76% , Morgan Stanley MS, +0.52% and investors including the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, among others.

“Climate change poses both economic risks and opportunities,” said Bloomberg. “But right now, companies don’t have the data they need to accurately measure the risks and evaluate the opportunities. That prevents them from taking protective measures and identifying sustainable investments that could have strong returns.”

Read now: In Trump era it’s up to companies to push climate agenda, advocates say

The movement won a victory late Monday, when energy giant Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM, +0.20% said it would disclose details on how climate change may affect its business, bowing to pressure from shareholders who voted 62% in favor of a resolution on climate change at its annual shareholder meeting this year.

There was more good news when French insurer Axa AXA, +0.11% said it would pull €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion) from the coal industry, shed all investment in oil sands and no longer insure new projects in either sector, as The Wall Street Journal reported. Dutch lender ING AT:INGA ING, +1.42% said it would cut its exposure to coal power to zero by 2025 and the World Bank said it would no longer finance upstream oil and gas after 2019.

That comes after Norway’s sovereign fund said recently it is recommending to its government a divestment from fossil fuels.

Companies are expected to start making the first disclosures in the coming year and the TCFD will report on their progress this time next year at the G-20 summit in Argentina, said Carney.

The task force is also planning to launch a web-based platform to further support companies that are interested in implementing its recommendations. The TCFD Knowledge Hub will go live in the first quarter and be available via 222.tcfdhub.org.

The S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% has gained 19% in 2017, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.13% has gained 24%.

Read now: Axa to spend €1.2 billion to fight climate change
A source at PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, has played down speculation about Pastor Maldonado's immediate future.

Reports have suggested that amid a corruption scandal and the plunging price of oil, the company is late to make its due payments to the Enstone based Renault team.

Other rumours, however, say a share-price plunging Renault may be facing a Volkswagen-like emissions scandal of its own, and therefore wants to shy away from associating with another scandal-ridden company like PDVSA.

So amid reports Maldonado could be replaced by Kevin Magnussen, a PDVSA source said: "This is all speculation at the moment.

"We have not received any information other than what was agreed last year with Lotus," the source told the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal.

However, the source did not deny it has held meetings this week with Renault officials in Caracas.

"Such meetings are always held to plan joint activities, so it is nothing strange," the source insisted.

(GMM)
Watch the live webcast on this page on Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Thursday, February 7 at 7 pm ET. (The initial date had to be postponed due to severe weather.)

Clifford V. Johnson is a theoretical physicist passionate about sharing science with the public. He resolved to write a book explaining physics to a lay audience, but he felt that words on a printed page did not fully convey the dynamic, collaborative nature of fundamental research.

What if, he wondered, you could represent multiple voices and points of view? What if one could make the reader feel immersed in scientific discourse, rather than reading the words of an expert sharing a single perspective?

He wanted to write a book that would give readers a fly-on-the-wall experience of the process of fundamental science. Johnson realized that graphic novels are the unique narrative medium he was searching for. Through the written word and compelling visuals, graphic novels immerse the reader in a sensory world of ideas.

This realization led Johnson to write and draw The Dialogues: Conversations About the Nature of the Universe (MIT Press), which allows readers to eavesdrop on a series of dialogues, set in locations around the world, about cutting-edge scientific topics.

In his public lecture webcast at Perimeter on February 6 February 7, Johnson will discuss the process of turning complex scientific topics into compelling visual narratives. The talk will be “graphic,” but in a family-friendly way.

Clifford V. Johnson’s work in science ranges from teaching and research into black holes, particle physics, string theory, and cosmology, to public outreach where he strives to put science back into the general culture. He helps artists, writers, and filmmakers incorporate science into their work, and appears on several TV and online shows. He has been a science advisor for many TV shows and movies, including Nat Geo’s Genius (featuring Einstein), Marvel’s Agent Carter, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and more.

Tickets to attend this lecture in person will be available here on Monday, January 21 at 9 am ET.
We talked to Na`Vi's Ladislav 'GuardiaN' Kovács about his team's victory over Liquid as well as the upcoming grand final of ESL One New York.

Despite going down in the first map to Liquid, CIS region team Natus Vincere rallied and won the series and advance to the final of the $250,000 event, with players Egor "flamie" Vasilyev and Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev having strong performances.

Afterwards, we caught up with Ladislav "GuardiaN" Kovács of the team to ask him a few questions about the Liquid match, the grand final, and the new update and pause rules that are in effect in New York.

You will be able to find all of our interviews from ESL One New York on our YouTube channel here.

stich writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter
HAUNTING PAST: The 63 tombstones at Satth Kabar in Bijapur today lie neglected HAUNTING PAST: The 63 tombstones at Satth Kabar in Bijapur today lie neglected

History is not just about quests and conquests. Beyond the ramparts and the battlefields there were the ordinary men and women, the farmers, the shopkeepers, the housewives, the blacksmiths, the servants, who worked to keep the empires going. But their narratives lie frozen and unheard amidst the dead debris of time.

If you look around carefully, you will find that every place has a nook or cranny which records history. It could be a decaying log hut, an inscription on the rocks, perhaps a path long disused and overrun by weeds. All these have their own stories to tell.

There's such a corner in Bijapur with a sad tale to relate. The rows of tombstones there tell a story that is redolent of the days when the world revolved around men, when women wilfully or otherwise immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. They recall insane acts, like those of Sultan Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empire who drowned his entire harem when he was told that one of them enjoyed a relationship with a eunuch. A concubine swam free and lived to tell the tale.

None of the 63 noble women of Bijapur survived to recount their horrific experience. It was the year 1658, when Ali Adil Shahi II of the Shahi dynasty was preparing to go to war against Shivaji, the indefatigable Maratha ruler. Under constant pressure from Aurangzeb on one side and Shivaji on the other, Adil Shahi depended on his generals to stall the enemies, and he counted General Afzal Khan among his most trusted warriors. Khan was a brave man who had but one weakness: auguries and omens.

When asked to lead a battle against Shivaji, Khan contacted astrologers who predicted doom - death at the hands of the Maratha soldiers. Fearing that his wives would remarry after his death, the anxious general chose to kill them. Some say they were pushed into a deep well, while others say they fell to his sword.

The diviners proved correct, for Khan did die in battle. His wives lie buried just 5 km from Bijapur at a place that now bears titular testimony to the uxoricide - Saatth Kabar (60 Graves). Ironically, the tomb built by the general for himself, who wanted to be close to his wives in life and in death, stands adjacent to the one-acre burial ground surrounded by jowar fields.

The site has now been declared to be of national importance under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958 and is under the jurisdiction of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). But official acceptance of responsibility for its upkeep is not too evident. The tombstones are scarred by graffiti, and people often come to the shady spot for rest or boisterous fun.

"People need to hear the heartrending stories that cry out from these graves," says Anilsaab Maashelkar, 65, who owns four acres of land besides the graveyard. He laments that there is not even a proper road leading to the monument. Another inhabitant of the area, Panchappa Kalbargi, adds, "This town is full of such monuments but there is not much awareness about them."

Apart from the famous Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur, or the "City of Victory", has 50 mosques and 20 historic tombs. But the ASI has no money to protect them. "We are working on a tight budget," says A. Venkateshiah, superintending archaeologist of the ASI's Dharwad circle, under whose jurisdiction Bijapur falls.

Another Dharwad resident, Ananth Kumar, until recently the Union minister for tourism and culture, explained that since the ASI had an annual budget of only Rs 156 crore, after meeting staff salaries and other expenses it was left with a mere Rs 7,600 to spend per monument. "Many in the government dismiss the Saatth Kabar as only a grave, forgetting the Taj Mahal too is only a mausoleum," adds V. Hari, a local resident who feels the site could become a tourist attraction.

Karnataka Tourism Minister Roshan Baig says Bijapur's monuments are being considered in a plan the Government is drawing up to promote tourism in the state. Till the plan becomes a reality, very few will know of a general who so loved his wives that he murdered them.
The Super Bowl is over, which means that baseball season is almost here. More precisely, baseball prediction season is almost here, where ostensibly smart writers trip over themselves to be aggressively dumb in public. I know I'm addicted to the rush, not sure about everyone else. There's just something about picking the Royals for third place that really gets the endorphins firing.

Before we get to the actual predictions, though, we'll start with something a little lighter. There are six divisions in baseball. All of them will have a champion in seven months. Our job today is to rank the divisional races to predict which one will be the most exciting.

I didn't do this last year, so I can't laugh at past results, but I absolutely guarantee that my prediction for the least-exciting divisional race would have been the NL East because the Nationals were going to win by 13 games. It turns out that the NL East really was a boring division toward the end, but not because the Nationals ran away with it. The same will invariably apply to this year: The best divisions in baseball will disappoint, and a random team will come out of nowhere to be this year's Astros, which will turn an unexciting race into a September thriller.

Until then, we'll go with what we think we know. Here are the best divisional races in baseball, in order from "least exciting" to "most exciting."

6. NL East

Before you yell at me too loudly, note that all of these divisional races are rare, beautiful creatures that just might steal our hearts by October. A bad divisional race is still a glorious divisional race, and this exercise is like ranking our children.

But some kids are objectively worse than other kids. That's not my fault, and I'm not going to apologize for it. And the NL East should have two good teams, one team on the cusp and two lousy teams. That's a combo to make them a clear last-place finisher. While the other five divisions might not have the raw intensity of a potential Nationals/Mets arms race, they'll mix a third team in the discussion that's more interesting than the Marlins, and they'll have more interesting fifth-place teams than the Phillies and a more interesting fourth-place team than the Braves. That applies if those two switch places, too.

In the most basic sense, a great divisional race can be defined by just two teams beating each other up. No one cares about who finished third in the 1993 NL West. No one cares who finished third in the 2012 AL West. So, why should we use the overall strength of the division in our criteria?

Because fewer contending teams means fewer chances at excitement. Last year, the NL East looked like one great team, one pretty okay team, and some also-rans, and it ended up being a pretty boring division by September. Not the way we expected, but still. If there's a glut of average-or-worse teams, the excitement potential goes way down.

5. AL West

I really want to make a contending A's team happen. Partially for selfish reasons, partially because it would really jimmy up this whole AL West race and create chaos. I'm a baseball fan second, and a chaos fan first. Which is the same thing as saying I'm a baseball fan twice.

Alas, the closer we get to the season, the less convinced I am that the A's will get to .500, much less threaten the division leaders. And if you're thinking the AL West is going to be one of the best races in baseball, you have to be thinking it's a five-way scrum. The Mariners are coated with a slick, Mariners-based substance that prevents them from getting too close to the top of the division, and the Angels might be history's most boring team if you limit the pool to "contending teams that employ the best player in the world."

But, again, if you think of Yu Darvish pitching to Mike Trout on a warm August night, with everyone checking the out-of-town scoreboard to see how that Astros/Mariners game is going, you're excited about this race. It just lacks oomph at the bottom.

4. AL Central

If you want parity, the AL Central has it. FanGraphs has the projected rosters for each team on their depth charts, and they've tallied up the projected WAR for each team. Here's where the AL Central teams rank:

12. Indians (39 projected WAR) 19. Tigers (33) 19. Royals (33) 21. White Sox (33) 23. Twins (32)

The Royals aren't getting a lot of respect, just like last year. ZiPS' gas chromatograph is probably broken, and it's telling us that the secret ingredient is love, which you would think the Royals have by this point. But I'll take the over again, if only because the burns from last year's projections are still raw.

And if you're taking the over on the Royals, why not the Tigers, too? That sure is one heck of a lineup, at least in the middle. And the White Sox rotation truly is underrated, even once you realize that John Danks has been replacement level for years now. The Twins have the kind of young talent that could go supernova at any second, which would alter the complexion of the race completely.

I'm looking for five teams with a shot at the AL Central, which vaults them ahead of the other teams. In reality, one team will probably lose 90 and another team will have a 10-game lead by the middle of August. From the cold distance, though, it looks like a superb testament to the wonders of parity.

3. NL West

They're going to have the lousy teams, just like the NL East. There's a clear top three and bottom two, just like the NL East. But there's a two-fer that elevates them above:

The Diamondbacks and Zack Greinke, even if ZiPS and other projection systems aren't convinced.

The Giants and Dodgers fighting it out has more of a ring to it than the Nats and Mets.

That last one could be bias, but I've seen enough Ken Burns documentaries to know what people really care about.

There's also just a touch of uncertainty with the two bottom-feeders, with the Rockies' homegrown rotation looking to surprise and the Padres cobbling together a staff filled with some angry pitchers trying to rebound from disappointing seasons. I've seen worse February rosters make it to the final month of the season in contention.

And while you might think it would be a very Padres thing to lose in an undistinguished fashion, you're wrong. As a long-time observer, I can attest that it would be much, much more Padres to contend past the trading deadline behind fantastic Andrew Cashner and James Shields seasons, spend prospects to acquire reinforcements rather than trade away their best players for prospects, and then finish the season in third place, wondering why they didn't just trade their best players for prospects at the deadline like they were planning to before the season started.

2. NL Central

This is the start of an aesthetic argument. Is it better to watch a division with three powerhouse teams, total heavyweights that might all threaten 100 wins, or is it better to watch a division with five teams that might all finish 83-79 and create 162nd-game chaos?

If you choose the former, the heavyweights with a chance to win 100, I don't blame you. The Cubs, Pirates and Cardinals really are outstanding collections of talent. Even though the Pirates had an unfortunately dull offseason, and the Cardinals lost their most valuable position player and pitcher from last season's juggernaut, it's still a three-way race that should be compelling all season.

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I just can't get over the Reds and Brewers, both of whom have a chance to be unspeakably awful. We're talking 100-loss awful, even if only because of the top-heavy distribution of talent around the division. And while that shouldn't make a difference when enjoying a three-team race in September, it will. The Cubs will finish the season with a three-game set against the Reds, who will be busy seeing if 26-year-old Darnson Skinwell is the left fielder of the future, and starting a homemade Brad Penny that they made from assorted body parts that they found in Mr. Redlegs' office. Meanwhile, the Cardinals and Pirates will be slamming each others' heads against the turf.

The Brewers were 11-27 against the Cubs and Cardinals last year, and the Reds were 13-25 against those two. For some reason, both teams were a game over .500 against the Pirates, so maybe this imbalance is a feature, not a bug, and it ferrets out the team that can't take care of the weaker teams in the division.

Still, there's something about the stratification that bugs me. Give me strong teams up and down the division. Give me possibly weak teams, as long as they are five of them.

Maybe I'm just a baseball socialist, I don't know.

1. AL East

To get here, where you're excited about the American League East and the five teams within, you have to make some assumptions.

First, you have to be somewhat curious about the Orioles. I was ready to proclaim their rotation very underrated for this article, and then I looked up Ubaldo Jimenez's second-stats, and, ha ha ha, no, they're probably rated just fine. He still has that Elaine-dance delivery, which means he's going to be inconsistent for the rest of his days.

But I believe in their lineup. Or, at least, their capacity to hit 200 dingers again. I believe that Hyun-soo Kim is going to get on base, and I believe that Scott Boras whispered, "Hit better, you fool" into Matt Wieters' ear, and that he whispered, "Okay" back.

Second, you have to forget that we were all jazzed about the Red Sox at this time last year, too. They have David Price, sure, but it's still a rotation filled with young players and uncertainty. Or, to put it another way, (last year's Red Sox + David Price) ≠ a 2015 contender, so are we really so jazzed about the way they finished last year?

Yeah, kinda.

Third, you have to believe in the Rays' rotation to an extent that it's not hard to see them aping the 2015 Mets, where the lineup does just enough until the deadline.

Fourth, you have to forget that almost everyone on the Yankees has a well-curated VHS collection. You also have to forget that most of the ligaments in the starting rotation are held together only by the aid of George Steinbrenner's astral manipulation from beyond the grave. They've forgotten it. They're the Yankees. They don't care, and you know they'll contend. You should probably just forget all that.

Fifth, you have to ignore both the Blue Jays' rotation of underwhelming adequacy and their potential to run away with the division by July. Which is hard to do in both cases, which means they probably even out. Maybe.

Add in the potential for Red Sox/Yankees end-of-the-season chicanery -- but only if we can catch any of the games on national TV, somehow -- and you have the division I'm most looking forward to.

The NL East should also be kind of cool, you know. There really isn't a wrong answer, and this entire article is basically a long-winded way of writing, "EXCITED ABOUT BASEBALL, Y'ALL." Last year was kind of a dud when it came to September races, especially once the Cubs and Pirates had the Wild Card safety net. Hopefully this year, we have some 162nd-game chaos.
The youngest person arrested was 13. All of the kids were handcuffed, cursed at and humiliated, and several spent 30 hours or more in jail.

To date, there has been no evidence produced — no witnesses, no photographs or videotapes, no dented vehicles or broken mirrors, nothing whatsoever — to indicate that any of the youngsters had done anything at all that was wrong.

How is it that you can have a rampage in broad daylight on a street in New York City and not be able to show in any way that the rampage occurred?

Photo

At least 22 of the 32 people arrested have had their charges dismissed or were never formally charged at all. No one has been convicted of anything.

The case against 18-year-old Zezza Anderson was dropped last month after his lawyer, Ron Kuby, filed a motion demanding that Mr. Hynes’s office produce documentary evidence of the youngsters misbehaving. No evidence was produced. Instead, an assistant district attorney moved to have the charges against Mr. Anderson dismissed, acknowledging that the case against the defendant could not be proved.

I’d like to know why, after the better part of a year, the authorities are still tormenting some of these kids. Why are charges still hanging over 10 of them? Why should it take more than nine months to resolve charges of unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct?

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A number of the kids have missed days at school to show up for court dates at which nothing of consequence happens. Asher Callender, a senior at Bushwick Community High School, had to go to court on Friday, only to have his case postponed again until March 3.

These are not gangsters. These are not drug dealers. These are kids who were trying to go to a wake for a friend. It was not the kids who were out of control, it was the criminal justice system, which can’t seem to tell the difference between right and wrong, between the truth and deliberate lies, or between justice on the one hand and gratuitously cruel behavior by public officials on the other.

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All the charges in this case should be dropped and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who apparently wants to be mayor of this city, and District Attorney Hynes should offer the kids a public apology.

The authorities have become accustomed to treating disadvantaged young people in New York City like dirt and getting away with it. In this case, local school officials, community residents and the civic group Make the Road New York rallied to the youngsters’ cause.

Neither the police nor the district attorney expected to be confronted in any kind of sustained way over their treatment of these kids. Mr. Hynes said on the radio program: “None of these kids are going to be prosecuted. They’re not going to go to jail ... We are going to offer every one of them community service.”

What he meant was that he expected the kids to go quietly, to plead guilty and passively accept the blot on their records and what he thought of as mild punishment.

But the kids had a surprise for him. They refused to plead guilty to something they hadn’t done. Ten of them are still paying the price for standing up for themselves.
Only five beers into our 2014 journey and we’ve already had two beers with gingerbread men on the label. (Albeit this time, one of them dismembered.) And three beers that seem to feature ginger even when they don’t (like the 2014 Anchor Christmas Ale).

And I have insider knowledge that at least one more beer in the series is ginger heavy. Friends, this may be a movement. If you like ginger, no problem. Otherwise, well.

This entry is from the Boston Beer Company, otherwise known as Samuel Adams. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to fill an entire 12-pack with different Samuel Adams beers that could be loosely considered holiday beers or winter warmers. We might get around to them all eventually—Old Fezziwig, White Christmas, Chocolate Bock, Holiday Porter, Cold Snap….

As I noted back in 2012 when enjoying the Samuel Adams Winter Lager, one could drink a different beer each week from the Samuel Adams roster and still be going after an entire year.

This particular brew is one of 16 beers in the brewery’s Small Batch Series, all high ABV beers in 22-ounce bottles that might best be shared, which is exactly what happened tonight. We put the Merry Maker to the eponymous test, we being the Shakespeare group that gets together every month or so to read through the Bard’s works. This has been going on for quite awhile—coming up on twenty years—and we’ve been through every play at least twice, most three times, some four times.

We also snack, drink, gossip about town politics, solve worldly problems. In short, we have enough fun that we just keep going, reading on even through the deaths of several members, absorbing Shakespeare into our beings to whatever degree we do. We swap parts, don’t get overly histrionic, don’t delve into knotted analysis. Mostly we just read and let the words wash over us. And that’s plenty.

We rarely make it through an entire play in one evening. So it was finishing up the “The Tempest” tonight, a play with its fair share of enchantment and merriment. But it also has that compelling valedictory feeling that suggests Shakespeare knew he was winding up his career, and I had the pleasure of reading Prospero tonight when he makes that marvelous speech:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

–Act IV, scene 1

Our revels were just getting going when I poured out the Merry Maker. It’s a stout all right, opaque in the glass, redolent of ginger in the nose, but it gets more complicated in the palate, with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg in the spice mix, roasted barley and a bit of wheat and flaked oats, leading to a smooth, chocolately mouthfeel. East Kent Goldings and Fuggles hops are along for the ride.

The three beer drinkers among us all liked the beer, all found the ginger and sweetness components muted to an agreeable degree, and didn’t object to the strength, since we spread the beer around, thereby avoiding the antics of Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban.

Deb Luskin, who’s not a big beer drinker, but a graceful writer, gave it a sip and a one-word interjectional review: “Ew!”

Name: Merry Maker Gingerbread Stout

Brewer: Boston Beer Co., Massachusetts

Style: Spiced sweet stout

ABV: 9%

Availability: November, nationwide

For More Information: www.samueladams.com

[December 18, 2014]

<12 Beers of Christmas 6: Elysian Bifrost Winter Ale

12 Beers of Christmas 4: Guinness The 1759>
BOCA RATON, Fla. -- The Detroit Lions are still playing coy with what their alternate uniforms will look like next season, but president Rod Wood shed some more light on their roll out Tuesday. "They'll be rolled out, I think, once the schedule comes out -- which, hopefully, will be relatively soon," Wood said Tuesday during the NFL owners meetings at the Boca Raton Resort & Spa. "That's usually kind of late April. There'll be more clarity around the Thursday night schedule, and then I think the league will be prepared to kind of talk about the whole Color Rush idea for the whole NFL."

The Lions are about to wear their first alternate uniform since this Thanksgiving game against New England in 2010.

The league debuted the Color Rush uniforms last season, and will expand the program to include all teams playing on Thursday this year. Schedules have not been announced yet, so it's unclear whether the Lions have a Thursday night game or will be wearing the alternate look on Thanksgiving. This will mark the first time since the Thanksgiving game in 2010 that Detroit has worn an alternate uniform. They lost that game 45-24 against New England. Some players have already seen the look,

, who raved about it. Wood said he's seen the jerseys as well, though declined to offer any more clues. "I'm not tweeting about them," he said. "I am not talking about them." What color will they be? "That would be giving it away, wouldn't it?" he said with a smile.

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Margaret Thatcher and her chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe were behind a politically toxic plan in 1982 to dismantle the welfare state, newly released Downing Street documents show. She later attempted to distance herself from the plans after what was described as a "riot" in her cabinet.

The proposals considered by her cabinet included compulsory charges for schooling and a massive scaling back of other public services. "This would of course mean the end of the National Health Service," declared a confidential cabinet memorandum by the Central Policy Review Staff in September 1982, released by the National Archives on Friday under the 30-year rule.

Nigel Lawson, then the energy secretary, said the report by the official thinktank on long-term public spending options caused "the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration".

In her memoirs, Thatcher said: "I was horrified when I saw this paper. I pointed out that it would almost certainly be leaked and give a totally false impression … It was all a total nonsense," claiming the proposals were never seriously considered by her or her ministers.

But the 1982 cabinet papers show the politically explosive paper was discussed at a special half-day extended cabinet discussion on 9 September that year. They show that Thatcher and Howe had been encouraging the CPRS thinktank to come up with such long-term radical options since February that year and that Howe continued to defend them even after the cabinet "riot" described by Lawson.

As part of that revolt a watered-down version of the CPRS paper was leaked to the press, provoking Labour accusations that Thatcher had a secret agenda to dismantle the postwar welfare state – a charge that continues to echo down the years.

Thatcher responded by famously promising in her 1982 Conservative party conference speech in Brighton that the NHS was "safe with us" – a claim that every Conservative leader since has felt compelled to repeat.

But the papers show the revised version of the CPRS paper that was leaked was mild in comparison with the original set of proposals – and that Thatcher's horror had more to do with the prospect of a leak than with the nature of its contents.

The leaked version proposed introducing education vouchers, ending the state funding of higher education, freezing welfare benefits and an insurance-based health service.

But as John Sparrow, the merchant banker Thatcher had appointed to head the CPRS, complained to her when she demanded a more circumspect version, the revised paper "loses a large part of its punch".

The original version went a lot further, including compulsory charges for schooling alongside a "drastic reduction in resources going to the public sector", full-cost university tuition fees and breaking the link that then existed between welfare benefits and prices.

But the earlier version's most controversial privatisation proposal concerned the health service: "It is therefore worth considering aiming over a period to end the state provision of healthcare for the bulk of the population, so that medical facilities would be privately owned and run, and those seeking healthcare would be required to pay for it.

"Those who could not afford to pay would then have their charges met by the state, via some form of rebating or reimbursement."

The only exceptions might be the long-term institutional care of the "mentally handicapped, elderly" who "clearly could not afford to pay".

One of those who worked on the CPRS paper was David Cameron's current advisor on crime and policing, Lord Wasserman. The cabinet papers show Gordon Wasserman, who was on the thinktank's staff from 1981-83, proposed cutting 25% of state school teachers in a background paper for the education section.

The cabinet papers show that far from being some kind of surprise freelance operation, the CPRS report was encouraged and commissioned by Thatcher and Howe. As early as February, Howe was pressing for a wide-ranging discussion on the future size and shape of the public sector. On 28 July, the Downing Street papers show that he told Thatcher: "We should not be inhibited at this stage by such considerations as … the alleged impossibility of change. A discussion of this kind would pave the way for some major strategic decisions affecting our programmes as a government for the next parliament."

Howe proposed a Treasury paper also be discussed at the special cabinet meeting on 9 September: "The PM agrees too that it would be useful if there were a CPRS paper pointing up some of the longer-term options open to us." Thatcher said they should be "vigorously explored".

On the eve of the meeting, the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, told Thatcher that Howe had suggested "and you agreed" that the CPRS should be asked to prepare a paper outlining possible ways of making significant changes to the scale and pattern of public expenditure.

Armstrong said the value of the meeting lay in the chance for the cabinet to "lift its eyes from current preoccupations and to focus on what they like the shape of things in this country to be at the end of the decade.

"At the extreme end, some may argue that any of the radical proposals discussed by the CPRS would be even more unacceptable than the prospect of unchanged policies. But the meeting will have failed in its purpose if ministers are not willing at least to contemplate the possibility of radical action," said Armstrong, who went on to recommend that all options should be remitted for further study.
THREE and a half years into a war that has left 200,000 dead, forced more than 10m from their homes and sucked in America, Russia and a host of regional meddlers, the UN has a new plan for Syria: “Aleppo first”. It seeks to fix a local ceasefire in Aleppo, once a proud and bustling metropolis of 3m that has been reduced to a pockmarked carcass of mostly empty buildings, in the hope of gradually “freezing” battles elsewhere.

Don’t hold your breath. The limited scope of the initiative, proposed on November 10th by Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy, underscores the intractability of this century’s bloodiest conflict. A break in the fighting that has split Aleppo in two would certainly cheer its surviving residents, many of whom no longer care who wins. But too many factors militate against even a limited local ceasefire, let alone a negotiated peace.

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President Bashar al-Assad’s government said it would study the ceasefire plan, which Mr de Mistura described as a potential building block for a wider solution. “Of course they won’t say no,” says Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in London. “Assad likes anything that appears to bolster his legitimacy.” Yet he notes that previous Syrian ceasefires have tended to come in two contexts: either regime forces have besieged a rebel district and offered a choice between starvation and surrender, or a halt to fighting has proven tactically useful, allowing the government to redeploy forces elsewhere.

In fact, Mr Assad has been doing better lately. The American-led air assault against Islamic State (IS) and other jihadist groups has battered some of his foes, and allowed him to pose as an ally in fighting terrorists. Mr Assad has ramped up his own, far less discriminating, aerial bombardment of rebel areas. And he has been able to release ground forces to make gains in some places, including Aleppo, after months of stalemate.

America’s decision to hit jihadist groups other than IS has further splintered the fractious rebels. Some have defected to extremist groups, including IS and Jabhat al-Nusra (which is affiliated to al-Qaeda), convinced that America’s coalition is in effect an ally of Mr Assad’s. Revelations that President Barack Obama promised not to attack the Assad regime in a secret letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and Mr Assad’s staunchest ally, have deepened such Sunni fears.

Yet, even though they are hopelessly squeezed between the regime and hostile IS forces, which control territory to the east of Aleppo, mainstream rebel groups inside the city seem determined to hold on. A commander laid out four conditions in response to Mr de Mistura: a halt to bombing by the regime; release of political prisoners (whose number is estimated at 85,000); the expulsion of “criminal terrorist militias” allied to the government (ie, Iranian-funded Lebanese and Iraqi fighters who bolster Syria’s depleted army); and the surrender for trial of those responsible for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. Bravado, perhaps, but despite the attrition of war and the waning enthusiasm of the rebels’ supporters in the West and the Gulf, Mr Assad’s foes continue to harass his forces. Fierce aerial bombardments have not stopped a slow, steady rebel advance from the south towards the capital, Damascus.

Given the nastiness of the regime and the gathering strength of the jihadists, the bleak underlying reality facing the people of Syria is well captured by a commentator in Aleppo who writes under the pseudonym Edward Dark: “an outright victory by either side is neither a real possibility nor a desirable prospect.”
It is one of America’s most beloved past times. Every year, when the weather gets cold and the days get shorter millions gather around their television sets to cheer on their favorite football teams.

From the Grid Iron to the Gravy Train: How the NFL Scored a Nonprofit Status

Those same fans funnel billions upon billions of dollars into the industry to buy everything from tickets to memorabilia. In fact, the National Football League collects upwards of $9 billion in revenue each year, making the league the most lucrative in the world according to Forbes.

On top of the massive profits the teams enjoy, the league also scores big with tax breaks handed down from the federal government, specifically income taxes. The teams themselves are considered for-profit entities and pay taxes -- however, the leagues, which set the rules, negotiate contracts, discipline players and come up with a programming schedule, do not.

“The NFL is exempt for federal and state income tax under section 501c6 of the federal tax code, which is very different from the sections that exempt charities and other philanthropic organizations,” Chair of the Nonprofit Organizations Practice at Venable Law Firm, Jeff Tenenbaum explains, “A 501c6 organization, which is typically reserved for trade and professional associations and chambers of commerce and some sports leagues, is a category that… carries with it exemption from paying federal and state corporate income tax on your net income.”

And, the NFL isn’t alone. The National Hockey League, the Professional Golfers’ Association, the U.S. Tennis Association and numerous other sporting leagues also enjoy similar statuses. So, how did such a situation come about?

Since the 1940’s, the NFL has received some tax breaks from federal and state governments. However, it wasn’t until 1966 that language was formally added to the national tax code which officially protected professional football. At the time, there were not one but two professional football leagues: the NFL and the American Football League or the AFL. On June 8, 1966, the two leagues formally announced plans to merge. The first ever Super Bowl was also held that very season. In order to merge, the leagues had to approach Congress to ask for an exemption to antitrust laws, which prohibit monopolies that limit competition.

Nitty Gritty Tax Law

After a lobbying blitz by both the NFL and the AFL, Congress eventually agreed to allow the two leagues to merge. During that same time, football lobbyists also pushed for the NFL to be explicitly added to federal tax code as a trade association. As a result, Section 6 of Unites States Code 26 regarding 501 exemptions was modified to read as such:

(6)Business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues (whether or not administering a pension fund for football players), not organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.

According to the IRS, in order to be considered a trade association and, therefore, tax exempt, the league’s activities must:

“Be devoted to the improvement of business conditions of one or more lines of business as distinguished from the performance of particular services for individual persons. It must be shown that the conditions of a particular trade or the interests of the community will be advanced. Merely indicating the name of the organization or the object of the local statute under which it is created is not enough to demonstrate the required general purpose.”

In its 2010 990 tax return form, the NFL described itself as a “trade association promoting interests of its 32 member clubs.” Whether or not promoting the interests of 32 member clubs equates to improving business condition is up to the IRS to decide.

Because the phrase ‘professional football leagues’ was added to the text, the NFL is protected, but the Internal Revenue Service takes that to mean other sporting leagues are as well. This is a notion Tenenbaum himself sees as suspect.

“I think the legitimate question is, ‘does the fact that they were written in so specifically, with some very particular, specific language, does that mean that Congress actually meant to exempt the NFL from taxes under section 501c6 or was Congress simply saying a professional sports league that broadly promotes a particular sport, that’s another category of what we mean by 501c6, the NFL may or may not be one of those. We really don’t know the answer to that.”

A Look at the NFL’s Playbook

To truly understand whether or not the NFL meets those criteria, a basic understanding of the organization’s structure is required.

The league’s origin goes all the way back to September 17, 1920, when team owners and football enthusiasts came together in Canton, Ohio to organize a central group that makes and enforces rules. Today, the NFL represents 32 teams in two conferences: the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC).

The organization's main duties include hiring league employees, disciplining people who break the rules, negotiating television deals, distributing money from those television profits to teams, suspending players and coaches, handing down fines and, in serious cases, canceling contracts or striping teams of draft picks.

In order to be able to conduct its business, each team pays annual dues. According to Forbes, only about $500,000 of the league's money comes in annually from fines and penalties and less than $200,000 comes from investment income. Teams pay the organization about $6 million in dues annually. However, as SportsFans.org reports, team owners are not taxed on that money since it is considered a donation to a nonprofit organization.

In spite of the fact that the NFL in its entirety is the most profitable sport in the US, the league itself is actually operating in the red. In 2011 alone, the NFL reported $77 million in losses.

“The expenses outweigh the revenues so it is actually losing money. So the irony is if it were a taxable entity it wouldn’t be paying any tax because, like any tax-paying entity, if you exceed your revenues you don’t pay any tax, there’s no net income,” Tenenbaum points out.

But, how can a league which brings in over $250 million annually still report losses year after year? That's probably because the majority of the NFL's money goes to executives' contracts.

Roger Goodell Makes How Much?!

According to IRS salary transparency rules, tax exempt organizations can pay no more than fair market value compensation for services. It is also because of the fact that the NFL files taxes as a trade association that the public gets to know exactly what its executives make.

Those very tax forms reveal that current NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell made nearly $29.5 million in 2011 alone. That’s almost triple the $11.6 million he pulled the year before. Those big checks almost guarantee that Goodell is perhaps the only sports commissioner who makes as much as or more money than the athletes themselves. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, for instance, made a mere $18 million by comparison, and former Indianapolis Colts Quarterback Peyton Manning had a salary of $23 million in 2011.

RT America reached out to the NFL, NHL as well as the PGA on multiple occasions. None of the leagues chose to comment on their tax exempt status.

Flag on the Play: Petitioning the NFL’s Tax-Exempt Status

Because of the revenues the NFL as a whole pulls in along with the massive salaries its executives enjoy, a number of people have spoken out against the tax exempt status, even fans themselves.

Lynda Woolard is a longtime New Orleans Saints fan and yet she started a petition on Change.org to call for an end to the NFL’s nonprofit status.

“I started the petition because I saw a real imbalance of power in the league," Woolard told RT. “So, to me, I was trying to think of a way to really give the fans a voice.”

So far, the petition has been signed by over 304,000 people. There’s also a letter attached to the bottom of the petition for the public to send to members of Congress, which a number of people have taken advantage of. Woolard, who runs a nonprofit charitable foundation herself, says the biggest obstacle to overcome is lack of awareness. But she has gotten ample support.

“Sports Fans Coalition at Sportsfans.org contact me and say they would like to go to Washington on the petition signers’ behalf and try to find someone to sign on to put this into the upcoming budget hearings that are coming up. So we do have a Champion in Washington.”

The Senator Who Called ‘Off-Sides’

The Sports Fans Coalition isn’t the only group in Washington that’s taking the NFL to task. Republican Senator Tom Coburn released a Government Waste Book in 2012 detailing just how much money this sports loophole is draining from the American economy. Coburn argues that taxpayers are losing millions annually.

“Hardworking taxpayers should not be forced to provide funding to offset tax giveaways to lucrative major professional sports teams and leagues,” the Government Waste Book reads, “Based on publicly available information about the NFL and NHL alone, barring major leagues from using the non-profit status may generate at least $91 million of federal revenue every year.”

In April, Coburn introduced an amendment to Senate bill 743 or the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013, which would amend the IRS tax code. The bill passed the Senate in May, though Coburn’s amendment never came up for a vote.

But that hasn’t stopped the Oklahoma Senator from continuing this battle. On September 18th of this year, Senator Coburn introduced his newest initiative to end the tax-exempt status for professional sports called the Properly Reducing Over Exemptions for Sports, or PRO Sports, Act. The goal is to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude major professional sports leagues from qualifying as tax-exempt organizations. If passed, all professional sporting organizations with annual revenue that exceeds $10 million would be forced to pay federal income taxes. The bill has been referred to committee but has a virtually nonexistent chance of passing by the end of the year.

Even if the PRO Sports act did eventually pass, Zimbalist and others argue the league tax exempt status is not as big of an issue as you might think.

“I think frankly it doesn’t make a great deal of difference because, as I say, as a central organization that is fulfilling a coordinating function, it doesn’t generate profits that it keeps itself and it can always, by changing its accounting, it can always make any potential surplus disappear,” Zimbalist said.

“When the joint committee on taxation scored the Coburn bill to try to figure out how much money it would raise over 10 years, it came in at $10 million a year, which is basically a rounding error in federal budget standards. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction and that has to be because these leagues are not generating a lot of net revenue, at least the league itself… So in terms of any real impact to the tax payers and to the bottom line, it’s really not going to have any. People may be outraged, maybe justifiably so, but if anyone thinks this is going to be a boon to the U.S. treasury, it’s just simply not,” Tenenbaum agrees.

If You Build it, They will Pay…

Another major issue that is entirely separate from the tax exempt status debate but equally important is the massive amount of money states shell out to build state-of-the-art stadiums.

Harvard University professor of urban planning Judith Grant Long calculated that league-wide, 70 percent of NFL stadium capital costs have been provided by taxpayers. The price tag on these behemoth stadiums, often featuring retractable roofs, interchangeable fields and massive jumbotrons, has risen substantially in recent years.

“The costs of land, infrastructure, operations and forgone property taxes add 25 percent to the taxpayer bill for the 121 sports facilities in use during 2010, increasing the average public cost to $259 million, or $89 million more than the $170 million commonly reported by the sports industry and media,” Long’s book, “Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities,” contends. Big pay for sports teams to play.

In fact there are only three NFL franchises, the New England Patriots, New York Giants, and New York Jets, which have paid three-quarters or more of their stadium capital costs, meaning 29 other stadiums were funded, in part by taxpayers.

CenturyLink Field, where the Seattle Seahawks play, finished it construction in 2002 to the tune of $560 million. A whopping $390 million, or 70 percent, of that money for construction came from taxpayers.

Another example: the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. The 80,000 seat stadium came to a grand total of $1.3 billion when it completed its construction in 2009. Taxpayers handed over $444 million to contribute to the total.

On top of that, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who ranks 166 on Forbes’ List of Richest Americans with a net worth of $3 billion, is exempt from paying around $6 million in property taxes annually as an incentive the state offered to keep the team in Dallas.

On the other hand, professional sports teams argue their presence is an economic boon for the cities. So, proponents of stadium investments argue capital costs are a small investment for cities to make in order to guarantee a long and profitable future regardless of how well the teams perform.

However, academic research has proved time and again public investment in sports stadiums do not result in the economic returns that would make such an investment worth it.

Live Long and Costly

Once the stadium is built and opening day is over, taxpayers continue to front money for years to come on maintenance and operation costs as well as city-wide functions necessary for game days such as traffic control.

Maintenance extends from deep below ground in the sewer system all the way up to electrical costs. The Minnesota Viking stadium cost a grand total of $950 million to build. City residents are expected to shell out an additional $7.5 million on maintenance costs.

And, when those stadiums need to be repaired or refurbished, that bill is once again addressed to the city. Earlier this year, the Carolina Panthers asked the state to pay $62 million for capital improvements, according to Charlotte Observer reporter Steve Harrison. Team owners want to renovate the 17-year-old Bank of America Stadium.The city of Charlotte will fork over an additional $125 on the promise that the Panthers will stay in the city for the next 15 years. Tack on top of that $15 million that the city would need to pay for maintenance and $375,000 for game-day traffic control and taxpayers are looking at quite a big chunk of change. Notably, all 32 NFL teams made Forbes’ list of the 50 most valuable sports franchises around the world with the Panthers claiming the 23rd spot.

A starker example of taxpayers footing the bill for renovation was brought about in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. For days and weeks after the hurricane, hundreds of stranded families waited in the Superdome for FEMA’s help. The stadium acted as a symbol of the storm and the government’s disastrous response. Since that historic storm, taxpayers have coughed up $471 million to restore the superdome to its former glory.

If You Don’t Pay for it, They Will Leave…

Along with a long history of states offering incentives like tax breaks and stadium construction, there is also a long history of states refusing to fund these expensive stadiums and paying dearly for it. It has become somewhat of a tradition in professional sports for teams to threaten to leave if local governments refuse to write a check. In fact, many have left as a result.

Some of the most recent examples of teams playing chicken with local governments are the Minnesota Vikings threatening to leave in 2011 over stadium disputes and, this year, the Atlanta Falcons, St. Louis Rams and San Diego Chargers are all threatening to pack their bags if they don’t get what they want.

Interestingly, as part of the 1966 antitrust exemption Congress granted the NFL in its pursuit to merge with the AFL, the league agreed to a rule forcing all existing franchises to be retained, meaning there must be 32 at all times, and none of those teams were allowed to move outside of their metropolitan areas. So, how teams are traveling from city to city in the modern era remains somewhat of a mystery.

In the end, many cities and states are more willing to hand over millions and offer tax incentives to teams rather than risk losing them for good.

Post- Game Commentary

In the end, America may be too invested in sports to adequately address any of these issues, from the tax exempt status to subsidized stadiums to its unparalleled broadcasting privileges. Some of these issues affect taxpayers more than others but all reaffirm how deeply ingrained professional sports, or perhaps just professional football, are in our culture. Love it or hate it, 17 million viewers will still tune in from kickoff to the fourth quarter to take part in America’s most profitable tradition.
This Is Why People Don’t Agree With Sound Of Same Headphones

There have been interesting researches on the sound of headphones as it is found to believe that every human being have a different opinion on the same headphone sound and this behavior has been researched by Brent Butterworth who has provided an elaborative reasoning about the same. In a recent study, different humans have been made to hear a same headphone sound and asked about their opinions. Interestingly, every test subject had a different take on the sound heard which proves the theory of disagreement as every human has a different take on same headphone sound.

Every human has different hearing and interpretation capabilities

It has been found that the reason for different interpretations is due to the development process of human ears as the ear canals vary from human to human. As quoted by Jacob Soendergaard, a sales engineer in a sound and vibration company.

Each minute variation in geometry (ear canal shape, amount of folds and creases in the canal, aspect ratio of canal, location of double bends, size of tympanic membrane [eardrum], etc.) will affect the hearing perception — especially at the high frequencies with very short wavelengths.

Hence, in the case of frequencies between 10KHz to 20 KHz (human hearing range), even a minuscule difference in offsetting of the human eardrum, which can be referred to as a measurement device, by a millimetre can result in varied results from person to person.

Every human has a different headphone’s space-sense

Scientifically, the human brain uses hand related transfer function or HRTF to locate sound in three dimensions. This function involves the time difference between the arrival of sound at the ears, difference in sound levels, differences in frequency caused by acoustical effects of heads, shoulders and pinnae. All these functions support the interpretation of the sound.

Headphones adjustments to the ears

The fitting of headphones plays a great role in the sound performance output of headphones. It is dependent on the fit of the ear pads of an ear-headphone on the pinna. For a good bass of headphones, a good seal will ensure the same. In case if any space is created, the headphones will have a low bass, which might result in the tonal imbalance.

Different humans have different tastes

It has been observed that one of the reasons behind the different taste could be varied perception of humans towards a headphone sound. This can be obvious as every human is different and the like and dislikes to a particular headphone sound mostly depends upon which sound is more likeable to a particular human.

Hearing ability varies

The hearing capability of a human undergoes changes with age. If the human ear is exposed to loud sounds continuously, it might result in low hearing capabilities in the long run as the ear might have lost hearing efficiency at loud sounds. Also, as you grow old with age, the hearing aid of humans starts to show changes, the efficiency of which slowly withers away with time.

Reference

Source: Lifewire
HOUSTON (CN) – A Texas judge is facing a call for her suspension by a state ethics commission that claims she habitually bought prescription cough syrup on the black market, took marijuana that her bailiff seized from a defendant and paid female prostitutes for sex.

Hilary Green is a justice of the peace in Harris County with jurisdiction over minor misdemeanors punishable by up to a $500 fine, and civil matters with not more than $10,000 at stake.

She has presided over the court since June 2007 and retained the position through three elections, winning more than 80 percent of the vote in November 2016, despite media coverage of her nasty divorce from former Houston Controller Ronald Green that she filed for in April 2014.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct filed a motion to suspend Green without pay with the Texas Supreme Court on Wednesday, a request largely based on the lurid testimony of her ex-lover Claude Barnes.

Green had a five-year extramarital affair with Barnes that ended in the autumn of 2015, according to Barnes’ deposition before the executive director of the judicial conduct commission.

Barnes admitted in the deposition he filed a complaint about Green with the commission in December 2015 out of spite because she led him to believe she wanted to have an exclusive relationship with him after she finalized her divorce, but caught her “cheating” and said she had “unprotected sex with numerous partners” behind his back.

“In January of 2010, I witness [sic] Judge Hilary Green smoke marijuana and illegally purchase Tussionex several times. Between 2011 I also witness her pay for sex from female escorts and consume the street drug ecstasy,” Barnes wrote in his complaint, using the brand name of the cough syrup he says Green became addicted to over the course of their fling.

Barnes said in his deposition that he got a bottle of cough syrup for Green six to eight times from 2010 to 2014, from his former coworker, who jacked up the price from $460 to $600 per bottle.

Barnes said Green initially told him she took a teaspoon of the syrup to help her sleep, but her usage steadily increased.

“At one point in time I just saw her turn the bottle up. There was no longer teaspoons. It was just a swig,” Barnes said in the January 2016 deposition.

According to the deposition, Green twice paid for female escorts off Backpage.com and she and Barnes had threesomes with the women at hotels in Houston and Austin, where Green was attending a conference for judges.

Barnes said in his deposition that Green once showed him a baggie of marijuana and told him she got it from her bailiff, who had taken it from a kid in her courtroom.

The commission states in its complaint to the Supreme Court that in response to ethics complaints, Green lied to it in 2014 and 2017 about her relationship with a convicted felon who remodeled her house, and that she had stopped taking cough syrup in 2013.

“Judge Green’s nature and frequency of misconduct and criminal activity in her own courtroom is incompatible with continuing to serve as a judge,” the motion to suspend states. “She not only misused Tussionex, but she illegally obtained and consumed marijuana and ecstasy with her former boyfriend, Claude Barnes. Judge Green also gave hundreds of dollars to her courtroom bailiff to purchase Tussionex for her.”

Green exchanged sexually charged text messages with the same bailiff, according to the commission, which faults Green for not reassigning the bailiff.

But Green’s attorney Chip Babcock with Jackson Walker in Houston told Courthouse News on Thursday she has no control over the bailiff.

“He doesn’t work for her and so she doesn’t have any personnel responsibility over him so she couldn’t fire him or reassign him if she wanted to,” he said.

Babcock said he will file Green’s response on June 2 with the Texas Supreme Court.

“We’re going to aggressively defend this,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe many of the claims in the motion to suspend.

“They are in many respects untrue and in all respects they are from many years ago and they are the result of allegations made by her ex-husband in the context of a bitter divorce case, and allegations made by somebody who is admittedly angry and out to hurt her. So their credibility is not the best,” he said, talking about Barnes.

He said Green’s work is not the issue and voters agree.

“She has been an exemplary judge and was reelected in November of last year by a huge majority, over 80 percent of the vote, and won a contested primary in the spring so obviously the citizens of her precinct don’t think she’s doing a bad job,” he said.

The commission asked the Supreme Court to indefinitely suspend Green from the bench while its motion plays out, its executive director Eric Vinson said Thursday in a phone interview.

“This is the first step that they have to do before they can recommend to the Supreme Court to remove a judge,” he said.

Tussionex is a combination of the pain killer hydrocodone and chlorpheniramine, an antihistamine.

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MSNBC Terrorism Analyst Evan Kohlmann declared, “You cannot have a situation where you take in immigrants and you do not integrate them” and that Belgium hasn’t learned the lesson Britain did, which is that letting jihadists live in their country is dangerous when they kicked out “all those people that they had allowed to live in London, that turned it into Londonistan” on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Kohlmann said, “Belgian society, in particular, is very segregated. You cannot have a situation where you take in immigrants and you do not integrate them.”

Host Chris Matthews then wondered, “Well, why do they take them in if they have no intention of letting them become Belgian? What’s the purpose of that? Why don’t they just bar them at the door, instead of letting them come in with the purpose of ghettoizing them?”

Kohlmann responded, “This is a very important question that we should be asking the Belgians. I mean, you can’t do that, and then have no surveillance, or no oversight whatsoever. You’re asking for problems. And the truth is is that the Belgians have had an attitude, which not their own, the British had this for years as well, which is that, we’ll let jihadists live here, as long as they’re not targeting us. As long as they’re targeting other people, it’s not the end of the world. The British learned their lesson after 9/11, after the 2005 terror attacks, all those people that they had allowed to live in London, that turned it into Londonistan, they kicked all those people out. They arrested them. They extradited them. But the Belgians don’t seem to have had that realization.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Imagine what Toronto would look like if we had put librarians in charge of running the place a long time ago.

Librarians would not have allowed a car-crazed condo-tower gold rush to crush the city. Librarians would integrate everyone regardless of age or background into a healthy, well-fed, multilingual, vibrant society.

Too bad. Stupidity rules. And stupidity says penalize the Toronto Public Library system for achieving the world-class status that otherwise eludes this Titanic town.

Sure enough, this year's proposed budget includes a 10 per cent funding cut to the TPL, despite the fact that more people visit libraries here than in any city in North America - or anywhere, I'd say, though they don't. Nineteen million a year.

It's a freezing Sunday afternoon, November 24, and I give up counting; every possible seat in the council chambers is taken by the overflow crowd of library supporters.

A hot Dixieland band distracts from the lack of any apparent heating other than human. Maureen O'Reilly, president of the 2,300-strong Toronto Public Library Workers Union Local 4948, chairs the meeting. She introduces her 87-year-old mother, who's sitting comfortably in the mayor's chair.

Balloons and books for children are upstairs in the councillors' lounge. The library system no longer has a recognized classification of children's librarian any more. Young people are criminalized while penny-pinching perpetrates this immeasurable crime against youth.

Pennies are no longer in use except when it comes to libraries. When amalgamation was forced on Toronto in 1998, libraries got just over 2 cents' worth of every budget dollar. Since then, the amount has decreased. Acquisitions, staffing, access and buildings have all suffered. This rescue meeting proposes restoration and reinvestment to the tune of 4 cents a day per resident.

Over the last 20 years, there's been a 44 per cent increase in library usage while the 98-library system has absorbed more than $800 million in cumulative cuts.

The most popular thing in town survives on an annual allowance of just $169 million as the blank cheque handed to police careens toward the billion-dollar mark.

As usual, it's up to the book-reading/immigrant/women and children elites to kick up a fuss. Fortunately, our librarians are prepared.

We watch a short fact-packed film by animators James Braithwaite and Josh Raskin celebrating our book centres as part of "intellectual infrastructure."

Tricia Hennessy of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calls Canada a "safe haven for progressive thought," which is cute. She shows a series of graphs illustrating the ski-slope dives of funding, staffing and acquisitions, and questions why the government refuses to supply the demand. She describes the "business" model as "how to drive a really good thing into the ground." Exactly.

Hennessy points out that, interestingly, other services - fire, parks and recreation, sanitation - have not been forced to take the hit that libraries had to.

The city paid consultants KPMG back in 2011 to assess the library system; they advised the lowering of standards, American-style. O'Reilly and library board member Councillor Janet Davis point to proposals being floated for "study halls" - rooms in the library with no books or computers available, and no library staff. Just a security guard.

Library activist Alejandra Bravo tells of the crucial role the institution played in her adjustment to the city and how it became a place to escape the heat with her baby. She lists poetry and other programs offered only in libraries, not schools. "Young people can find themselves. The library is a neutral space where everybody can feel at home," she says.

The revelation that 51 per cent of TPL workers are now part-time, with no benefits or pension, prompts cries of "Shame!"

Davis encourages residents to call their councillors and invites all to deputations Monday and Tuesday, December 2 and 3, in Committee Room 1.

As I exit the Hall of the City of the Future that never was, I find heat blowing out the door.

news@nowtoronto
The title of this Recording Industry vs The People post says it all, really: "Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000!!!":

If the average settlement were $3,900, that would mean 100 settlements for the entire year.

As bad as it was, I guess it was better than the numbers for 2007, in which more than $21 million was spent on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And the amount recovered was $515,929.

And 2006 was similar: they spent more than $19,000,000 in legal fees and more than $3,600,000 in "investigative operations" expenses to recover $455,000.

So all in all, for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000.
Eric Fanning (waving) is the first openly gay Secretary of the Army in US history.

The first openly gay US Secretary of the Army Eric fanning rode in the San Diego Pride parade on Sunday in an open car with boyfriend Ben Masri-Cohen.

Fanning spent the weekend in the sunny California city and also appeared at a rally and at a San Diego Padres baseball game.

His appearance came just weeks after the US military announced it would begin to allow transgender military personnel to serve openly for the first time.

‘For many in our military, Pride in San Diego has special meaning,’ Fanning told an audience at the Spirit of Stonewall rally Friday evening at Balboa Park.

‘With their actions, they sent a clear message to our country: That it’s possible to take deep pride in being part of two great families, the U.S. military and the LGBT community.’

He also addressed critics who are against allowing transgender people to serve openly.

‘Today, when our critics say that the military is not a place for social experimentation, they may be right. But equality and inclusivity are not experiments. They are American values.’

Manning later told the San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘I want to be able to recruit from the broadest base of people possible who meet the requirements. So why shouldn’t we open up service to those people who meet those requirements that are all about the job and the mission? … People who just want to serve.’

Fanning, 47, also spoke at the rally of the 12 June shooting massacre at the Orlando nightclub Pulse that killed 49 people and injured 53 others.

‘We should come together, even as we grieve and mourn,’ Fanning told the crowd. ‘Because we must respond to acts of cowardice with acts of confidence, with acts of pride in who we are and what we believe.’

His nomination last fall by President Barack Obama came just five years after the historic end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

That law prohibited gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans from serving in the US armed forces openly.

Enacted in the 1990s, DADT prevented Fanning from joining the military himself.
Commercial surrogacy is a booming industry in India, and in recent years the ranks of childless foreign couples looking for a low-cost, legally simple route to parenthood have been joined by gay couples and singles.

The measures mark the first step to the regulation of "surrogacy tourism" in India.

The rules say foreign couples seeking to enter into a surrogacy arrangement in India must be a "man and woman (who) are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years".

The rule changes, posted on the Indian home ministry's website, were denounced by fertility clinics and gay rights activists as "discriminatory".

"Parenting is everybody's right and now we're withdrawing that right," said Dr Rita Bakshi, who heads the International Fertility Centre in New Delhi. "These rules are definitely not welcome, definitely restrictive and very discriminatory," she told AFP.

"This is a huge heartbreak for homosexual couples and singles," commented fertility doctor Anoop Gupta.

Gay rights campaigners also denounced the changes to the rules on surrogacy, which was legalised in 2002.

"It's totally unfair - not only for gay people but for people who are not married who may have been living together for years, and for singles," Mumbai gay rights advocate Nitin Karani told AFP.

India is a popular destination for gay couples seeking children even though it remains a largely conservative country and only decriminalised consensual sex between homosexuals in 2011.

The home ministry would not comment on the changes which stipulate that would-be parents provide proof that their home country will give citizenship to any baby born of a surrogate mother.

There have been several publicised cases of babies born through cross-border surrogacy in recent years who have been trapped in citizenship limbo because their parents' countries refused them passports.

Surrogacy is banned in some European countries and is subject to strict regulation in the United States.

The new India rules, which also state applicants must apply for a medical instead of a tourist visa, come as legislation to regulate the industry has yet to be passed by parliament.

The bill says only women aged between 21 and 35 can act as surrogates but sets no minimum payment for the mother.

Critics have said a lack of legislation governing surrogacy encourages "rent-a-womb" exploitation of young, poor Indian women.

While the government has been pushing the country as a medical tourism destination, the issue of wealthy foreigners paying poor Indians to have babies has raised ethical concerns in many Indian minds.

Clinic owners deny ill-treatment of mothers, saying it is in their interest to treat the women well in order for them to have healthy babies,

The cost of surrogacy is about $18,000 to $30,000 in India, said Bakshi, of which around $8,000 goes to the surrogate mother. The figure is roughly a third of the US price.

Hari Ramasubramanian, founding partner of Indian Surrogacy Law, said the new measures were introduced without "proper consultation" and needed to be challenged in the courts.

"A lot of people who will be affected had seen India as a wonderful option for getting into parenthood and now this option is closed. It's quite sad," he said.

Source: AFP
Professor Fired for Catholic Beliefs?

The Fox News headline "University of Illinois Instructor Fired Over Catholic Beliefs" is grossly misleading.

James Joyner · · 22 comments

A Fox News headline* blaring “University of Illinois Instructor Fired Over Catholic Beliefs” is grossly misleading.

The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church’s teaching that homosexual sex is immoral. The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center. Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam. “Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY,” he wrote in the e-mail. “In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same.” An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell’s e-mail “hate speech.” The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous. “Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing,” the student wrote. “Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another.” Howell said he was teaching his students about the Catholic understanding of natural moral law. “My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches,” Howell said in an interview with The News-Gazette in Champaign. “I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I’m teaching and they’ll never be judged on that.” Howell also said he makes clear to his students that he’s Catholic and that he believes the church views that he teaches. […] In an e-mail to other school staff, Ann Mester, an associate dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said Howell’s e-mail justified his firing. “The e-mails sent by Dr. Howell violate university standards of inclusivity, which would then entitle us to have him discontinue his teaching arrangement with us,” Mester wrote. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said professors should be able to tell students their own views and even argue in favor of them, provided students can disagree without being penalized. “It’s part of intellectual life to advocate for points of view,” said Nelson, an emeritus English professor at the University of Illinois. “Hopefully when they go out in the world, they can emulate that. They can argue a case, and do it in a well-informed and articulate way, and can make a more productive contribution to our democracy that way.”

First off, I’m not sure that it’s possible for an adjunct teacher to be “fired.’ By definition, he’s not a permanent employee. Nor was he terminated mid-term. He was simply not offered another course because university administration felt his emails made it impossible for him to teach gay students.

Second, he’s not being let go because of his “beliefs” but because of his conduct. If a professor believed blacks were inanely inferior to whites or that women should be at home having babies rather than attending college, he would be wise not to share said beliefs with his students in mass emails.

Now, as to the merits of the situation, my sympathies are with the AAUP. Homosexual students taking a course in Catholic thought ought to come away understanding the church’s views on homosexuality, their origins, and have their own views challenged. I had plenty of professors along the way whose views greatly differed from my own and gained much in the give-and-take.

But Howell would have been on much firmer ground had he simply presented the arguments as those of the Catholic Church, not his own. In this case, he wasn’t simply challenging the deeply held beliefs of some of his students — a perfectly valid and even laudable thing for a professor to do — but challenging their worthiness as human beings. That’s going too far.

Additionally, I mostly disagree with PZ Myers, who thinks “it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors.”

He begins with a view of the exchange more charitable than my own:

A letter that condemned students, that threatened students if they didn’t agree with his views, that discriminated against a segment of society, or that denied people full participation in the culture for their views or background or private practices…that would be hate speech. This letter, though, is a pedantic and polite explanation of the views of the professor and of the Catholic church and of his interpretation of utilitarianism, and in fact is careful to say that he isn’t condemning any individuals. We can’t endorse using this kind of discussion as an excuse to expel people from academia — we want professors and students to be able to communicate freely with one another, without fear of retaliation. I see no sign that the professor was discussing the matter in a way that disrespects any of his students. And the student complaining was doing so poorly. The professor’s ideas made him uncomfortable. He disliked what he said. He thought the professor was insensitive. Those are not good reasons. If a student is never made uncomfortable, that student is not getting an education.

But he then rips apart the intellectual quality of the ideas being offered in the email exchange, which are based on a combination of Catholic dogma, woeful ignorance about human sexuality, and sheer laziness. That requires several paragraphs and defies excerpting.

I get a queasy with this, as professors frequently verge a bit too far out of their intellectual comfort zone, as Howell did. That’s not a fireable offense. But, as already noted, Howell isn’t technically being fired here. (Although he did also lose an ancillary full-time job that required him to be eligible to teach.)

I’m also a bit leery of this:

Of course, part of the reason for his weird shortcomings is the fact that he’s a professor of religion who is spitting up Catholic dogma, and one big problem is that a respected major university is offering courses in Catholicism taught by its adherents as serious philosophy, rather than teaching it as cultural anthropology by someone who can maintain a little distance from its weird precepts.

I agree that courses of these type — indeed, all courses — ought be taught by subject matter experts with solid intellectual grounding. I disagree, however, with the implication that someone with said training who also holds strong religious beliefs — and such people do exist, by the way — is intellectually unqualified to teach.

_______________________

*The story is from AP; it’s the Fox-supplied headline that I object to. Alas, most of the headlines I’m seeing at this juncture are blog-supplied. The non-editorial headlines seem to be along the lines of “Illinois Instructor Fired for ‘Hate Speech'” — which is also misleading.
CLOSE President Trump reprised his attacks on former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, telling supporters in Ky. that 'they like when people stand for the American flag.' Wochit

Colin Kaepernick was selected as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2017. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP file)

Colin Kaepernick, whose national anthem protest sparked equal amounts of applaud and outrage, was named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2017.

The former Wolf Pack quarterback, who is an NFL free agent, began his protest of the anthem by first sitting and then kneeling as it was played before NFL games. Other NFL players, including Nevada alum Brandon Marshall, followed his lead. During a game against Purdue, a dozen Wolf Pack players held a single fist in the air during the anthem.

Kaepernick said his protest was over the oppression of minorities, including police brutality.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media about his protest. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

Kaepernick, who donned the cover of Time magazine last September, went on to say he loved America and his protest was being misunderstood and wasn't a statement against the military. He pledged to donate $1 million (he's donated $400,000 so far) and sent food, water and aid via plane to Somalia, which is experiencing a historic famine. He also started free "Know Your Rights" camps for youth.

President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for Kaepernick being unemployed, was critical of the quarterback during the president race.

“I think it’s personally not a good thing," Trump said of the protest. "I think it’s a terrible thing. And, you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him. Let him try. It won’t happen.”

Time listed Kaepernick among the "icons" in its 100 most influential list. His former 49ers' quarterback, Jim Harbaugh, penned the Time write-up applauding Kaepernick. Harbaugh initially said he was against the act – "I acknowledge his right to do it, but I don't respect the motivation or the action," he said – before changing his stance.

"I thank Colin for all he has contributed to the game of football as an outstanding player and trusted teammate," Harbaugh wrote in Time. "I also applaud Colin for the courage he has demonstrated in exercising his guaranteed right of free speech. His willingness to take a position at personal cost is now part of our American story. How lucky for us all and for our country to have among our citizens someone as remarkable as Colin Kaepernick."
Arnold schwarzenegger is the best person in the universe to teach you how to achieve your Dream. When He was just 16 years old, he had a dream of being Mr Olympia, he worked hard and didn't quit and not for one time nor twice nor thrice He became Mr.Olympia for seven times. Then He had a dream of entering in to the Hollywood but people said you have got thick Austrian accent. But He didn't quit, worked hard and became the Highest paid Actor in Hollywood, around $15million he got for terminator. Then He had a dream of entering into politics, Now He has been the governer(highest post a non-american can achieve) of California for 7years. Then He had a dream to invest into real estate. Right now He owns his private beach in santa monica. Then He had a dream to marry a kennedian girl and he was married to maria shriver. Then He had a dream of being an author, He authored the best selling book Total Recall. So Every single dream, Every Single Fucking Dream, He had in life, He achieved it. He didn't just live his life. He actually lived his dream. So If You also want to live your dream. Follow him, Learn from him and Respect him.
Is this the best run-good in modern poker history?

Erik Seidel took down another high buy-in event, capturing the inaugural WPT Championship $100,000 Super High-Roller. For the win, Seidel banks $1,092,780. He defeated Erick Lindgren ($700,500) heads-up for the title.

In 2011 alone, Seidel has earned $5,590,166. This includes:

:: A fourth for $295,960 in the $25k PCA High Rollers.

:: A third for $618,139 in the $100k Aussie Millions High Rollers.

:: A first for $2,472,555 in the $250k Aussie Millions Super High Rollers.

:: A first for $144,570 in the $25k LAPC High Rollers.

:: A first for $750,000 in the $25k NBC National Heads-Up.

:: A second for $155,103 in the WPT Hollywood Poker Open.

Between winning all of these events and the fact that nobody can get money off the site he helped launch–Full Tilt Poker–Seidel is pretty much the epicenter of the poker economy at this point.

Where all of this places Seidel on poker’s all-time winningest player list is still debatable, depending on what tournaments you include for your list. He’s either first by a large margin or third.

Regardless, by any measurable, the 2011 poker scene has been owned by Erik Seidel.

And the DoJ.

Get full payouts here.
Albano Brás, the owner of the small café, recalls them very well. They were regulars, “good lads”, calm, who appeared at the end of the day or at the weekend and always in a group. However much he attempted to recall some incident, the 52 year old emigrant – in Leytonstone for the last two decades – is unable to point to any particular warning sign that the “boys” might have given. They laughed at the comments of others, there were no Muslim items of clothing nor was there any reference to either the Koran or to Islam. They just did not consume alcohol. They watched the football with a bottle of Sumol orange or pineapple soda. And there was no censure should one of their friends drink a Super Bock beer. Religion was left very much at the door of the Cascais.

Between 2012 and 2013, the five began sharing an apartment in Leyton, located between the calm Dawlish Road and Sidmouth Road, next to a children’s park with squirrels running through the trees. However, the Portuguese spent very little time there. It served only for sleeping, washing, praying and watching jihadist propaganda videos on the Internet. There was no television – out of choice that they stuck to with pride. The rent and daily needs were paid for by low level jobs in clothes stores or cleaning. There was not much money left at the end of the week but, then again, the group was not given to great extravagances. As a friend stated: “They did not need much to live. The remained satisfied with very little.”

The house was just a minute from a bus stop serving routes 58 and 69, which would take them not only to Café Cascais but also to the University of East London, in Stratford, where most of them studied, and the mosque they attended in Forest Gate. They would head off to work or the faculty in the morning and return in the evening, a daily routine similar to the rest of the immigrants living in the neighbourhood. Leyton proves little more than a dormitory for its approximately forty thousand inhabitants, over half of whom belong to an ethnic minority, a ratio far higher than the Greater London average. Here, the unemployment, poverty and criminality rates are also way above the national averages. And, this is where one of Britain’s largest Muslim communities lives.

In Portugal, none of the five paid any attention to religion. Some had even grown up in practising Catholic households. The conversion to Islam and the radicalisation had taken place there, in Greater London, in a quick process lasting just a few months in the majority of cases. Edgar, the first Portuguese person in the group to emigrate and turn Muslim, went onto influence his brother Celso and his three friends. However, who influenced him? “They went over to the more radical side of Islam because they wanted to, out of faith, due to not agreeing with the foreign policy of the West against Muslims. Nobody twisted their heads around. It was just like that. In Lisbon, the Muslims did not understand these questions. Here they did”, was the attempted explanation of a friend of the group who remains in London. Those responsible at the Forest Gate mosque, a white prefabricated building, modest in scale, which also serves as a religious schools, guaranteed to Expresso that they did not know any “brother” of Portuguese nationality but did accept their might be a few “black sheep” in amongst the flock of hundreds of persons attending the mosque daily.
God is in the details. So they say. Words I tend to live by.

My next two posts will be a reflection on exactly that. I have talked before about my biggest struggle in doing a show like this, where the Costume team has an opportunity to create such elaborate, detailed pieces, is hearing viewers say, “when do we see that costume?”. WE SAW IT!!!! Three episodes ago! But you actually didn’t. The actor never got up from the table, we never saw them from the back, there was never a head to toe shot (almost never), it is too dark to see it if they did, etc.

I often threaten to abandon the details. “What is the point? ” I ask. “Why should my team bleed over these costumes for months, if we are never going to see them?!?! Don’t we want the audience to SEE this alien world??”

But I do get it. The show cannot add hours to loving close ups on buttons or pocket details. There is an awful lot of story to get into a 13 hours of television and every minute is precious. I also believe that even if we don’t see the details, we feel them. They are their subliminally (is that a word?), they help the audience to believe that the world is real, and they absolutely help the actor to feel the character. God IS in the details.

But I am a mere human, and I struggle. So I created my own art gallery, to celebrate the details. My work, the work of my team. I am an atheist, after all.

Let’s start with one of my favourite costumes this season. Annalise at Versailles. I love this costume. It is as close a reproduction as I could make of this costume. I try to pepper the show with reproductions. Not only does it add authenticity, but it validates various choices. this particular costume is about detail, but very importantly about color. This supports our choice to use a different palette in S2 than everyone expects. These are not the pastel, bon bon colours that come later in the 18th century. The colors of the mid 18th are much deeper and richer. Our story is just one King before the ears of Marie Antoinette that everyone associates with the 18th century.

This is a Casaquain from the Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.

Ours-

The differences are clear. Our colors are deeper. There comes a point when you have looked at every possible shade of whatever colour you are trying to match, the dye room is already behind schedule, and you have to LET IT GO, TERRY! It is close enough! We also just did not have the time to create that marvellous tulip hem and to piece the silver lace the way they did. I had to use a Dupioni silk in order to get the closest color. Very often these things are an exercise in compromise. But you accept it and move one. Cameras need to roll.

Enjoy!
The Retirement Commissioner says the superannuation age needs to rise from 65 to 67.

Diane Maxwell says the country can’t afford not to make the change, calling it a "no-brainer."

"The number of 65-plus will double in the next 25 years, the cost of super will triple in the next 20 years," she says.

"Our dependency ratio — the number of people of working age to retirees — will go from 4.4 to 2.4 [per working person]. We can't pretend this isn't happening."

But Commerce Minister Paul Goldsmith disagrees, saying economic growth will cover the cost of keeping super eligibility at 65.

Mr Goldsmith says the government currently spends around 5% of GDP on super.

"The projections are in 2045, 30 years from now, that will increase to 7% of GDP. The world's not going to come to an end. We can afford that," he says.

Prime Minister John Key says he would resign before he lifted the retirement age, in part because he says it would be tough on many blue collar workers. A recent survey by the Retirement Commission found two-thirds of Kiwis want it kept at 65.

"I'm hoping to change the voters' minds," says Ms Maxwell. "If I can change the voters' minds, I can change [Mr Key's] mind."

The Retirement Commissioner also says immigrants should not be eligible for super until they have lived in New Zealand for 25 years, in line with the average of 26 years. Currently, the wait is 10 years. But Mr Goldsmith says we’ve always been a generous country.

She says now the government has such a large surplus it should resume payments into the Super Fund.

RAW DATA: Lisa Owen interviews Retirement Commissioner Diane Maxwell and Commerce Minister Paul Goldsmith

Lisa Owen: Well, this is a political hot potato that no party wants to handle – superannuation. But now the Retirement Commissioner, Diane Maxwell, is wading in. Her report on New Zealand’s retirement policy is due shortly, and she joins me now in the studio.

Diane Maxwell: Good morning.

Good morning. What are your key recommendations going to be?

So super as it stands is a fantastic thing. We’re very proud of it, but it’s not sustainable in the long term unless we make some changes. So the changes that we’re looking at, you’ve either got to say how do you work on the eligibility criteria or the absolute amount that people get? So the eligibility criteria would time spent in country, age that you become eligible for super and the absolute amount is about the indexation that occurs every year and what it’s indexed to. So we’re looking at looking at raising the age of eligibility over time and talk more about that.

So to what age? From 65 to what, do you think is the best?

So I want to be really clear that this is a slow change. We’re looking at three scenarios. One of them would impact people who are 55 today. You’d raise it three months a year over a period of 10 years, so it’s a slower change than the last time it went up.

To…?

To 67.

To 67.

To 67.

Okay. You mentioned foreigners coming into the country, their eligibility. At the moment you get super — full super — if you’ve been here for 10 years.

Yeah.

What would you do about that?

So you get New Zealand super after 10 years, and the OECD average is 26 years, so we are an outlier. We would look at extending that out, and we’re costing out if we extended it to 25 years — being in New Zealand for 25 years before you get New Zealand super. If you look at the migration figures for the ones that have just come out, in fact, net migration is 70,000 into New Zealand. That’s a net figure. So the actual figure’s 125,000, and actually a quarter of them are New Zealanders coming back, but we do have people coming to New Zealand and we do have parents coming to New Zealand, people who are resident in New Zealand, and we need to think about in the longer term, as is a cost blowout, how we manage that.

Okay, I just want to unpack some of them, because there’s a lot in there. So let’s look at the age first. You say you’ll bring it in incrementally. Well, two-thirds of the people you surveyed most recently don’t want a bar of raising the age.

Yeah.

So why would any political party take a policy…

They won’t.

…that is potentially suicidal?

Look, the problem is — I do want to put these numbers out there very quickly — the number of 65-plus will double in the next 20 years. The cost of super will triple in the next 20 years. As importantly, our dependency ratios, which is the number of people of working age to retirees will go from 4.4 to 2.8— 2.4, sorry. 2.4 people of working age to every one retiree.

Yeah.

So we can’t pretend that this isn’t happening. Now, I have days where I think, actually, it’s going to be fine; I believe in growth and driving productivity. But then we look at how an ageing population is actually going to impact productivity. Our costs are growing faster than our GDP ever could, so part of this is where I’m getting to is people need to understand all that before they can decide what they think, otherwise it’s a very emotional reaction.

But it comes back to the thing you say — the number of 65-year-olds is going to double. That’s double the voting.

The voters, I know. I know.

They’re doubling the voter population.

We need a bipartisan—

How are you going to get parties to do this?

I’ve very pragmatic about this. We need a cross-government agreement. That would be fantastic. By the time it comes in as a change, it will be a no-brainer. I notice in your clip you had retirees as old people on Zimmer frames. Actually, 65- to 70-year-olds are quite a sprightly, fit bunch, you know? They’re not spending a whole lot of time on Zimmer frames, and yet we pull out pictures of really old people, but what we find is that people in their 60s and their late 60s now are really quite an active, healthy bunch. So we’re living for longer, but also we’re healthier for longer; we’re working for much longer.

I want to talk about that a bit more a bit later, but what’s really important is that our current prime minister has vowed that he will resign before he increases the entitlement age for super. Can you change his mind?

Look, it comes down to what the voter thinks. I’m hoping to change the voter’s mind.

And get them to send him the message?

If I can change the voter’s mind, I can change his mind, because that’s the point. You said we’re doing a report; I’m not doing a report. I have said to the government they’re not getting a report, and I know you have my minister on after me.

Yeah.

What they’re going to get, actually, are seven videos within which all our work will be embedded as digital content. The problem with doing a report, and this is what happened last time, is a group of people like me sit in a room and people who know about the stuff talk about the stuff with other people who know about the stuff, and then we peer-review each other’s stuff, and then we go home.

So you want people to watch these videos and know where you’re at?

It’s a circular internal conversation. This has to go out to New Zealand. This has to be understood by New Zealand, by voters, by taxpayers, and to do that we’re got to take the jargon out of it. We’ve got to make it sensible. We’ve got to make it interesting and compelling, and we’ve got to put it out there in ways that make sense. So there’ll be quick videos, interesting, quite funny, I’m hoping, that people can watch, and then within that will be embedded the research, the recommendations which are going to be in the freezer and a few others things. So it’s a very different type of work, and there’s not going to be a report.

Okay. I want to then talk about some of the fairness issues, because you’ve touched on that.

Yeah.

So between generations and between workers, so how is raising the age of super, even if it’s incremental, fair to, say, Maori, who have a lower life expectancy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Or people who are physically clapped out because they’ve had such jobs in their life?

So this is really really important, because actually if you talk to people about this, then their feelings change about raising the age— towards raising the age. So what I’ve learnt this year with all the work that we’ve done, and I’ve been travelling around New Zealand with my listening ears on, is that what we’ve— You know, we talk 65 to 67. That’s a really old conversation. We’ve got to stop talking 65 to 67. We need to talk 50 to 70. That’s where the conversation needs to be, because we engage with people who actually in their early 50s, cannot go too much further in terms of work.

Are they going to have exemptions?

So what we need to do is step back. And so we’ve got two groups here — one who, frankly, could work to 70 without a problem, but for others, 65 isn’t the issue. If they’ve got an issue at 65, they will have had an issue at 55. So if we raise the age today — and I’m not saying we’re going to — we would save 1.6 billion, so you take that 1.6 billion, and you look at where it needs to be invested for people in their early 50s. So is it a career change? Is it retraining? Is it—? What do they need? Do they need a hearing aid? What do people need throughout their 50s to take them into their 60s and their 70s?

So you’re talking about stretching their work life no matter what they do now?

I think for some of them, yes, and for some people, no.

Will there be exceptions?

And I think, you know, it is changing. We’re seeing people much healthier much longer. The other thing to remember is that jobs are changing. Many of those manual jobs that broke people aren’t— are dying out. But we need to say really clearly, take the 1.6 billion, look at the people who simply cannot work and make sure they are looked after. Look at the people who could work but just need retraining and retrain them, and then the people, frankly, who are 65 going strong, fit as a fiddle and working full-time, they don’t need Super.

The thing is, though, you’re going to have more people in the workforce, so what kind of jobs are they going to be competing for, and who are they going to be competing against?

Yeah. I mean, there’s a silly theory, which we should have all moved on from, that a 65-year-old working is taking a job away from an 18-year-old. They’re not. There’s lots of evidence that that simply isn’t the case. We want to grow a productive economy.

So you’re saying nobody’s going to be squeezed out by making a growing percentage of the population—?

I don’t believe so, but what I do believe is that the workforce — and we know this from the month we did Ageing Workforce — the workforce is not ready to employ older New Zealanders. There is huge discrimination and bias against older New Zealanders, so this is critical, because if we say we want people to work for longer, we have to have the workplace ready to accommodate them — not just accommodate them but get the best out of them. There are lots of people in their 60s who are very competent and capable and able-bodied who cannot get a job because of our attitudes towards aging, and we need to address that.

All right. I want to move on to KiwiSaver. Let’s take a look at some of the figures there — 131% jump in money taken out for first homes in the past year; hardship withdrawals up 52%; a number of people signed up but not paying in grew to 1.1 million — that’s heading towards the halfway mark —and growth in membership halved since the Government nixed its start-up contribution. So if this is about numbers, give us your number for KiwiSaver. How’s it doing, 1 to 10, 10 being the best?

I’d put it at an 8, actually. Look there are people who aren’t putting enough money in. As you said, half of KiwiSaver members didn’t get the full-member tax credit, and then half of that group, about 580,000, didn’t put anything in at all, so those are big numbers for not contributing. However, what I see when I travel up and down the country, and this is where you’ve got to step away from the spreadsheets, get out of Wellington and talk to people, I see people with savings they would never have otherwise had. You know, they’re people who have never had savings in the family. They have a history of never having had savings, and they have savings.

But there is room for improvement, so the Government said—

There’s huge room for improvement.

The Government said when it was fiscally prudent, it would auto-enrol people into KiwiSaver. Is the time right now? Should we be going for it?

Oh, look, I don’t know what— I’m not sure what that would achieve, cos people could still opt out, and about 75% of the workforce— sorry, the people eligible in that workforce are in.

So you’re on the fence on that one?

What I said the other day I stand by, which is what I’d love to see support for is that group who are joining the workforce for the first time. So their first job is their first time they’ve got an income, and basically it’s a conversation with them that says, ‘You know what? This is what an income looks like. You’re on a salary. This is your first opportunity to save and to start a savings habit.’ So that’s where I would say give them the $1000 kick-start as a first-jobber if they didn’t get it already. Make sure they’re on KiwiSaver, but give them that moment, that flush moment, where they go, ‘$1000. This is a savings vehicle. I’m working now, the beginning of my working career. I’m going to take this seriously.’

There’s a couple of things I want to run through before we get out of time. So the Super Fund, the Government stopped paying into that in 2009. Again, it said when the books were in the black, they would start paying again. We are – 1.8-billion surplus. Is it time to start repayments into that?

I would say yes, it is. Yes, quite definitely.

Right now spend the surplus on that?

Depends. You know, previously, I think it was 1% to 2% GDP that went in before it stopped, so question is — is that the right amount? But, you know, the pre-funding, which is what’s going to kick in in 20 years’ time to try and alleviate some of the pressure point, is critical. There’s no way around it.

So Super Fund also gets taxed on its earnings. Should—? I mean, that was, what, $250 million last year.

I know. They were one of our biggest taxpayers one year.

So should those returns be taxed?

So last time I did this report, I said, ‘If you can’t start contributing to the fund, for goodness sake, stop taxing the thing,’ as a midpoint. See, to me, if you contribute, then tax; if you don’t contribute, don’t tax.

We’ve got to go, but I just want to ask you quickly — is the Government going to listen to you?

Are New Zealanders going to listen to me is a bigger question, because if New Zealanders listen to me, the Government will listen to me.

Okay. Thanks for joining us this morning. Much appreciated.

Lisa Owen: Welcome back. Well, before the break we heard from the Retirement Commissioner, Diane Maxwell, about changes she says we need to make to superannuation. But even she admits the changes are a vote loser, so will the government listen? Well, joining me now in the studio is the commerce minister, Paul Goldsmith. Good morning to you.

Paul Goldsmith: Good morning. How are ya?

You would have heard the Commissioner say there that she thinks retirement age should go up to 67, change it over 10 to 15 years. Sound like a good idea? Are you going to do it?

No. I mean, I think... Look, I agree with a lot of what the Retirement Commissioner says around— Her focus is around trying to encourage New Zealanders to save for their retirement and think about their retirement over the long term. I don't agree with her assessment that the current regime is unsustainable. I don't think the facts back that up. If you look at what the Treasury says, we basically spend about 5% of GDP at the moment looking after our older citizens, and that's absolutely right. They should have a decent standard of living and comfort when they're old. The projections are that by 2045, so 30 years from now, that will have increased to 7% of GDP. Now, the world's not going to come to an end. We can afford that and it's important that we do.

Well, she says you can't. In 2057 that's $104 billion a year with a rising, ageing population. And even you have said that we can afford it, and I'm quoting you here, as long as we keep control of other government spending.

That's right.

So, what are you going to cut to afford it?

Well, you don't have to cut anything. I mean, what you've seen— Look, we've talked about going from 5% to 7% over the next 30 years in terms of spending on superannuation. Let's just remember that in the last six years, this government has taken total government spending from nearly 35% of GDP down to just under 30% now. So we've managed to drop government spending by 5% of GDP in six years without closing things down. We've actually continued to invest heavily in social programmes. We've increased benefits. We've done all sorts of things so...

We'll have an item on later this morning which is about health where the budget is, arguably— a tight rein is kept on the health budget, and if you look at some of the figures, they say, decreasing against population — health funding, so you are keeping a tight rein. You're going to be spending money on building new prison beds. So does this mean tax cuts will be off to afford superannuation?

No. I just think you need to continue on in a stable, sort of sensible, pragmatic government like we've had. And if you keep good sound control of the finances, then there's no reason to think that New Zealanders can't afford to look after their older people in their retirement. The point that I focus on as commerce minister, is around encouraging people to save through KiwiSaver. And I think one of the things— You know, the challenge that we've got is that there is a tendency for people to sign up when they start a new job and then not think about it for the next 10 years. And so the thing that worries me is that we wouldn't want a generation of New Zealanders to get to retirement, having been in KiwiSaver for 30 or 40 years—

So why not auto-enrol them, then?

Well, they are auto-enrolled. You can opt out if you need to, but at the moment when you start a new job, you're auto-enrolled.

Yes. When you start a new job.

Yeah. Sure.

Super is for our vulnerable to make sure that when people retire, there is something to sustain them. And you talk about people paying into KiwiSaver. I suppose the issue is, we've seen this year that there's plenty of working poor who can't afford a roof over their head or a hot meal. How do you suggest they save for their retirement?

Well, that comes back to the government doing everything it can to create an environment where the economy grows. And, boy, we've got a pretty good story on that front. I mean, the economy's grown 3½%, we're creating new jobs — 300,000 new jobs in New Zealand since the bottom of the global recession, and average wages are rising faster than inflation, so that's all good stuff and I think we've got every reason to be optimistic about New Zealand's future. Sure, we've got challenges but the best way to deal with people who are struggling is to have a good, strong economy where people can get jobs. But the thing about KiwiSaver is that it's not there to replace super, and so the problem I have with the narrative is that when people say, 'The current system is unsustainable and you're not going to have super when you retire,' I don't think that's the right message to send to people at all.

The Commissioner is not saying that. She's saying you'll just get super later. You should get super later cos we can't afford to give it to you at 65.

Like I'm saying, I think what we have got is sustainable. But the KiwiSaver regime is to supplement that, not to replace it. And that's why I think it is important that we encourage— I mean, there's every incentive for New Zealanders to save—

But not everyone can afford KiwiSaver.

Well, you know, we've got 2½ million New Zealanders who are in KiwiSaver at the moment.

1.1 million are not paying a single cent in.

Yeah. Yeah.

They've signed up but they're not paying... they're not saving.

Yeah. Quite a number of them will be kids who have been signed up under the age of 18.

52% increase in the number of people withdrawing money from KiwiSaver due to hardship. That is evidence people cannot afford it.

And that's about 100,000 out of the 2.5 million, so it's a pretty small group. And we have a bit of flexibility in KiwiSaver so that if you do have real issues, you can take the money out, and also so people can take it out and buy their first home. So you've got to have a bit of flexibility in the system. But the point remains, and where I focus as a minister, is to make sure people have got the opportunity to engage with KiwiSaver. And I pay a lot of attention to things such as ensuring people think about what kind of fund they're in, whether they're in a growth fund or a defensive one, and also paying attention to the fees they pay. And that's something that I've been working on as well, because what you don't want is people to wake up after 30 years and realise that they were in the wrong fund. They were paying high fees and the result is not as good as it could be.

The other point that the Commissioner raised there was new New Zealanders who are collecting super after 10 years in the country, and she's saying that the OECD average is 26 years you have to be in the country before you can collect super. Should you change that, do you think?

Well, look, I think we're a generous country and we have been always. I think— Like I say, the overall system is sustainable, but, ultimately, that's a matter for the Minister of Finance or Immigration to deal with. It's not my area directly, but I think the broader point is that you do have a robust, sustainable system.

All right. Thanks for joining me this morning. Much appreciated.
They will be joined in Nashville by Milwaukee Head Coach Dean Evason and Assistant Coach Stan Drulia.

After playing Games Three and Four on the road in Chicago, the Nashville Predators return to Bridgestone Arena for Game Five tomorrow night (8:30 p.m. CT, FOX Sports Tennessee, 102.5 The Game). Doors for will open at 6:30 p.m. and the Preds Plaza Party presented by Lee Company will begin at 5:30 p.m. The Preds Plaza Party includes family activities, street hockey, live music, food and drink, face painters and more. Join the conversation and show your Preds Pride by using #StandWithUs and tweeting the team at @PredsNHL.

Game Five is SOLD OUT, but at 10 a.m. tomorrow, the Preds will release 100 $15 tickets courtesy of Ticketmaster that will be sold only on Ticketmaster.com (while supplies last). All fans in attendance at Game Five will receive GOLD spirit sticks presented by Jaguar Land Rover Nashville and a voucher for a free skate rental at Ford Ice Center. For more information on upcoming playoff promotions and community events, visit Nashvillepredators.com.
When does women’s work become real work?

When no woman shows up to do it.

It feels like a footnote to the tumult of Month 1 of the Trump presidency, a minor detail easily lost in the toxic stew of news about Russia, executive orders, legal appeals and grammatically challenged Twitter blitzes. But by now, most of America knows that Melania Trump has declared herself the First Lady Who Wouldn’t.

Instead of taking up the mantle of First Hostess and slipping into the role of a landlocked Julie the cruise director without complaint, Melania the Intermittent has chosen to mostly stay in New York City with her young son, at least through the end of the school year, emerging from her gilded penthouse for a White House dinner here or a sightseeing jaunt there.

While a libel lawsuit suggests that Mrs. Trump had an eye on eventually monetizing her role as “one of the most photographed women in the world,” she has seemed uninterested in doing the work of the first lady. She waited until the end of January to name a social secretary and has yet to hire a full staff for her office. During his news conference Thursday, President Trump gave a progress report, explaining that his wife had “opened up the visitors center” and predicted that she would be a “fantastic” first lady, insofar as she was “always the highest quality that you’ll ever find.”

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Now that Mr. Trump has turned 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into a bachelor pad, it’s clear that we’ve been taking our first ladies for granted.
Itty Bitty Songbird Instructions

If you are at Chicago Brickworld 2016 right now, you have one of these little guys on your display. As part of my duties as Brickworld Master 2015, I created 555 of these for the express purpose of pimping the MOCs on awards night. If yours falls apart, you now have instructions for putting him back together.

A huge thanks goes out to CoWLUG members for helping me build the whole mess: Meghan & Ryan Nelson, Jim Miller, Derek Medina, Lester Marcinkowski, Donnie & Lauren Greenfield and Jordan Breithaupt. Also Dustin, Madi & Chase who stayed into the morning to get all the arms & heads done. Thanks too, to my Atomic Goblin crew, Bodhi & Dave for the final full body assembly.

And finally, thanks to Mel, Evan & Adam for staying up all night in the event hall to help me make sure all the MOCs were properly pimped. You guys are awesome! Medic!!! And thanks to Nick and all the awesomeness that is GamerLUG for making a space for all of us.

Done
Join us on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at Noon for the biggest Flipper Bowl yet!

The New Year is almost here and that means Flipper Bowl III is a month away!

The New Year is almost here and that means Flipper Bowl III is a month away!

The New Year is almost here and that means Flipper Bowl III is a month away!

The New Year is almost here and that means Flipper Bowl III is a month away! Join us on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at Noon for the biggest Flipper Bowl yet!

The Young Associates Board's Flipper Bowl has gotten

SO HUGE we've moved to one of the biggest bar venues

in Chicago - Joe's on Weed!

THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT IN PAST YEARS,

SO REGISTER BY JANUARY 7th AND SAVE $5 PER PERSON!

Get your team ready and sign up at http://www.events.org/flipperbowl.

Individual Entry - Now $35! (after January 7th $40)

Team of 6 - Now $210! (after January 7th $240)

Spectator Ticket - Now $30! (after January 7th $35)

All proceeds from this event are donated to support pediatric brain tumor research

and family support services at Children's Memorial Hospital.

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This article is about the light machine gun. For the semi-automatic hunting rifle, see Browning BAR

The Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) is a family of American automatic rifles and machine guns used by the United States and numerous other countries during the 20th century. The primary variant of the BAR series was the M1918, chambered for the .30-06 Springfield rifle cartridge and designed by John Browning in 1917 for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe as a replacement for the French-made Chauchat and M1909 Benét–Mercié machine guns that US forces had previously been issued.

The BAR was designed to be carried by infantrymen during an assault[1] advance while supported by the sling over the shoulder, or to be fired from the hip. This is a concept called "walking fire" — thought to be necessary for the individual soldier during trench warfare.[2] The BAR never entirely lived up to the original hopes of the war department as either a rifle or a machine gun.[3]

The U.S. Army, in practice, used the BAR as a light machine gun, often fired from a bipod (introduced on models after 1938).[4] A variant of the original M1918 BAR, the Colt Monitor Machine Rifle, remains the lightest production automatic firearm chambered for the .30-06 Springfield cartridge, though the limited capacity of its standard 20-round magazine tended to hamper its utility in that role.[4]

Although the weapon did see some action in World War I, the BAR did not become standard issue in the US Army until 1938, when it was issued to squads as a portable light machine gun. The BAR saw extensive service in both World War II and the Korean War and saw limited service in the Vietnam War. The US Army began phasing out the BAR in the late 1950s, when it was intended to be replaced by a squad automatic weapon (SAW) variant of the M14, and was without a portable light machine gun until the introduction of the M60 machine gun in 1957.

History [ edit ]

John M. Browning, the inventor of the rifle, and Frank F. Burton, the Winchester expert on rifles, discussing the finer points of the BAR at the Winchester plant

The US entered World War I with an inadequate, small, and obsolete assortment of domestic and foreign machine gun designs, due primarily to bureaucratic indecision and the lack of an established military doctrine for their employment. When the 1917 United States declaration of war on Germany was announced on 6 April 1917, the high command was made aware that to fight this trench war, dominated by machine-guns, they had on hand a mere 670 M1909 Benét–Merciés, 282 M1904 Maxims and 158 Colts, M1895s.[5] After much debate, it was finally agreed that a rapid rearmament with domestic weapons would be required, but until that time, US troops would be issued whatever the French and British had to offer. The arms donated by the French were often second-rate or surplus and chambered in 8mm Lebel, further complicating logistics as machine gunners and infantrymen were issued different types of ammunition.[2]

Development [ edit ]

A live fire demonstration of the BAR in front of military and government officials

In 1917, prior to America's entry to the war, John Browning personally brought to Washington, D.C. two types of automatic weapons for the purposes of demonstration: a water-cooled machine gun (later adopted as the M1917 Browning machine gun) and a shoulder-fired automatic rifle known then as the Browning Machine Rifle or BMR, both chambered for the standard US .30-06 Springfield cartridge.[2] Browning had arranged for a public demonstration of both weapons at a location in southern Washington, D.C. known as Congress Heights.[6] There, on 27 February 1917, in front of a crowd of 300 people (including high-ranking military officials, congressmen, senators, foreign dignitaries and the press), Browning staged a live-fire demonstration which so impressed the gathered crowd, that he was immediately awarded a contract for the weapon and it was hastily adopted into service (the water-cooled machine gun underwent further testing).[6]

Additional tests were conducted for US Army Ordnance officials at Springfield Armory in May 1917, and both weapons were unanimously recommended for immediate adoption. In order to avoid confusion with the belt-fed M1917 machine gun, the BAR came to be known as the M1918 or Rifle, Caliber .30, Automatic, Browning, M1918 according to official nomenclature. On 16 July 1917, 12,000 BARs were ordered from Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company, which had secured an exclusive concession to manufacture the BAR under Browning's patents (Browning's U.S. Patent 1,293,022 was owned by Colt).[7] However Colt was already producing at peak capacity (contracted to manufacture the Vickers machine gun for the British Army) and requested a delay in production while they expanded their manufacturing output with a new facility in Meriden, Connecticut. Due to the urgent need for the weapon, the request was denied and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (WRAC) was designated as the prime contractor. Winchester gave valuable assistance in refining the BAR's final design, correcting the drawings in preparation for mass production.[8] Among the changes made, the ejection pattern was modified (spent casings were directed to the right side of the weapon instead of straight up).

Initial M1918 production [ edit ]

2nd Lt. Val Browning with the Browning Automatic Rifle in France

Since work on the gun did not begin until February 1918, so hurried was the schedule at Winchester to bring the BAR into full production that the first production batch of 1,800 guns was delivered out of spec;[8] it was discovered that many components did not interchange between rifles, and production was temporarily halted until manufacturing procedures were upgraded to bring the weapon up to specifications.[9] The initial contract with Winchester called for 25,000 BARs. They were in full production by June 1918, delivering 4,000 guns, and from July were turning out 9,000 units per month.

Colt and Marlin-Rockwell Corp. also began production shortly after Winchester got into full production. Marlin-Rockwell, burdened by a contract to make rifles for the Belgian government, acquired the Mayo Radiator Co.'s factory and used it exclusively to carry out production of the BAR. The first unit from this source was delivered on 11 June 1918 and the company's peak output reached 200 automatic rifles per day.[9] Colt had produced only 9,000 BARs by the time of the armistice due to the heavy demands of previous orders.[9] These three companies produced a combined daily output of 706 rifles and a total of approximately 52,000 BARs were delivered by all sources by the end of the war.[9] Between 1918–19 102,174 BARs had been manufactured jointly by Colt, Winchester and Marlin-Rockwell.

By July 1918 the BAR had begun to arrive in France, and the first unit to receive them was the US Army's 79th Infantry Division, which took them into action for the first time on 13 September 1918.[9] The weapon was personally demonstrated against the enemy by 2nd Lt. Val Allen Browning, the inventor's son.[9] Despite being introduced very late in the war, the BAR made an impact disproportionate to its numbers; it was used extensively during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and made a significant impression on the Allies (France alone requested 15,000 automatic rifles to replace their Chauchat machine rifles).[9]

US Marines briefly took possession of the BAR. Troops from the First Battalion of the Sixth Marines had talked the "doggies" of the US Army's 36th Division into trading their BARs for their Chauchats. However, complaints from officers of the 36th resulted in the issuance of a command from Marine Lt. Col. Harry Lee on 9 October 1918: All Browning guns and equipment in Marine possession were to be turned in.[10]

Design details and accessories [ edit ]

The M1918 is a selective-fire, air-cooled automatic rifle using a gas-operated, long-stroke piston rod actuated by propellant gases bled through a vent in the barrel. The bolt is locked by a rising bolt lock. The weapon fires from an open bolt. The spring-powered cartridge casing extractor is contained in the bolt and a fixed ejector is installed in the trigger group. The BAR is striker-fired (the bolt carrier serves as the striker) and uses a trigger mechanism with a fire selector lever that enables operating in either semi-automatic or fully automatic firing modes. The selector lever is located on the left side of the receiver and is simultaneously the manual safety (selector lever in the "S" position – weapon is safe, "F" – fire, "A" – automatic fire). The "safe" setting blocks the trigger.

The weapon's barrel is screwed into the receiver and is not quickly detachable. The M1918 feeds using double-column 20-round box magazines, although 40-round magazines were also used in an anti-aircraft role; these were withdrawn from use in 1927. The M1918 has a cylindrical flash suppressor fitted to the muzzle end. The original BAR was equipped with a fixed wooden buttstock and closed-type adjustable iron sights, consisting of a forward post and a rear leaf sight with 100 to 1,500 yard (91-1,372 m) range graduations.

As a heavy automatic rifle designed for support fire, the M1918 was not fitted with a bayonet mount and no bayonet was ever issued.[11] Only one experimental bayonet fitting was ever made for the BAR by Winchester.[11] This was a standard M1917 bayonet fitted at the Winchester factory with a special muzzle ring. The bayonet was attached to a standard M1918 BAR by means of a special experimental flash hider assembly.[11] This prototype bayonet-flash hider assembly came from the Winchester in-house factory museum in New Haven, CT, with a tag printed on one side Winchester Repeating Arms Co./New Haven Conn., and handwritten on the other side: combined flash hider, front sight and bayonet mount for Browing Automatic Rifle Model 1918 with bayonet and scabbard and the date – September 7, 1918.[11] There is no evidence whatsoever of military adoption nor a military stock number, name or classification.[11]

Variants and subsequent models [ edit ]

The primary US M1918 variants.

The early M1918 BAR.

During its lengthy service life, the BAR underwent continuous development, receiving many improvements and modifications. The first major attempt at improving the M1918 resulted in the M1922 machine rifle, adopted by the United States Cavalry in 1922 as a troop-level light machine gun. The weapon used a new heavy profile ribbed barrel, an adjustable spiked bipod (mounted to a swiveling collar on the barrel) with a rear, stock-mounted monopod, a side-mounted sling swivel and a new rear endplate, fixed to the stock retaining sleeve. The hand guard was changed, and in 1926 the BAR's sights were redesigned to accommodate the heavy-bullet 172-grain M1 .30-06 ball ammunition then coming into service for machine-gun use.

An FBI special agent practices with the Colt Monitor (R 80). The Monitor had a separate pistol grip and long, slotted Cutts recoil compensator.

In 1931 the Colt Arms Co. introduced the Monitor Automatic Machine Rifle (R 80), intended primarily for use by prison guards and law-enforcement agencies.[12] Intended for use as a shoulder-fired automatic rifle, the Monitor omitted the bipod, instead featuring a separate pistol grip and butt stock attached to a lightweight receiver, along with a shortened, 458 mm (18.0 in), barrel fitted with a 4-inch (100 mm) Cutts compensator.[13] Weighing 16 lb 3 oz (7.34 kg) empty, the Monitor had a rate of fire of approximately 500 rpm.[13] Around 125 were produced; 90 were purchased by the FBI.[13] Eleven went to the US Treasury Department in 1934, while the rest went to various state prisons, banks, security companies and accredited police departments.[13] Although available for export sale, no examples appear to have been exported.

In 1932 a greatly shortened version designed for bush warfare was developed by USMC Maj. H.L. Smith and was the subject of an evaluative report by Capt. Merritt A. Edson, ordnance officer at the Quartermaster's Depot in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[14] The barrel was shortened nine inches (229 mm) at the muzzle and the gas port and gas cylinder tube were relocated. The modified BAR weighed 13 lb 12 oz (6.24 kg) and was only 34.5 inches (880 mm) long overall.[14] Though it proved superior to the M1918 in accuracy when fired prone in automatic mode and equal in accuracy to the standard M1918 at ranges of 500–600 yards (460–550 m) from a rest, it was less accurate when fired from the shoulder, and had a loud report combined with a fierce muzzle blast.[15] Attaching a Cutts compensator materially reduced the muzzle blast, but this was more than offset by the increase in smoke and dust at the muzzle when fired, obscuring the operator's vision.[14] Nor did it improve control of the weapon when fired in bursts of automatic fire.[14] Though the report recommended building six of these short-barreled jungle BARs for further evaluation, no further work was done on the project.[14]

The M1918A1, featuring a lightweight spiked bipod with a leg height adjustment feature attached to the gas cylinder and a hinged steel butt plate, was formally approved on 24 June 1937.[16] The M1918A1 was intended to increase the weapon's effectiveness and controllability firing in bursts. Relatively few M1918s were rebuilt to the new M1918A1 standard.

In April 1938 work commenced on an improved BAR for the US Army. The army specified a need for a BAR designed to serve in the role of a light machine gun for squad-level support fire. Early prototypes were fitted with barrel-mounted bipods as well as pistol grip housings and a unique rate-of-fire reducer mechanism purchased from FN Herstal.[17] The rate reducer mechanism performed well in trials, and the pistol grip housing enabled the operator to fire more comfortably from the prone position. However, in 1939 the army declared that all modifications to the basic BAR be capable of being retrofitted to earlier M1918 guns with no loss of parts interchangeability.[18] This effectively killed the FN-designed pistol grip and its proven rate reducer mechanism for the new M1918 replacement.[18]

Final development of the M1918A2 was authorized on 30 June 1938.[18] The FN-designed pistol grip and rate-reducer mechanism with two rates of automatic fire was shelved in favor of a rate-reducer mechanism designed by Springfield Armory, and housed in the butt stock. The Springfield Armory rate reducer also provided two selectable rates of fully automatic fire only, activated by engaging the selector toggle. Additionally, a skid-footed bipod was fitted to the muzzle end of the barrel, magazine guides were added to the front of the trigger guard, the hand guard was shortened, a heat shield was added to help the cooling process, a small separate stock rest (monopod) was included for attachment to the butt and the weapon's role was changed to that of a squad light machine gun. The BAR's rear sight scales were also modified to accommodate the newly standardized M2 ball ammunition with its lighter, flat-base bullet. The M1918A2's walnut butt stock is approximately one inch (2.5 cm) longer than the M1918 BAR's butt stock.[19] The M1918A2's barrel was also fitted with a new flash suppressor and fully adjustable iron sights. Late in the war a barrel-mounted carrying handle was added.

Because of budget limitations initial M1918A2 production consisted of conversions of older M1918 BARs (remaining in surplus) along with a limited number of M1922s and M1918A1s. After the outbreak of war, attempts to ramp up new M1918A2 production were stymied by the discovery that the World War I tooling used to produce the M1918 was either worn out or incompatible with modern production machinery.[20] New production was first undertaken at the New England Small Arms Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. (a total of 188,380 new weapons were manufactured). In 1942 a shortage of black walnut for butt stocks and grips led to the development of a black plastic butt stock for the BAR.[21] Composed of a mixture of Bakelite and Resinox, and impregnated with shredded fabric, the stocks were sandblasted to reduce glare.[19] The Firestone Rubber and Latex Products Co. produced the plastic butt stock for the US Army, which was formally adopted on March 21, 1942.[19] The M1922 machine rifle was declared obsolete in 1940, but they were used by Merrill's Marauders in Burma later in the war as a slightly lighter alternative to the M1918A2.

Production rates greatly increased in 1943 after IBM introduced a method of casting BAR receivers from a new type of malleable pig iron developed by the Saginaw division of General Motors, called ArmaSteel.[22] After it successfully passed a series of tests at Springfield Armory, the Chief of Ordnance instructed other BAR receiver manufacturers to change over from steel to ArmaSteel castings for this part.[22] During the Korean War M1918A2 production was resumed, this time contracted to the Royal McBee Typewriter Co., which produced an additional 61,000 M1918A2s.[23]

Heavy Counter Assault Rifle [ edit ]

Heavy Counter Assault Rifle-HCAR.

In 2006 Ohio Ordnance Works worked on the 21st-century modernization of the BAR, named the Heavy Counter Assault Rifle (HCAR).[24][25][26]

The Ohio Ordnance Works HCAR includes improvements such as an AR-style buffer tube with adjustable stock, an optional 16" shortened barrel with adjustable gas regulator, hand guard and receiver picatinny rails as well as a suppressor-compatible flash hider.[25] It also addresses the original BAR's weight issue through material reduction by machining material from the receiver, and through a dimpled barrel removing 8 lbs. overall.[25] It also features a proprietary 30-round magazine, to increase firepower from the original 20-round magazine.

International and commercial models [ edit ]

Export models [ edit ]

The BAR also found a ready market overseas and in various forms was widely exported. In 1919 the Colt company developed and produced a commercial variant called the Automatic Machine Rifle Model 1919 (company designation: Model U), which has a different return mechanism compared to the M1918 (it is installed in the stock rather than the gas tube) and lacks a flash hider. Later the Model 1924 rifle was offered for a short period of time, featuring a pistol grip and a redesigned hand guard. These Colt automatic rifles were available in a number of calibers, including .30-06 Springfield (7.62×63mm), 7.65×53mm Belgian Mauser, 7×57mm Mauser, 6.5×55mm, 7.92×57mm Mauser and .303 British (7.7×56mmR).[27] All of the 6.5×55mm-caliber Colt automatic rifles appear to have been sold directly to FN.[27]

An improved version of the Model 1924, the Model 1925 (R75), has achieved the highest popularity in export sales. It is based on the Model 1924 but uses a heavy, finned barrel, a lightweight bipod and is equipped with dust covers in the magazine well and ejection port (some of these features were patented: US patents #1548709 and #1533968). The Model 1925 was produced in various calibers, including .30-06 Springfield (7.62×63mm), 7.65×53mm Belgian Mauser, 7×57mm Mauser, 7.92×57mm Mauser, and .303 British (7.7×56mmR) (no Colt-manufactured Model 1925 rifles in 6.5×55mm appear to have been sold).[27] A minor variant of the Model 1925 (R75) was the R75A light machine gun with a quick-change barrel (produced in 1942 in small quantities for the Dutch army). Between 1921–28 FN Herstal imported over 800 Colt-manufactured examples of the Colt Machine Rifles for sale abroad.[13]

All of the Colt automatic machine rifles, including the Colt Monitor, were available for export sale.[13] After 1929 the Model 1925 and the Colt Monitor were available for export sale in Colt's exclusive sales territories per its agreement with FN.[13] These Colt territories included North America, Central America, the West Indies, South America, Great Britain, Russia, Turkey, Siam (Thailand), India and Australia.[13]

Belgium [ edit ]

A variant known as the FN Mle 1930 was developed in 7.65×53mm Belgian Mauser by FN Herstal and adopted by the Belgian army. The Mle 1930 is basically a licensed copy of the Colt Automatic Machine Rifle, Model 1925 (R 75).[28] The Mle 1930 has a different gas valve and a mechanical rate-reducing fire control mechanism designed by Dieudonne Saive, located in the trigger guard-pistol grip housing.[28] Some of these FN rate reducer mechanisms and pistol grip housings were later purchased by Springfield Armory for evaluation and possible adoption on a replacement for the M1918.[17] The weapon also had a hinged shoulder plate and was adapted for use on a tripod mount. In 1932 Belgium adopted a new version of the FN Mle 1930 allocated the service designation FN Mle D (D—demontable or "removable"), which had a quick-change barrel, shoulder rest and a simplified take-down method for easier cleaning and maintenance. The Mle D was produced even after World War II in versions adapted for .30-06 Springfield and NATO-standard 7.62×51mm ammunition.

The final variant in Belgian service was the Model DA1 chambered for the 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge and feeding from the 20-round magazines for the FN FAL rifle.[29]

Poland [ edit ]

Production of the BAR in Belgium began only after signing an agreement with Poland (on 10 December 1927) involving the procurement of 10,000 wz. 1928 light machine guns chambered in 7.92×57mm Mauser, which are similar to the R75 variant but designed specifically to meet the requirements of the Polish army. Changes to the base design include a pistol grip, different type of bipod, open-type V-notch rear sight and a slightly longer barrel. Subsequent rifles were assembled in Poland under license by the state rifle factory (Państwowa Fabryka Karabinów) in Warsaw. The wz. 1928 was accepted into service with the Polish army in 1927 under the formal name 7,92 mm rkm Browning wz. 1928 and—until the outbreak of World War II—was the primary light support weapon of Polish infantry and cavalry formations (in 1939 Poland had a total of approximately 20,000 wz. 1928 rifles in service). Additional detail modifications were introduced on the production line; among them were the replacement of the iron sights with a smaller version and reshaping the butt to a fish tail.

In the mid-1930s Polish small-arms designer Wawrzyniec Lewandowski was tasked with developing a flexible aircraft-mounted machine gun based on the Browning wz.1928. This resulted in the wz. 1937. Changes included increasing the weapon's rate of fire to 1,100 rounds/min, eliminating the butt stock, adding a spade-type grip to the rear of the receiver, moving the main drive spring under the barrel and, most importantly, changing the feed system. Sustained fire was practically impossible with the standard 20-round box magazine, so a new feed mechanism was developed that was added to the receiver as a module. It contains a spring-loaded, bolt-actuated lever that would feed a round from a 91-round pan magazine located above the receiver and force the round into the feed path during unlocking. The machine gun was accepted in 1937 and ordered by the Polish Air Force as the karabin maszynowy obserwatora wz. 1937 ("observers machine gun model 1937"). Eventually 339 machine guns were acquired and used as armament in the PZL.37 Łoś medium bomber and the LWS-3 Mewa reconnaissance aircraft.

Sweden [ edit ]

Swedish Kg m/21 model, which was nearly identical to the M1919 configuration.

Model Kg m/37 with quick-detachable barrel.

In 1920 Belgian arms manufacturer Fabrique Nationale (FN) acquired sales and production rights to the BAR series of firearms in Europe from Colt. The first BAR model sold by FN was the Kg m/21 (Kg—Kulsprutegevär or "machinegun rifle") chambered for the 6.5×55mm m/94 cartridge. The m/21 is a variant of the Model 1919 designed to Swedish specifications and manufactured initially by Colt's and later under license at the Carl Gustafs Stads Gevärsfaktori in Eskilstuna. Compared to the Model 1919, the Swedish weapon has—apart from the different caliber—a spiked bipod and dust covers for ejection. The m/21 would become one of Sweden's main support weapons in the interwar years together with the water-cooled, belt-fed Ksp m/1914 medium machine gun (Swedish adaptation of the Austrian M07/12). Dissatisfied with the rapidly overheating fixed barrel of the m/21, Carl Gustaf began to design a new quick-detach mechanism for the barrel that mates the externally grooved chamber to a series of rotating flanges in the receiver operated by a locking lever. The barrel also received cooling fins along its entire length. These enhancements were incorporated into the fm/1935 prototype, which was favorably evaluated during trials in 1935. The final version was the Kg m/37, adopted for service in 1937, which uses a smooth-contour, unfinned barrel. Numerous m/21 guns were retrofitted with the screw-on receiver extension and quick-change barrel and renamed the Kg m/21-37.[citation needed] The m/37 remained in service until replaced by the FN MAG, but was still in second-line use until 1980. Carl Gustaf also developed a belt-fed prototype; however, it was never adopted.

China [ edit ]

FN M1930.

The Chinese Nationalist Army used the FN M1930 throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese BAR was chambered for the German 7.92×57mm Mauser round, the standard rifle cartridge of the National Revolutionary Army. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Chinese Expeditionary Army in Burma was equipped with American BARs. Towards the end of the war small quantities of American equipment, including the BAR, made their way into mainland China.

Civilian use [ edit ]

With the cessation of WWI hostilities, Colt Arms Co. received the Browning patents to produce the BAR that had been withheld from issue during the war.[32] This allowed Colt to make the BAR available for commercial sale, including to civilian owners. The Colt Automatic Machine Rifle Model 1919, initially made up of overruns from the M1918 military production contract, was the first of several commercial Colt BARs that would follow. However, the high price of the weapon and its limited utility for most civilian owners resulted in few sales. Ad Topperwien, a famous trick shooter of the early 1920s, purchased one of the first Colt-produced BARs to perform aerial target shooting exhibitions.[33] Occasional BAR sales were made to civilian owners through distributors such as the Ott-Heiskell Hardware Co.[34] In 1931 the new Colt Monitor was made available to civilians during the Depression at $300 each, including a spare parts kit, sling, cleaning accessories and six magazines, but Colt records indicate no domestic sales to individuals.[35] After passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, civilian BAR ownership was restricted even further. Importation of machine guns for US civilian transfer was banned in 1968 and US production of machine guns for civilian transfer was banned in 1986. However, some transferable civilian-owned BAR models exist in the US and occasionally come up for sale to qualified buyers. Some companies are manufacturing semi-automatic copies for sale to civilians. Ohio Ordnance Works, Inc., in Chardon, OH, holds an exclusive patent for the 1918A3-SLR (Self-Loading Rifle), which is a contemporary semi-automatic variant of the M1918 and is legal for civilians to own.[36]

Criminal and law enforcement use [ edit ]

Although the Colt Monitor version of the BAR failed to interest US civilian buyers in the midst of the Depression,[37] the underworld was a lot more interested: in 1936 the price of a black-market Colt Monitor was $5,000, with military BARs going for somewhat less.[37] The army's M1918 was a favorite of gangster Clyde Barrow, who obtained his through periodic robberies of Army National Guard armories in the Midwest. Barrow liked to use armor-piercing (AP) .30-06 ammunition he obtained from armory stores, and frequently modified his BARs to suit his own needs.[38] Barrow taught his girlfriend Bonnie Parker to fire the M1918 as well, and by all accounts she was an excellent BAR operator. She used an M1918 on full-automatic to pin down unsuspecting law officers after they confronted the gang at a house in Joplin, MO.[38] A Missouri highway patrolman at the scene, forced to dive for cover behind a substantial oak tree after Bonnie Parker opened up on him, later stated, "That little red-headed woman filled my face with splinters on the other side of that tree with one of those damned guns".[38]

As the use of automatic weapons by criminal elements in the US became more widespread, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the agency to acquire and commence regular training with automatic shoulder weapons, including the Thompson submachine gun and the BAR. For its BARs the FBI turned to Colt, which sold 90 Colt Monitor automatic machine rifles to the agency.[13] Some of the FBI's Monitors were distributed to field offices for use as support weapons if needed on a particular operation, while the remainder were retained at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for training purposes.[39] Colt sold an additional 11 Colt Monitors to the US Treasury Department in 1934, while 24 guns were sold to state prisons, banks, security companies and accredited city, county and state police departments.[13] At least one member of the ambush team that killed Bonnie and Clyde was armed with a Colt Monitor.[40][41]

Although it has sometimes been alleged that the M1918 or M1918A2 BAR was used by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in a shootout with Los Angeles police on 17 May 1974, no SLA members ever used such a weapon. The confusion arose out of Browning's decision in the 1970s to also designate its semi-automatic hunting rifle the Browning BAR. The SLA converted a .30-06 Browning BAR hunting rifle and a .243 Remington Model 742 to automatic fire by filing down the sear, and it was these weapons that were used in the shootout.[citation needed]

In US military service [ edit ]

World War I [ edit ]

At its inception, the M1918 was intended to be used as a shoulder-fired rifle capable of both semi-automatic and fully automatic fire. First issued in September 1918 to the AEF, it was based on the concept of "walking fire", a French practice in use since 1916 for which the CSRG 1915 (Chauchat) had been used accompanying advancing squads of riflemen toward the enemy trenches, as regular machine guns were too cumbersome to move with the troops during an assault.

In addition to shoulder-fired operation, BAR gunners were issued a belt with magazine pouches for the BAR and sidearm along with a "cup" to support the stock of the rifle when held at the hip. In theory, this allowed the soldier to lay suppressive fire while walking forward, keeping the enemy's head down, a practice known as "marching fire". The idea would resurface in the submachine gun and ultimately the assault rifle. It is not known if any of the belt-cup devices actually saw combat use.

The BAR only saw minor action in France during World War I, being brought into action only as late as September 1918, less than three months before Armistice Day. The intentional delay had been inspired by general Pershing, the A.E.F. commander, in order not to let the BAR fall into enemy hands too early. Fifty-two thousand BARs were available by November 1918 and they would have been used in much larger numbers at the front if the war had lasted into 1919.

Interwar use [ edit ]

A US Army soldier trains with a BAR

During the interwar years, as the U.S. Army was reduced significantly in size, the BAR remained in the smaller extant Regular Army and by the 1930s, was also issued to state national guard units to be maintained at their armories. Given the part-time nature, smaller manning and lesser security of these national guard armories when compared to regular army installations, some BARs were subject to theft by domestic civilian criminal elements.[42]

The BAR was also standard issue to US naval landing forces during the period.[43] The weapon was a standard item in US warship armories, and each BAR was accompanied by a spare barrel.[43] Large capital ships often had over 200 BARs on board,[43] with many of the US Navy BARs remaining in service well into the 1960s.[43]

The BAR also saw action with US Marine Corps units participating in the Haitian and Nicaraguan interventions, as well as with US Navy shipboard personnel in the course of patrol and gunboat duty along the Yangtze River in China.[44] The First Marine Brigade stationed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, noted that training a man to use the BAR proficiently took a full two days of range practice and instruction, compared to half a day with the .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun.[44]

Prior to World War II both the US Army and Marine Corps had a separate BAR squad together with three rifle squads in the "square" organisation of the time. When converting to the "triangular" organisation the separate BAR squad was eliminated with BARs going to each rifle squad.

World War II [ edit ]

A US Marine infantryman firing a BAR at enemy positions

When the threat of a new war arose, Ordnance belatedly realized that it had no portable, squad light machine gun, and attempted to convert the M1918 BAR to that role with the adoption of the M1918A2 by the US Army on 30 June 1938.[45] The BAR was issued as the sole automatic fire support for a twelve-man squad,[46] and all men were trained at the basic level how to operate and fire the weapon in case the designated operators were killed or wounded. At the start of the war, infantry companies designated three-man BAR teams, a gunner, an assistant gunner, and an ammunition bearers who carried additional magazines for the gun. By 1944, some units were using one-man BAR teams, with the other riflemen in the squad detailed to carry additional magazines or bandoliers of .30 ammunition.[47] Despite various claims on the subject, the BAR was issued to soldiers of various heights.[48]

As originally conceived, US Army tactical doctrine called for one M1918A2 per squad, using several men to support and carry ammunition for the gun.[46] Fire and movement tactics centered on the M1 riflemen in the squad, while the BAR man was detailed to support the riflemen in the attack and provide mobility to the riflemen with a base of fire.[46] This doctrine received a setback early in the war after US ground forces encountered German troops, well-armed with automatic weapons, including fast-firing, portable machine guns.[49] In some cases, particularly in the attack, every fourth German infantryman was equipped with an automatic weapon, either a submachine gun or a full-power machine gun.[49]

Elements of the 6th Marine Division at Okinawa with the lead marine (Onward Elmo McCullough) carrying a BAR

In an attempt to overcome the BAR's limited continuous-fire capability, US Army divisions increasingly began to specify two BAR fire teams per squad, following the practice of the US Marine Corps. One team would typically provide covering fire until a magazine was empty, whereupon the second team would open fire, thus allowing the first team to reload. In the Pacific, the BAR was often employed at the point or tail of a patrol or infantry column, where its firepower could help break contact on a jungle trail in the event of an ambush.[50] After combat experience showed the benefits of maximizing portable automatic firepower in squad-size formations, the US Marine Corps began to increase the number of BARs in its combat divisions, from 513 per division in 1943 to 867 per division in 1945.[51] A thirteen-man squad was developed, consisting of 3 four-man fire teams, with one BAR per fire team, or three BARs per squad. Instead of supporting the M1 riflemen in the attack, marine tactical doctrine was focused around the BAR, with riflemen supporting and protecting the BAR gunner.[51]

Despite the improvements in the M1918A2, the BAR remained a difficult weapon to master with its open bolt and strong recoil spring, requiring additional range practice and training to hit targets accurately without flinching.[52] As a squad light machine gun, the BAR's effectiveness was mixed, since its thin, non-quick-change barrel and small magazine capacity greatly limited its firepower in comparison to genuine light machine guns such as the British Bren and the Japanese Type 96. The weapon's rate-reducer mechanism, a delicately balanced spring-and-weight system described by one ordnance sergeant as a "Rube Goldberg device", came in for much criticism, often causing malfunctions when not regularly cleaned.[53] The bipod and buttstock rest (monopod), which contributed so much to the M1918A2's accuracy when firing prone on the rifle range, proved far less valuable under actual field combat conditions.[50] The stock rest was dropped from production in 1942, while the M1918A2's bipod and flash hider were often discarded by individual soldiers and marines to save weight and improve portability, particularly in the Pacific Theatre of war.[53] With these modifications, the BAR effectively reverted to its original role as a portable, shoulder-fired automatic rifle.[53]

Due to production demands, war priorities, subcontractor issues, and material shortages,[54] demand for the M1918A2 frequently exceeded supply, and as late as 1945 some Army units were sent into combat still carrying older, unmodified M1918 weapons.[55]

After a period of service, ordnance personnel began to receive BARs with inoperable or malfunctioning recoil buffer mechanisms. This was eventually traced to the soldier's common practice of cleaning the BAR in a vertical position with the butt of the weapon on the ground, allowing cleaning fluid and burned powder to collect in the recoil buffer mechanism.[53] Additionally, unlike the M1 rifle, the BAR's gas cylinder was never changed to stainless steel. Consequently, the gas cylinder frequently rusted solid from the use of corrosive-primered M2 service ammunition in a humid environment when not stripped and cleaned on a daily basis.[53] While not without design flaws (a thin-diameter, fixed barrel that quickly overheated, limited magazine capacity, complex field-strip/cleaning procedure, unreliable recoil buffer mechanism, a gas cylinder assembly made of corrosion-prone metals, and many small internal parts), the BAR proved rugged and reliable enough when regularly field-stripped and cleaned.

During World War II, the BAR saw extensive service, both official and unofficial, with many branches of service. One of the BAR's most unusual uses was as a defensive aircraft weapon. In 1944, Captain Wally A. Gayda, of the USAAF Air Transport Command, reportedly used a BAR to return fire against a Japanese Army Nakajima fighter that had attacked his C-46 cargo plane over the Hump in Burma. Gayda shoved the rifle out his forward cabin window, emptying the magazine and apparently killing the Japanese pilot.[56][57]

Korean War [ edit ]

Korean War, 1951: A US soldier behind an M4A3E8 Sherman tank, with an M1918A2

The BAR continued in service in the Korean War. The last military contract for the manufacture of the M1918A2 was awarded to the Royal Typewriter Co. of Hartford, Connecticut, which manufactured a total of 61,000 M1918A2s during the conflict, using ArmaSteel cast receivers and trigger housings.[23] In his study of infantry weapons in Korea, historian S.L.A. Marshall interviewed hundreds of officers and men in after-action reports on the effectiveness of various U.S. small arms in the conflict.[58] General Marshall's report noted that an overwhelming majority of respondents praised the BAR and the utility of automatic fire delivered by a lightweight, portable small arm in both day and night engagements.[59] In his autobiography Colonel David Hackworth praised the BAR as 'the best weapon of the Korean War'.[60]

A typical BAR gunner of the Korean War carried the twelve-magazine belt and combat suspenders, with three or four extra magazines in pockets.[61] Extra canteens, .45 pistol, grenades, and a flak vest added still more weight.[61] As in World War II, many BAR gunners disposed of the heavy bipod and other accoutrements of the M1918A2, but unlike the prior conflict the flash hider was always retained because of its utility in night fighting.[62]

The large amounts of ammunition expended by BAR teams in Korea placed additional demands on the assistant gunner to stay in close contact with the BAR at all times, particularly on patrols.[63] While the BAR magazines themselves always seemed to be in short supply, Gen. Marshall reported that "riflemen in the squad were markedly willing to carry extra ammunition for the BAR man".[64]

In combat, the M1918A2 frequently decided the outcome of determined attacks by North Korean and Chinese communist forces. Communist tactical doctrine centered on the mortar and machine gun, with attacks designed to envelop and cut off United Nations forces from supply and reinforcement. Communist machine gun teams were the best-trained men in any given North Korean or Chinese infantry unit, skilled at placing their heavily camouflaged and protected weapons as close to UN forces as possible.[65] Once concealed, they often surprised UN forces by opening fire at very short ranges, covering any exposed ground with a hail of accurately sighted machine gun fire.[65] Under these conditions it was frequently impossible for US machine gun crews to move up their Browning M1919A4 and M1919A6 guns in response without taking heavy casualties; when they were able to do so, their position was carefully noted by the enemy, who would frequently kill the exposed gun crews with mortar or machine gun fire while they were still emplacing their guns.[65] The BAR gunner, who could stealthily approach the enemy gun position alone (and prone if need be), proved invaluable in this type of combat.[65]

During the height of combat, the BAR gunner was often used as the 'fire brigade' weapon, helping to bolster weak areas of the perimeter under heavy pressure by communist forces. In defense, it was often used to strengthen the firepower of a forward outpost.[65] Another role for the BAR was to deter or eliminate enemy sniper fire. In the absence of a trained sniper, the BAR proved more effective than the random response of five or six M1 riflemen.[65]

Compared to World War II, US infantry forces saw a huge increase in the number of night engagements. The added firepower of the BAR rifleman and his ability to redeploy to 'hot spots' around the unit perimeter proved indispensable in deterring night infiltration by skirmishers as well as repelling large-scale night infantry assaults.[66]

While new-production M1918A2 guns were almost universally praised for faultless performance in combat, a number of malfunctions in combat were reported with armory-reconditioned M1918A2s, particularly weapons that had been reconditioned by Ordnance in Japan, which did not replace operating (recoil) springs as a requirement of the reconditioning program.[51] After decades of complaints, ordnance addressed the problem of maintaining the problematic gas piston on the BAR by issuing disposable nylon gas valves.[63] When the nylon valve became caked over with carbon, it could be discarded and replaced with a fresh unit, eliminating the tedious task of cleaning and polishing the valve with wire brush and GI solvent (frequently in short supply to line units).[63]

A South Vietnamese soldier using a BAR LMG

Vietnam War [ edit ]

The M1918A2 was used in the early stages of the Vietnam War, when the US delivered a quantity of 'obsolete', second-line small arms[67] to the South Vietnamese Army and associated allies, including the Montagnard hill tribespeople of South Vietnam. US Special Forces advisors frequently chose the BAR over currently available infantry weapons. As one Special Forces sergeant declared, "Many times since my three tours of duty in Vietnam I have thanked God for ... having a BAR that actually worked, as opposed to the jamming M16 ... We had a lot of Viet Cong infiltrators in all our [Special Forces] camps, who would steal weapons every chance they got. Needless to say, the most popular weapon to steal was the venerable old BAR."[67]

Post-Vietnam use [ edit ]

Quantities of the BAR remained in use by the Army National Guard up until the mid-1970s. Many recipients of US foreign aid adopted the BAR and used it into the 1990s.

Users [ edit ]

Polish resistance fighters during the Warsaw Uprising , 1944. The wz. 28 seen here is likely a survivor of the 1939 September Campaign

BAR in use by Vietnamese communist guerrillas, 1966

British Home Guard in 1941. The man on the end of the front rank is carrying a BAR

See also [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]
At the beginning? Quite a bit. Over time? Not as much.

In this paper we compare the labor market performance of Israeli students who graduated from one of the leading universities, Hebrew University (HU), with those who graduated from a professional undergraduate college, College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS). Our results support a model in which employers have good information about the quality of HU graduates and pay them according to their ability, but in which the market has relatively little information about COMAS graduates.

Hence, high-skill COMAS graduates are initially treated as if they were the average COMAS graduate, who is weaker [than an] HU graduate, consequently earning less than [HU] graduates. However, over time the market differentiates among them so that after several years of experience, COMAS and HU graduates with similar entry scores have similar earnings. Our results are therefore consistent with the view that employers use education information to screen workers but that the market acquires information fairly rapidly.
Sony might be staring down the barrel of another PlayStation Network security breach. The company, having just had a successful launch of the PlayStation 4 console, has sent out emails to an unknown number of users requiring them to change their passwords because of “irregular activity” on the account. It seems the warning might have come too late for some — users are beginning to report fraudulent charges on the linked credit cards.

Unlike the breach a few years back, it doesn’t appear that mountains of customer data were stolen, but someone seems to have at least gained access to usernames and passwords. Reports indicate content is being purchased on accounts without authorization. One user tells IGN that $150 was charged to his PSN Wallet, and another says FIFA 14 content was bought by someone with his profile.

It may seem odd that someone would steal account credentials only to add content to the victim’s account, but there is a way for the thief to benefit. By adding his or her console to the victim’s account the thief is able to download all the content they want and play it offline, assuming there is no additional DRM measure employed by the game. One user has also reported $650 charged to a clothing retailer on the card used for PSN, but it’s not clear if the supposed perpetrators got that kind of access.

Sony hasn’t spoken publicly about the breach yet, but the emails are genuine. Something happened, but we might have to wait until after the weekend to find out what.
Author Anne Rice delivered the ultimate smack down on her Facebook page yesterday, telling her fans, “I will no longer tolerate hate speech in the guise of Christian belief.”

Ms. Rice, whose son Christopher made Out Magazine’s list of top ten gay bachelors last week, has been a longtime LGBT rights supporter.

Following Hollywood actress Ellen Page’s coming out this weekend, Rice posted a congratulatory note on Facebook Saturday to which dozens of haters left vile comments under the post.

Ms. Rice then took to Facebook with this awesome post:

Our post commending actress Ellen Page for her courage in coming out as gay attracted a lot of hostility and hate and hate speech — as well as positive and substantive comments. I have banned many from the page today. I will no longer tolerate hate speech in the guise of Christian belief with the usual irresponsible pick and choose bible quotes and talk of “sin” and hellfire. I have had enough of it, and I think the world has had enough of it too. Again, I commend Ellen Page for her bravery in coming out. I hope more celebrities and public figures will be inspired to do so. Anyone who thinks this does not matter is deceiving himself or herself. It matters very much. Gay people in all walks of life suffer from bigotry, bias, superstition, and ignorance. Hats off to Ellen Page! (And please do NOT come here to tell us publicly that you “don’t care.” If you don’t care, don’t expect us to care that you don’t care!).

Rice also took time to respond to several of the over 3,700 comments to her post.

In one response Anne explained how she bans Christian’s who spread hate on her page:

I ban those who engage in hate speech under the guise of Christianity. And when people say they are unliking the page or rejecting me and my works, I also delete and ban them. This is my personal choice based on my experience on the page.

Rebecca commented:

I do not care. The American people have bigher fish to fry.

Rice hit back with this response:

Then why post here? Obviously you do care enough to tell us that you disapprove of our caring. Well, I do care. I think what Ellen Page did was brave and good….And her courage will have a decidedly positive effect against the hypocrisy,bigotry and ignorance that underscore the persecution of gays in our country.

Mike H. left this response to her post:

I love the way you see people who don’t like or agree with that lifestyle are always”haters”. By that definition what do you think you are when you don’t like what Christians believe. Total hypocrisey. Ms Rice I think you also are dabbling in some self deception.

To which Rice responded with this comment:

Mike, in my experience many Christians are extremely aggressive towards those they despise and seek to control and change. They spend millions in America trying to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and a gay person’s civil rights. They are vocal and “in your face” with their hate of gays and other strong religious biases. If they would respect the rights and dignity of those who do not share their belief system, it would be better for everyone. But sadly, they don’t. And when they bring hate speech to this page, I will delete and ban them. Mike, I don’t think the aggression and hostility of Christians towards those they condemn can be compared in any way to gay rights activists. Gay rights activists don’t spend millions trying to persecute and demonize others or oppress them in terms of civil rights. I hope you do some research on this topic. We have a serious problem in this country with aggressive Christians violating our separation of church and state, and campaigning to oppress women and gays, and sometimes children. I think we are in a time in America when we must demand that all people claiming to be Christian take full moral responsibility for their belief system and the harm it has done historically and the harm it continues to do in our country. I see no reason to give Christians a pass on any of this.

Robyn wrote:

I had made a comment late last night about how I believe in love. And how I am grateful to Jesus loving me as a sinner. I received a reply back about you not wanting me to preach on your page. I didn’t feel I was preaching, but stating my opinion, as so many others. I apologize if there were a misunderstanding. I enjoy your work, and your opinions. I totally agree about your stance on Ellen Page and perhaps, so many others. Have a great day… I’m off to do some chores.

Rice replied with:

Robyn, for many of us, words like “sin” and even “Jesus loving” have become associated, sadly, with bigotry and hate. This isn’t your doing. It isn’t mine. It has to do with the way this language has been used in America aggressively and boldly on a national level in a war against women’s rights and gay rights. So I find myself highly sensitive to it. I respect your good intentions. I cannot change at this point my own negative reaction to the word “sin.” I think it is a very poor word to use in discussing the human spirit and the moral problems which all human beings face every day. But again, I respect your sincerity. I think it’s a good idea to remember that religion has to do with faith in things which cannot be proven, and which have divided people into warring camps and warring nations for centuries. Saying that Jesus loves you may sound innocent and neutral. But blood has been shed in the name of Jesus for almost 2,000 years. Again, I respect your sincerity, but I do ask that people not preach Christianity on this page.

{H/T: Instinct Via TheNewCivilRightsMovement]
Update: Oct. 12: Python script to query the API

We are very excited to announce that JEB 2.3.6 integrates with a new project we called the Malware Sharing Network. It allows reverse engineers to share samples anonymously, in a give-and-take fashion. The more and the better you give, the more and the better you will receive.

Files are shared with PNF Software (they are not shared directly with other users);

Contributions and users are algorithmically ranked and scored;

In exchange for their contributions, users receive more files, based on their score.

The goal is to offer a platform for reversers that can (and wish to) share malware files to easily do it, with the added incentive of receiving samples in return — including relatively high-value files that may not be accessible to most users, such as files that are not publicly downloadable on most malware trackers; or files that are not present on malware databases at all, including VirusTotal.

Obviously, the service is entirely optional. Any user, including users of the demo version, may use it whenever they please.

Getting started

The latest JEB update will let you know about the Malware Sharing Network right after you upgrade. You may also click the Share button in the toolbar at any time to get started.

First time users should create an account. You will only need an email address and a password. Click the “Create an Account” button to sign up.

Once you’ve successfully logged in, you will be able to view your profile. Things like your sharing score and other stats are displayed.

Sharing a File

Any time you are working in JEB, you can decide to share the primary file being worked on by clicking the Share button or the Share entry in the File menu:

Before sharing a file, you may:

redact the sample name;

add a text comment;

select a Determination, among four choices (“Unknown”, “Clean”, “Unsure” and “Malicious”).

By hitting the Share button, you will submit the file to PNF Software. It will be added to our file portal, get scored, and eventually, be shared with other users who are participating in this sample exchange program.

When your score gets high enough, you will receive samples. They will be accessible from our website, and also, using the Malware Sharing Network back-end API.

API for Scripting

After successfully logging in, you may have noticed that the API key field was populated. Power-users will be able to use it to perform automation and scripting with our back-end, such as querying samples by hashes, uploading and downloading files, etc. It’s all standard HTTP-POST queries with JSON responses.

A Python wrapper to issue simple API queries can be found on our public GitHub repository. First make sure to set up your API key (either in source, or create an environment variable JEBIO_APIKEY, or pass it as a parameter if you are importing the script as a library).

Queries return JSON output, except for download requests, that return binary attachments. The return “code” variable is set to 0 on success, !=0 on error.

Here are a few examples:

Query a file hash:

$ jebio.py check 42aaa93a894a69bfcbc21823b09e4ea9f723c428 42aaa93a894a69bfcbc21823b09e4ea9f723c428: { "code": 0, "created": "2017-10-09 16:24:31", "filesize": 75599, "filestatus": 0, "md5hash": "879322cfd1c1b3b1813a27c3e311f1a5", "sha1hash": "42aaa93a894a69bfcbc21823b09e4ea9f723c428", "sha256hash": "57ae463e6bc53a38512c58a878370338dcfe0fb59eeedfd9b3e7959fe7c149d1", "userdetails": { "comments": "", "created": "2017-10-09 16:24:31", "determination": 0, "filename": "Raasta.apk" } }

Note: the userdetails section is present only if you uploladed the file yourself.

Upload a file:

$ jebio.py upload 1.apk 1.apk: { "code": 0, "uploadeventid": 155 }

Download a file: (subject to permission)

$ jebio.py download a2ba1bacc996b90b37a2c93089692bf5f30f1d68 a2ba1bacc996b90b37a2c93089692bf5f30f1d68: downloaded to ba1d6f317214d318b2a4e9a9663bc7ec867a6c845affecad1290fd717cc74f29.zip (password: "infected")

–
News of a Euro Truck Simulator 2 expansion shipped out a few weeks ago. It took a while to get here, though: arriving on the back of a lorry pocked with dents, it's many fines and tickets flapping about the windscreen. Having played the game, I sympathise. Now that it's here we can delve into info about the game's first DLC, Going East, which adds a number of Eastern European cities to the game.

That means one thing: tanks!

Not playable tanks, of course. Fun fact: tanks are not trucks.

The DLC promises thirteen additional cities, spanning Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. It's a big increase to the available land mass, even if it would be nice to see some other parts of the game, such as available cargo types, get a boost too.

SCS do suggest that more DLC is planned for the future. "Once this is all done," they write , "the DLC team will be facing the big question - what next? Another territory expansion?" The smiley face afterwards would suggest that yes, that is a safe bet.

The developers previously announced that they're planning to patch Oculus Rift support into the game. Personally, I'm hoping for Razer Hydra support too. Then we'd really get to live a true simulation of the truck driving lifestyle:

Accurate road-rage modelling? Well, I can dream.

Going East will be released on 20th September. If you're not sure why I've dedicated hundreds of words and a silly photoshop to a game about driving on motorways, you should really check out our review .
After helping a man pick up paints that fell from his bag on a train in Cumbria, 14-year-old Ben Azarya​ was blessed with a signed painting by an artist he had never heard of. The man turned out to be Banksy, one of the most famous street artists of all time, and the painting Azarya received is said to be worth five figures.

Image via Cascadenews.co.uk

According to the New York Daily News, Azarya helped the man who introduced himself as Robin Banks. "He opened his rucksack and had a gas mask and spray paints inside," the teenager said. "He got out a piece of paper and had colors marked on it of what he had been trying out and he dropped his colors." Banksy asked the Azarya if he knew who Robin Banks was, and when Azarya said he didn't, the street artist gave him the artwork, said that it would be worth around $30,000, and told him, "Have a good life, brother."

Azarya described Banksy as a white man in his late 40s with "scruffy clothes" and an old, fluffy hat. "He had a little jacket that didn't go over his arms and jeans with paint on. He looked really wacky and had blonde hair and blue eyes."

POST CONTINUES BELOW

Bonhams Auction House has advised Azarya and his mother to have the work authenticated, and Azarya already has plans to buy a new phone when the painting is sold.

UPDATE: It looks like young Ben Azarya won't be getting that new phone after all. According to The Independent, there was another alleged run-in with "Robin Banks" at a Wild Zucchinis restaurant in Cumbria on Jan. 19, but Banksy's publicist Jo Brooks says he was not in the area on either of those occasions. "It isn’t true. I don’t know where it has come from, it is really strange," she said. Restaurant owner Manon Plouffe gave a description similar to that of Azarya, and she said that the man announced himself as a graffiti artist and was admiring the art on the walls of the establishment. He never returned despite an offer to have coffee the next day.

So if you are in or around Cumbria and meet a man named Robin Banks, he is an imposter.

[via NY Daily News]
The 2016 college Senior Bowl begins tomorrow with the weigh-in, followed by practices Tuesday-Thursday, with the game next Saturday January 30th. This is my position-by-position breakdown of who I’m liking and who I’m looking to gain more information on going forward:

Cornerback

Always one of the positions that has had the most distinct Seahawk archetypes, CB begins with a player that is near 6’0" and 190lbs. We’ve seen exceptions (WT3 and Burley pretty much the only two in six years…and Burley wasn’t a draftpick), but for the most part it’s those benchmarks. Weight is less of a deal-breaker than height/length. A guy can put on 10lbs but you can’t make a short guy tall.

That gives us our first pass at filtering down to a list of:

James Bradberry 6’1"/213

Eric Murray 6’0"/199

William Jackson 6’1"/185

Jalen Mills 6’1"/194

Deiondre Hall 6’2"/190

Harlan Miller 6’1"/180

Maurice Canady 6’2"/195

So, the good news is that is a pretty long list of options. But a) that list will probably filter down again after weigh-in when the arm-lengths are announced, b) I’ve already filtered that list down in my mind to one.

After considering all of the intel that I have access to, the only CB that I am currently considering as a draftpick from this group is Maurice Canady. And even with him, I think I’d have to see him on the board in the 6th round to be interested. I don’t think he’s WT3 in the 4th, nor Sherm or Tye Smith in the 5th…I think he’s more Byron Maxwell in the 6th. And he’ll need two years on the PS/active-redshirt/bench to get his technique complete.

Now, before making you think this makes the CB class seem a disaster, keep in mind the declared Juniors includes Jalen Ramsey, Mackensie Alexander, Vernon Hargreaves, Eli Apple, Kendall Fuller, Artie Burns, Rashard Robinson, Xavien Howard, Zack Sanchez, Daryl Worley. About 7 of those guys are over 6’0".

Defensive End

I don’t recall ever seeing such an extreme, across the board swing to a 3-4 style DE in a single class. These guys, outside of Noah Spence, are MASSIVE. And, quite frankly, many are being mislabeled as DE. Literally, f you look at the North/South specific rosters, the South lists only one guy as a DT (Quinton Jefferson), and then lists seven DE’s. And those DE’s run 261, 265, 275, 283, 303, 313 lbs. The two obvious names mislabeled are Sheldon Rankins (303) and Jarran Reed (313). Both also played inside at DT this year, and that is where both will end up as pros.

Noah Spence has found himself as a unique player in this draft. A year after the class held Vic Beasley, Shane Ray, Hau’oli Kikaha, Nate Orchard, Randy Gregory, Markus Golden, Eli Harold as the OLB/DE tweener/LEO types, this draft has Spence, maybe Victor Ochi day 2, and then a pretty sharp drop-off to the day 3 group of Dadi Nicholas, Kamalei Correa, Ian Seau, Matt Judon, Yannick Ngakoue, James Cowser. So Spence may hold higher value for that distinction. But then how much does he drop for the drug redflag from OSU? I don’t think he drops out of the 1st, but Gregory did. Regardless, Spence is going to be an exciting player this week.

Dadi Nicholas will be an interesting case. Undersized at 227lbs, Nicholas was asked to play 5 technique for Virginia Tech, when his size is a clear disadvantage in the run game. If Nicholas can be allowed to play more of a wide-9, 3rd down, pass-rush specialist in Mobile, he may regain some of the form that saw him finish with 18.0 TFL and 8.5 sacks in 2014. Then again, Bruce Irvin was asked to play a 3-3-5 DE in his Senior year, and his sack total did suffer…but it dropped from 14.0 to 8.0. Nicholas’ number dropped from 8.5 to 2.5.

Shawn Oakman has had a similar path to Nicholas…after posting 19.5 TFL and 11.0 sacks in 2014 everybody loved the 6’9"/275 freak show as a 1st round player. Now, after slumping to 14.5 TFL and 4.5 sacks in 2015, his stock has plummeted to almost 4th round. While I think there’s a degree of boxscore scouting going on there, within boxscore scouting there is generally an element of truth: and it’s the rate of finishing plays, and Oakman hasn’t been good enough this year to finish plays. I, certainly, have taken part in the boxscore scouting, but if we know Pete Carroll, wouldn’t you guess he would take the half-full view of Oakman and believe the player we saw in 2014 is still in there? Worth considering.

Bronson Kaufusi is one of a trio of monster DE at the game. At 6’8"/280, Kaufusi is a shade smaller than Oakman at 6’9"/275 and a shade bigger than the 6’6"/295 Jihad Ward. After beginning his tenure at BYU playing both football and basketball, Bronson gave up hoops after his Freshman year, but it seems he held on to his knack for shot-blocking, as he blocked 5 kicks this year alone. That’s 2 more than everyone else in the country. Kaufusi really stuffed the stat sheet this year: 63 tackles, 19.5 TFL, 10.5 sacks, 3 QBH, 2 PBU, 1 INT, 3 FF, 5 blocked kicks, AND an 18 yard punt return. This is going to be a guy to watch, not only this week, but also at the combine.

Defensive Tackle

Senior Bowl week will be our best look so far at this fabled DT class. Jarran Reed, Sheldon Rankins, Sheldon Day, Adolphus Washington, and Austin Johnson make for a quintet of probable top-63 picks. Some keep Vernon Butler in that group, but I’m not. I think Butler is getting way too much heat right now (we’re talking 10 TFL, 3.0 sacks vs mostly Conference USA competition).

I know Reed is rated very well, but I just have trouble watching Bama and not thinking that Reed is succeeding off of the play from A’Shawn Robinson, who looks to me to be the superior talent. Both are projected gone before Seattle picks.

Sheldon Day has been getting some of the Aaron Donald comp for most of the year. I don’t see that. I think Day is one of the best locker room guys in this entire draft, all positions; but I see him more as Will Sutton than AD. This year’s more apt Donald comparison is Jon Bullard, who is not at the Sr Bowl.

This will be Washington’s first appearance since his arrest, and subsequent "guilty" plea for soliciting a prostitute before the end of OSU’s season. His stock has dropped him out of the 1st, and it will be interesting to see if he can repair that or if he ends up staying available to the Hawks’ 57th overall pick. This draft, for Seattle, is really one of two stories: will the better value player at #57 come from OL or DL? Answer that question and it can inform which direction to prioritize at #26. If Adolphus drops because of his indiscretion, THAT can give you the value you need at DT in 2nd to allow you to go hard for need at OL in the 1st.

Similar could be thought of Sheldon Rankins and Austin Johnson who both currently have projection more to the upper end of the 2nd round. I wrote once before that there holds some plausibility to going OL in the 1st and then trading UP in the 2nd round using our native 3rd to get a DT. Rankins and Johnson would both be worth that maneuver.

Johnson is a 6’4"/323 lb DT that can play a 3-4 NT, but whom also holds enough athleticism to play 1 technique and up into the 3 technique. On the year, AJ compiled a statline of:

78 tackles, 15.0 TFL, 6.5 sacks, 2 PBU, and 1 FF.

Compare that to the line of mystery DT:

43 tackles, 15.5 TFL, 7.0 sacks, 4 PBU, and 1 FF.

Rankins played more DE than DT this year, but at 6’2"/303 I liken him more to a Geno Atkins type once he gets settled inside. Shelly Rank had a year of 58 tackles, 13.0 TFL, 6.0 sacks, and one pretty nifty 46-yard fumble return TD.

Inside Linebacker

Seattle doesn’t have a need here, so I haven’t spent a lot of time studying MIKE’s, but I do appreciate the seasons that Kentrell Brothers and Tyler Matakevich have put together. Deion Jones should test well at the combine, but he’ll be undersized and moved to WILL at the next level.

Outside Linebacker

I’m curious if Joe Schobert can have a Clay Matthews-like rise during the next couple months. After opening 2015 with 9.5 sacks in Wisconsin’s first 7 games, Schobert got completely shutout of the sack column in the Badgers’ final six.

Three more of the OLB at Sr Bowl have projections in the 1st, which is likely far too rich for Seattle’s blood, let alone if they’d even be available at #26.

Perhaps the best mix of value and ability that could make him of interest to Seattle is an OLB from the same school we last drafted a Sr Bowl LB: Utah State. Kyler Fackrell is 6’5"/250, finished the year with 82 tackles, 15.0 TFL, 4.0 sacks, 13 QBH, and 2 FF. Valued at the early 4th round, Fackrell does potentially fall at the early end of where Seattle could take a shot at filling the potential void at SAM from Bruce leaving in FA.

Offensive Center

I believe at one point Alabama’s Ryan Kelly was meant to be a part of this group, but he withdrew sometime after the National Championship game. The group now consists of Jack Allen, Graham Glasgow (promoted from Shrine), Evan Boehm, and Austin Blythe. I feel similarly about this group to how I feel about the CB group: none are bad, but are any particularly special?? With two practices and the game being televised, I hope to find that out this week.

Offensive Guard

I mean, Joe Dahl y’all. More on that in a second.

Interestingly, of the eight players now listed as OG on the Sr Bowl website, only three were playing OG during the regular season. Willie Beavers, Cody Whitehair, Connor McGovern and Joe Dahl are moving inside from OT, and Nick Martin is moving out from OC. This suggests this is a pretty weak OG class. But that’s okay…I’ve always been expecting any Seahawk OG pick this year would come from the ranks of an OT.

I talked to a rep from the Sr Bowl this week to get a sense of the reasons players move positions from their natural college starting spot to a new position for the Sr Bowl…his answer was that it was a collaboration between player request, Sr Bowl evaluations, and NFL personnel projections. So it is some combination of those that has pushed Dahl, McGovern, and Whitehair inside. All three felt inevitable, but there is still some disappointment Dahl won’t get to compete at OT.

For whatever reason, amongst those three, Whitehair is getting the most buzz. Which I don’t understand, at all. Dahl has the superior technique. McGovern is probably the superior athlete. Whitehair feels like B-minuses across the board. Whitehair is similar to Jack Conklin in his footwork…both show nice short-area quickness in their kicksteps, and then become more plodding going forward in run-blocking. The difference is, Conklin is a monster once he gets his hands on a DL’s chest. Whitehair looks concerningly weak in his upper body.

Even if I’m wrong about the order in which Dahl, McGovern, Whitehair should come off the board, I find it very difficult to see Whitehair at his #44 overall draftscout ranking, and then look at Dahl as #209 and McGovern as #224. Just their mere inclusion on the Sr Bowl roster should suggest scouts want to see these two.

Offensive Tackle

The strength of this OT class will not be on full-display at the Sr Bowl. Four of the top six OT can’t attend as underclassmen, and then the other two elected not to attend. Plus a couple interesting OT will be playing OG.

The top-rated OT that is attending AND playing OT ends up being Jason Spriggs, who is a mid-2nd projection. Spriggs should test well at the combine everywhere but in the bench. I love his feet, but I have serious concerns about his functional strength and football IQ. Some of these really large Sr Bowl DL are going to destroy him.

Kyle Murphy might be the most underrated OT in this class.

Man…sitting here trying to write this, looking at this list of OT…I’m exceedingly unimpressed. I think the DL’s are going to steal the show.

Quarterback

Don’t care. Don’t need to.

Okay, okay…but just to give you a little something…the two I’m most interested in are Jeff Driskel and Brandon Allen. Both of these two kept their INT’s to single digits this year. Allen comes from a Bret Bielema team, which means there could be some system carryover from when Bielema coached Russell at Wisconsin. Driskel had a nice little 3.51ypc and 5 TD’s on the ground this year, so if you want a QB2 that can do some read option stuff; he likely can. Both were top 15 passer rating in the country.

Running Back

Here’s another position where it feels like one guy is head and shoulders above everyone else. This is Kenneth Dixon’s game to steal.

Safety

Jeremy Cash had arguably the best overall season of any Safety prospect. He’s a known entity with a known high price. 18.0 TFL on the year, from a SAFETY is crazy. Also 101 total tackles. But do you want to spend a 2nd round pick with Kam and Kelcie both under contract next year?

I have a sneaking suspicion Miles Killebrew gets exposed versus this higher level of competition. KJ Dillon flashed enough while watching Karl Joseph to warrant observation. Darian Thompson plays great, but tests my intuition for something off the field. Tyvis Powell is the opposite of Thompson; he seems fantastic off the field, but then his tape is disappointing. Powell is one I will keep studying further. His 6’3"/210 frame is very intriguing.

The guy that I come around to really liking is Sean Davis. At 6’1"/202, Davis played CB for Maryland all year but still managed to 88 tackles. 88 tackles from a CB?? That’s a crazy number. But part of that is Davis’ experience at Safety from 2012-2014. Sean checks off a lot of boxes for me when I watch his tape, not to mention his 5th round projection is perfect value.

Tight End

I don’t think it’s a great year for TE, but I think the Sr Bowl did great finding the best of what’s available.

I think Tyler Higbee is probably the best TE I’ve watched this year, and if he’s still there at his currently projected #123 overall, I seriously consider it. Higbee at 6’6"/250 has great size, and his 38/563/14.82/8 TD this year are pretty high marks in the current under-used TE college climate.

Nick Vannett looked very promising in preseason, but then put up only 19 catches at 8.53 ypc for the year. Feels a reach in the 3rd round.

For size, hands, production, blocking, and value; the TE I find myself liking best is Jake McGee. 6’6"/249 with 41 catches on the year. And potentially available in the 6th round.

Wide Receiver

Tajae Sharpe just got the callup to Sr Bowl from the Shrine, so I already wrote some on him in that piece. My hope is that he will play more in the actual game this week than he did in the Shrine. At Shrine practices, Tajae was consensus fantastic.

Sterling Shepard is very much like this year’s Tyler Lockett, only as a result of Lockett doing what he did, Shepard won’t last until the 3rd round. Great kid though. Great route runner. Very high volume producer.

I didn’t know about Paul McRoberts until like two weeks ago, but I was instantly fascinated once I saw the tape. Listed 6’3"/197, with massive hands and a basketball background, McRoberts has some pretty massive upside. In the one game I saw from him, he displayed nice hands, really impressive RAC, and the obvious big WR frame. What he needs to show this week (or perhaps better-put, what he needs to learn this week) is that he doesn’t need to fall in love with the flashy play. Make more of the routine plays more often and the flash plays will come.

I’ve been tracking Charone Peake for most of the season, but I had left him recently because he just hasn’t had the same volume that it seems PCJS have looked for in WR recently. But then John Schneider made the comment last week about wanting the team to return to being physically dominant like they were 2 years ago. Well, Peake is without question one of my top two most-physical receivers available this year. What he did to a Miami CB in October is the stuff of highlight reel legend.
In recent years, we have seen many wonders done with Raspberry Pi and Arduino in different DIY computing projects. Because of their size and their price, these single-board computers have been used in the creation of everything from home media centers to a space-ready X-Wing. And now Now, one creative user has just turned Motorola Lapdock into an actual laptop with Raspberry Pi Zero.

Also Read : Software Bug Put Several MediaTek Powered Android Smartphones Vulnerable to Attack

LogBook : Turn Motorola Lapdock Into A Laptop With Raspberry Pi Zero

One creative Raspberry Pi owner, just changed Motorola Lapdock 100 into a a fully fledged laptop with Raspberry Pi Zero and a couple of cables.

Motorola Lapdock 100 is a CPU-less laptop designed for plugging in your smartphone that enabled you to use your phone as a computer.

Motorola launched the product in 2011, but it wasn’t a big seller and the company discontinued its Lapdock products about a year later.

Now about the Raspberry Pi Zero, it is a surprisingly powerful machine, with 512MB of RAM and a CPU faster than the original Pi. Pi Zero is the heart of a Raspberry Pi on a tiny 65mm x 30mm board with mini-HDMI, micro-B OTG USB, and the same 40-pin GPIO it still has great connectivity and cost only $5.

Hence turning Lapdock to actual laptop won’t cost you much money if you follow the plans laid out by blogger Ax0n over at H-I-R.net.

Also Read : Now Nintendo 3DS XL can Run Windows 95

All it takes is a Raspberry Pi Zero and a couple of cables. Heck, even if you have to go out and buy a Lapdock this still isn’t an expensive build.

Because the Raspberry Pi Zero sells for just $5. You can pick up the two cables you need — micro USB to USB OTG and female micro HDMI to HDMI — from Amazon for around $8. You should be able to find a working Lapdock on eBay for $60 or $70. That brings the total bill to roughly $80.

Previous iterations of the Raspberry Pi and similar computers from other manufacturers worked well with the Lapdock, but the wiring used to connect the two devices could make things messy.

But the Raspberry Pi Zero is so tiny that everything fits in the case with some minor modifications.

One of the modifications made by Axon is drilling out two holes — one to allow easy access to the Pi’s micro SD card slot and another just over the Lapdock’s reset button. Check out the full guide here.

So Still, if you happen to have an old Lapdock gathering dust and $5 to spare, it might be worth trying out this build for yourself. It might not be a PC capable of running the latest video games, but it’s certainly an interesting project.

Also Read : PlayStation 4 Hacked to Run Linux
On August 7, Brandon Hudgins, 28, of Boone, North Carolina, became the 448th American to break 4:00 in the mile, and most likely the first to do so after overcoming granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), a rare autoimmune disease that affects the blood vessels.

Hudgins’ 3:59.67 fifth-place finish in the Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh marked the culmination of a journey that has included three bouts with the disease, which is treated with chemotherapy and high doses of corticosteroids, in eight years.

Hudgins, who says his sub-4:00 mile is a “dream come true, but something I always knew I could do,” struggled to hold back tears in his postrace interview, as he talked about what it meant to accomplish a lifelong goal in front of family and friends after overcoming what seemed like insurmountable obstacles at times.

“My goal is to inspire other people to persevere, whatever their walk in life is, to reach their goals, because it gets dark sometimes,” Hudgins told Runner’s World Newswire. “I can now say that it’s completely worth it. That feeling I had on Friday night when I broke 4:00 was definitely worth it.”

After running 4:16 for 1600 meters to win a South Carolina state title as a senior, and running 4:07 for the mile as a sophomore at Winthrop University, Hudgins figured it was only a matter of time before he broke 4:00. But during his junior cross country season at Winthrop, he began to experience symptoms—starting as a cold that wouldn’t go away—that would eventually lead to his diagnosis.

Because GPA, formerly known as Wegener’s granulomatosis, is such a rare condition, it can be difficult to diagnose initially. In his first encounter with the disease, Hudgins suffered 90 percent hearing loss in one ear and 80 percent in the other. His sinuses swelled and were covered in sores, he developed granulomas in his lungs and kidneys, and he came close to losing kidney function. After six months of chemotherapy most of his symptoms were reversed, but the disease and treatment had worn down his body.

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By the time Hudgins was well enough to think about training and racing again, he had graduated from Winthrop, but he was able to use his remaining eligibility as a graduate student at Appalachian State University. He graduated from Appalachian State in 2011 with personal bests of 3:45 for 1500 meters (roughly 4:03 in the mile) and 1:50 for 800 meters, faster than he had run prior to developing GPA.

“After I had come back and run really well, my doctor told me, ‘I didn’t tell you it wasn’t possible, but I pretty much didn’t think it was possible. When you asked if you could run again and I said yes, I did not think that you would be able to get back to competing at the level you were at, much less get faster,’” Hudgins said.

Through a connection, Hudgins was able to earn a gear-only contract from Saucony for almost two years upon graduating from Appalachian State. However, Hudgins had flare-ups in 2012 and 2013—GPA has a high relapse rate—leading to more chemotherapy and rounds of corticosteroids, and little running. During that time, Hudgins said, he was dropped for lack of performance. He has remained unsponsored since.

Because GPA is unpredictable and it’s unclear what causes it to flare up, Hudgins constantly monitors his body and watches for symptoms, in the hope of catching them early. The unpredictability and uncertainty has caused him to develop depression and anxiety.

In February, Hudgins had hernia surgery, but it was almost a relief to experience a more straightforward and common setback. Hudgins is so skilled in the art of the comeback now that he didn’t let the lost training rattle him.

Because Hudgins is unsponsored, he works a full-time job, in guest services at a resort, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. four or five days a week. On the side, he works as a personal trainer to fund the cost of his travel to races.

Hudgins does his primary run around 11 a.m., and a second run when he gets off work, around 11:30 p.m. Add in nine hours of work per day, travel time, weightlifting, and sleep, and there isn’t a lot of time left over.

Partially because of his unconventional work schedule, he does the majority of his 75-90 miles per week alone. He’s coached remotely by Temple University coach James Snyder, who was one of Hudgins’ coaches when he was at Appalachian State.

Hudgins meets runners from ZAP Fitness, a nearby post-collegiate training group, for long runs about twice a month. The idea of joining a post-collegiate training group has crossed Hudgins’ mind, but he hasn’t actively pursued the idea of doing so because he’s happy with the coaching he’s receiving now.

Hudgins is hopeful that his sub-4:00 mile will attract a sponsor. For now, he races with the Lauren Currie Twilight Foundation logo on his singlet, in an attempt to spread awareness about his disease and the organization founded in memory of a 15-year-old girl who died of GPA.

Hudgins hopes to do more racing this season, including the Michigan Mile, a road mile, this Friday in Flint, Michigan, but finding the right racing opportunities can be tough. In addition to getting the time off from work, he needs to make sure that he can afford the travel costs, and that a good racing situation awaits him wherever he goes. He had hoped to participate in the Hoka One One Long Island Mile in September, but upon learning he wouldn’t be able to get into the fast section, he had to re-evaluate his plans.

Luckily for Hudgins, he’s learned to deal with adversity over the past eight years. Now, while he’s enjoying some success, he’s hoping to use his story to inspire others.

“Everybody’s got their own goals in life and they’re not all running-related. Whether it’s chasing a dream to be an artist or be a doctor, a lot of people are going to run into roadblocks in life, or run into tough times,” Hudgins said. “Sometimes you’re going to want to give up, but you just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other and see where you end up.”
We are collecting cases of discontinuous technological progress, to inform our understanding of whether artificial intelligence research is likely to undergo such a discontinuity. This page details our investigation.

We have verified that five technological trends underwent a discontinuous jump in improvement equivalent to more than a decade at previous rates, three of which underwent more than a century of progress.

Details

Motivations

We are interested in whether artificial intelligence research is likely to undergo discontinuous progress in the lead-up to human-level capabilities, or whether it will get there via incremental steps. If the former, we are interested in the nature of such discontinuities.

Why are we interested in this? If discontinuity is likely, a transition to AI is more likely to be abrupt, more likely to be soon, and more likely to be disruptive. Also, if we think a discontinuity is likely, then our research should investigate questions such as how to prepare or be warned, and not questions like when the present trajectories of AI progress will reach human-level capabilities. As well as being decision relevant and important, this question appears to attract substantial disagreement, making it particularly important to resolve.

This project aims to shed light on the potential for discontinuities in AI by investigating the degree and nature of discontinuities in other technologies. This seems an informative baseline for our expectations about AI, especially if we have no strong reason to expect artificial intelligence to be radically unusual in this regard.

We are interested in several specific questions, such as:

How common is abrupt progress in technology?

Where there are discontinuities, how much progress do they represent? (relative to previous rates of progress)

What predicts such discontinuities, if anything?

We are also interested in overall distributions of size of progress increments, but searching specifically for the very largest increments bears on this in a less straightforward way, so we are likely to investigate it by other means later.

Methods

We have collected around fifty instances of technological change which are contenders for being discontinuous. Many of these are suggestions offered to us in response to a Facebook question, a Quora question, and personal communications. We obtained some by searching for abrupt graphs in google images, and noting their subject matter.

We are taking these cases one by one, and assessing whether each involved discontinuous progress on plausible and interesting metrics. For instance, if we were told that fishing hooks became radically stronger in 1997, we might investigate the strength of fishing hooks over time—if we could find the data—and also their cost and how many fish could be caught, because these are measures of more natural interest which we might expect to be related.

We generally count progress in an area as ‘discontinuous’ if the improvement between two measurements is far larger than what one would normally expect over the same time period. This definition is open to revision, as we gain a better understanding of the landscape.

Tentative findings

We know of four large or moderate discontinuities. That is, discontinuities where at least ten years of progress at usual rates occurred on one occasion. We have roughly thirty suggestions for trends that may have been discontinuities that we have not finished looking into.

The method of calling for examples of discontinuous progress does not lend itself well to giving a precise base rate of discontinuity, because we do not know how many technological trends participants knew about or considered. In particular, we would need to know how many technological trends there are, such that if they contained a large discontinuity, it would have been reported to us.

If we guess that fifty people considered our question seriously, and each of them knows something about fifty technological trends, with thirty of those overlapping with the others, then we have 1,000 tech trends, that might have a discontinuity somewhere in them. If we conservatively suppose that all of the suggested discontinuities are actual discontinuities, then we have around forty moderate discontinuities, in one thousand examples, for an overall rate of a moderate discontinuity in around 4% of technological trends. These guesses are far too uncertain for us to put any weight on this number, however.

List of cases we have evaluated

This is a list of areas of technological progress which we have tentatively determined to either involve discontinuous technological progress, or not. Note that we only investigate cases that looked likely to be discontinuous.

Key: LD: Large discontinuity (>100 years of progress at once) MD: Moderate discontinuity (>10 years of progress at once) NSD: No sign of substantial discontinuities IIP: Investigation begun but in progress

The Haber Process – NSD

The Haber process was the first energy efficient method of producing ammonia, which is key to making fertilizer. The reason to expect that the Haber process might represent discontinuous technological progress is that previous processes were barely affordable, while the Haber process was hugely valuable—it is credited with fixing much of the nitrogen now in human bodies—and has been used on an industrial scale since 1913.

A likely place to look for discontinuities then is in the energy cost of fixing nitrogen. Table 4 in Grünewald’s Chemistry for the Future suggests that the invention of the Haber reduced the energy expense by around 60% per nitrogen bonded over a method developed eight years earlier. The previous step however appears to have represented at least a 50% improvement over the process of two years earlier (though the figure is hard to read). Later improvements to the Haber process appear to have been comparable. Thus it seems the Haber process was not an unusually large improvement in energy efficiency, but was probably instead the improvement that happened to take the process into the range of affordability.

Since it appears that energy was an important expense, and the Haber process was especially notable for being energy efficient, and yet did not represent a particular discontinuity in energy efficiency progress, it seems unlikely that the Haber process involved a discontinuity. Furthermore, it appears that the world moved to using the Haber process over other sources of fertilizer gradually, suggesting there was not a massive price differential, nor any sharp practical change as a result of the adoption of the process. In the 20’s the US imported much nitrogen from Chile. Alternative nitrogen source calcium cyanamide reached peak production in 1945, thirty years since the Haber process reached industrial scale production.

The amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer applied hasn’t abruptly changed since 1860 (see p24). Neither has the amount of food produced, for a few foods at least.

In sum, it seems the Haber process has had a large effect, but it was produced by a moderate change in efficiency, and manifest over a long period.

Penicillin on syphilis – NSD

Penicillin was introduced to clinical use in 1941, and quickly became the preferred treatment for syphilis. At around that time, there began a steep decline in the prevalence of syphilis, which appears to be generally attributed to penicillin. Cases of syphilis declined by around 80% over fifteen years, as shown in figure 1. Between 1940 and 1975, deaths from syphilis declined by over 98%, from 14 deaths per hundred thousand to 0.2, as shown in figure 2.

It is possible from our perspective that this decline is not entirely from penicillin. US Surgeon General Thomas Parran launched a national syphilis control campaign in 1938. Wikipedia also attributes some of the syphilis decline over the 19th and 20th centuries to decreasing virulence of the spirochete. Nonetheless, penicillin is likely responsible for most of it.

Either way, the decrease in deaths from syphilis appears to have been rapid, but not abrupt: syphilis cases and deaths gradually came down over around fifteen years. In figure 2, the annual reductions during the fastest decline are not much larger than the characteristic difference between years before the decline.

Even if penicillin’s effect on the national death rate from syphilis was gradual, we might expect this to be due to frictions like institutional inertia, rather than ongoing technological improvements. Thus it could still be the case that penicillin was a radically better drug than its predecessors, when applied.

Recent predecessors to penicillin included arsenic and bismuth compounds, and intentionally contracting malaria. It appears on casual investigation that penicillin was successful about 85% of the time soon after its development, while a previous treatment—arsenic and bismuth—was successful around 90% of the time, though it is unclear whether the same success is being measured. However the success figures (for the latter at least) include only people who completed the treatment, and it appears that perhaps only a quarter of patients tended to receive a ‘minimum curative dose’ of arsenic and bismuth therapy before ‘defaulting’, seemingly due to the prolonged nature of the treatment and unpleasant side effects (though the death rate for untreated syphilis is apparently 4%-54%, so it is somewhat surprising to us that so many people would default from treatment). For an early version of penicillin, almost all patients could receive a minimum curative dose; a difference that might represent a large improvement in syphilis treatment.

If penicillin made an abrupt difference to syphilis treatment then, it seems it is likely to have been in terms of costs, broadly construed (which were partly reflected in willingness to be treated). The time required for treatment reduced from more than 20 days to 8 days for the first penicillin patients. The side effects qualitatively reduced from horrible and sometimes deadly to bearable (see above). Evaluating these costs quantitatively will remain beyond the scope of this investigation at present.

Even if penicillin was in fact a large improvement over its predecessors in absolute terms, in terms of characteristic progress in syphilis treatments, it was less obviously unusual. Arsphenamine, released in 1910, was sold as ‘salvarsan’ and known as ‘magic bullet’, and won its discoverer Paul Erhlich a Nobel prize. A physician at the time describes:

“Arsenobenzol, designated “606,” whatever the future may bring to justify the present enthusiasm, is now actually a more or less incredible advance in the treatment of syphilis and in many ways is superior to the old mercury – as valuable as this will continue to be – because of its eminently powerful and eminently rapid spirochaeticidal property.”

In sum, penicillin probably made quick but not abrupt progress in reducing syphilis and syphilis mortality. It is unclear whether penicillin is much more likely to cure a patient than earlier treatments, conditional on the treatment being carried out, but it appears penicillin treatment was around four times more likely to be carried out, due to lower costs. Qualitatively it appears that penicillin represented an important reduction in costs, but it is hard to evaluate this precisely or compare it with the longer term progress. It appears that as recently as 1910 another drug for syphilis also represented qualitatively impressive progress in treatment.

Nuclear weapons – LD

Main article: Discontinuity from nuclear weapons

Nuclear weapons represented abrupt progress in explosive power, but probably not in cost-effectiveness. Nuclear weapons represented progress in relative explosive efficiency which would have taken over six thousand years at previous rates.

High temperature superconductors – LD

Main article: Cases of discontinuous technological progress

High temperature superconductors represented abrupt progress in the temperature at which superconductivity could take place. In a brief period, progress took place which would previously have taken at least a hundred years.

Jet-propelled vehicles – MD

Main article: Cases of discontinuous technological progress

Jet-propelled vehicles produced a moderate discontinuity—about thirty years of progress at previous rates—in the land speed record.

Fairey Delta 2 and Lockheed YF-12A – MD

Main article: Cases of discontinuous technological progress

Fairey Delta 2 and Lockheed YF-12A were planes which increased the air speed record by relatively large factors. They represented 11-17 years and 7-8 years of progress respectively, at previous rates.

The printing press – IIP

The printing press is generally credited with massively increasing the availability of the printed word, starting in around 1450. For instance, some estimate that the number of books in Europe climbed from 30,000 to 10,000,000 in the fifty years following the printing press.

We have not looked into this in depth yet, and there is some ambiguity around the relevance of other printing methods. For instance, according to Wikipedia, in the mid-fifteenth century block-printed books were cheaper than those printed on a printing press.

Aluminium – IIP

It is often claimed that the discovery of the Hall–Héroult process in the 1880s brought the price of aluminium down precipitously. We found several smidgeons of quantitative data about this, but they seriously conflict. By far the most rigorous looking is a report from Patricia Plunkert at the US Geological Survey, from which we get the following data. However be warned that some of these figures may be off by orders of magnitude, if other sources are trusted.

Plunkert provides a table of historic aluminium prices, according to which the nominal price fell from $8 per pound to $0.58 per pound sometime between 1887 and 1895 (during most of which time no records are available). This period probably captures the innovation of interest, as the Hall–Héroult process was patented in 1886 according to Plunkert, and the price only dropped by $1 per pound during the preceding fifteen years according to her table. Plunkert also says that the price was held artificially low to encourage consumers in the early 1900s, suggesting the same may have been true earlier, however this seems likely to be a small correction.

The sewing machine – IIP

Early sewing machines apparently brought the time to produce clothing down by an order of magnitude (from 14 hours to 75 minutes for a man’s dress shirt by one estimate). However it appears that the technology progressed more slowly, then was taken up by the public later – probably when it became cost-effective, at which time adoptees may have experienced a rapid reduction in sewing time (presumably at some expense). These impressions are from a very casual perusal of the evidence.

Video compression – IIP

Blogger John McGowan claims that video compression performance was constant at a ratio of around 250 for about seven years prior to 2003, then jumped to around 900.

Information storage volume – IIP

According to the Performance Curves Database (PCDB), ‘information storage volume’ for both handwriting and printing has grown by a factor of three in recent years, after less than doubling in the hundred years previously. It is unclear what exactly is being measured here however.

Undersea cable price – IIP

The bandwidth per cable length available for a dollar apparently grew by more than 1000 times in around 1880.

Chess AI – NSD

There was a notable discontinuity in chess AI according to the SSDF ratings. However it appears to be less than ten years of progress at previous rates. Also, part of this jump appears to have been caused by the introduction of new hardware in the contest.

Infrared detector sensitivity – IIP

Infrared detector sensitivity is measured in terms of ‘Noise Equivalent Power’ (NEP), or the amount of power (energy per time) that needs to hit the sensor for the sensor’s output to have a signal:noise ratio of one. We investigated progress in infrared detection technology because according to Academic Press (1974), the helium-cooled germanium bolometer represented a four order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity over uncooled detectors. However our own investigation suggests there were other innovations between uncooled detectors and the bolometer in question, and thus no abrupt improvement.

We list advances we know of here, and summarize them in Figure 5. The 1947 point is uncooled. The 1969 point is nearly four orders of magnitude better. However we know of at least four other detectors with intermediate levels of sensitivity, and these are spread fairly evenly between the uncooled device and the most efficient cooled one listed.

We have not checked whether the progress between the uncooled detector and the first cooled detector was discontinuous, given previous rates. This is because we have no strong reason to suspect it is.

Genome sequencing – IIP

This appears to have seen at least a moderate discontinuity. An investigation is in progress.

Building height – LD

Main article: Discontinuity from the Burj Khalifa

The Burj Khalifa represented a large (175 year) discontinuity in the trend of maximum building heights over time. It did not represent a particular discontinuity in the trend of maximum structure heights over time.
Most light emitters, from candles to light bulbs to computer screens, look the same from any angle. But in a paper published this week on the Nature Photonics website, MIT researchers report the development of a new light source — a fiber only a little thicker than a human hair — whose brightness can be controllably varied for different viewers.

The fiber thus opens the possibility of 3-D displays woven from flexible fibers that project different information to viewers’ left and right eyes. The fiber could also enable medical devices that can be threaded into narrow openings to irradiate diseased tissue, selectively activating therapeutic compounds while leaving healthy tissue untouched.

The paper is the work of seven researchers affiliated with MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), including Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering and the RLE’s director; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics; lead author Alexander Stolyarov, a graduate student at Harvard University who is doing is PhD research with Fink’s group; and Lei Wei, a postdoc at RLE. The work was funded by the U.S. Army and the National Science Foundation, through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and Center for Materials Science and Engineering.

The newly developed fiber has a hollow core; surrounding this core are alternating layers of materials with different optical properties, which together act as a mirror. In the core is a droplet of fluid that can be moved up and down the fiber. When the droplet receives energy, or is “pumped” — in experiments, the researchers used another laser to pump the droplet — it emits light. The light bounces back and forth between the mirrors, emerging from the core as a 360-degree laser beam.

Surrounding the core are four channels filled with liquid crystals, which vary the brightness of the emitted light; each liquid-crystal channel is controlled by two electrode channels running parallel to it. Yet despite the complexity of its structure, the fiber is only 400 micrometers across. (A human hair is usually somewhere around 100 micrometers in diameter.)

In experiments, the researchers simultaneously activated liquid crystals on opposite sides of the fiber to investigate a hypothetical application in which a transparent, woven display would present the same image to viewers on both sides — not mirror images, as a display that emitted light uniformly would. But in principle, Stolyarov says, there’s no reason a fiber couldn’t have many liquid-crystal channels that vary the light intensity in several different directions. “You can build as many of these liquid-crystal channels as you want around the laser,” Stolyarov says. “The process is very scalable.”

As a display technology, the fibers have the obvious drawback that each of them provides only one image pixel. To make the fibers more useful, the researchers are investigating the possibility that the single pixel — the droplet of water — could oscillate back and forth fast enough to fool the viewer into perceiving a line rather than a colored point.

Even before the researchers answer that question, however, the fiber could prove useful in the burgeoning field of photodynamic therapy, in which light activates injected therapeutic compounds only at targeted locations.

“The coolest thing about this work, really, is the way it’s made,” says Marko Loncar, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. “The technology that they used to do it, basically, they can make kilometers of these things. It’s remarkable.”

Loncar adds, “And they envision this being used for surgeries and things like that, where it would be really hard to use any other laser approach.”

Loncar also thinks that the problem of pumping the fluid droplet back and forth to produce images is probably soluble. “There are entire lasers that depend on microfluidics,” he says. “The handling of fluids on a small scale nowadays is a pretty developed technology. So I don’t see this as a major obstacle.”
When the photo of Higuain’s secret medical first leaked, Napoli fans across the world were distraught. The loss of our star striker would have hurt enough but to lose him to our most hated rival; that was heartbreaking. Just months earlier he had been kissing our shirt and singing with fans under the stands shouting about defending the city. Now he plays for the team whose fans invoke Vesuvius to bury that city in lava. As if that were not enough, just as hurtful to fans was his motivation. Higuain didn’t leave for money. Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis came forward and said he had offered more to the Argentine striker than he is currently receiving at Juventus. Higuain left “to win”. He obviously didn’t believe he could do that in a blue shirt; and if he didn’t believe it, then why should we as fans? Without his help and that of his 36 goals, what reason would there be to even dream of competing for trophies?

While the supporters remained in shock, the club went to work; scooping up some of the most talented young players in Italy and Europe (Milik, Zielinski, Diawara, Rog, Maksimovic). Yet with youth comes inexperience, and it was only natural to think it would take time for the new acqusitions to settle in and contribute on the field. However, the two youngsters that have been given a chance, Zielinski and Milik, have made an immediate impact. Zielinski is already pushing Allan for a starting spot and Milik has made his claim as the starting striker with a goal per minute ratio that is top in Europe. Their contributions so far have been invaluable and they have given us reason to have high, but tempered, expectations for the other additions.

Yet what has really stood out is how the team as a whole has performed on the pitch. Sometimes having a star player can damage a team as they look to force feed him the ball in times of need. Perhaps this was the case with Higuain in Napol; for as impressive as Napoli were last season, this year they look even better. The team’s movement seems even more coordinated. At their best, the players have looked like a single attacking entity. They did at times last year as well but these days it seems more like the normal run of affairs. Without a doubt the extra time for the returning players to learn Sarri’s system has helped, yet one cannot help but wonder if they are also playing a bit more free mentally without having to worry about feeding a striker who would at times throw a fit if he wasn’t serviced well.

It’s important to remain grounded and remember that Juventus are still clear favorites to win the title. They had a terrible start to last season only to put on an amazing run of 25 matches in which they collected 73 out of a possible 75 points. At the same time, it is also important to appreciate this moment at the top of the table; to be grateful to the coach and players that have left us wondering if perhaps out of our midsummer despair we’ve emerged stronger than ever.
Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

I was en route to the Sydney Airport in Australia when my cab driver asked me if I was ashamed of President Donald Trump.

I immediately answered yes, before thinking about how ludicrous that question would be in any other context. It would have been provocative, perhaps, to ask an American tourist if she was ashamed of former Presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush (though the latter’s global favorability ratings were far lower). Bush deceived the country as a means of invading Iraq, but even as public understanding about his actions became well-understood and global disgust morphed into widespread protest, there was still a patina of reverence associated with the Commander in Chief. At least in polite interaction, respect for the office was generally assumed — outside of the countries they were actively bombing, anyway.

Under Trump, any such sense of deference has been obliterated. My cab driver in Sydney wasn’t trying to be rude, he was worried. The subtext rang of pity rather than condemnation, and the same was true of many other Australians and other foreigners I met while traveling through the country over the course of two weeks in October.

On a dive boat off the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns, I sat surrounded by an Australian man, two brothers from Denmark, and a couple from Germany, while the other New Yorker and I attempted to explain how Trump happened. As we discussed horrors like the travel ban, birth control rollback, and the ongoing aggravation of North Korea, they alternately stared in wide-eyed horror or shook their heads in sympathetic disbelief. We weren’t offended — we were desperate to separate ourselves from the mess that is America. It was as if we had done something profoundly humiliating and they were at a total loss as to how to make us feel better. Or, as one of my Twitter followers put it a few days later, “We used to look up to you. Now we’re embarrassed for you.”

A similar sentiment is shared by the global population. A Pew Research poll of 37 countries conducted in January revealed that only 22% of respondents have “confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs,” down from 64% under Obama. FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of the Pew numbers also shows that the average favorability rating has dropped significantly, from 65 to 50%. I’d imagine both of those numbers would be lower if conducted today.

World leaders have echoed discontent with Trump. During the campaign, the President of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, called Trump a “crackpot candidate.” The Prime Minister of Australia notoriously mocked him in leaked audio, poking at his relationship with Russia, and ideas about “fake news.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been cautious to explicitly insult the States, but emphasized Canada’s belief that “diversity is a strength” in response to Trump’s travel ban. French President Emmanuel Macron decried Trump’s “mistake” in leaving the Paris Climate Accord. And, perhaps most profoundly, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted her country can no longer rely on America in allied foreign diplomacy. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” she said during a campaign event in May. “We Europeans have to take our destiny into our own hands — of course in friendship with the U.S.…but we have to know that we have to fight for our own future.”
By Ellen Asermely

Rabat – Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders was found not guilty of hate speech but guilty of discrimination and group insult. He will face no punishment.

The verdict is in reference to comments Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, made about Moroccans while campaigning in The Hague in 2014.

On camera, Wilders said of his campaign: ‘They are voting for a safer and more social city with fewer problems and, if possible, fewer Moroccans.’ Wilders also asked the audience at a rally if they wanted ‘more or less Moroccans’ and the crowd responded, as instructed, ‘less’. The comments were met with backlash from politicians, Muslim organizations, and Moroccan-Dutch people.

In December 2014, public prosecution announced its intent to take Wilders to court for discrimination and inciting hatred.

During the case, judges wanted to determine whether the remarks were impulsive or planned in advance. They also wanted to address the fact that Wilders later claimed his remarks referred to ‘criminal Moroccans’ while simultaneously refusing to withdraw his statements previously made in The Hague.

The public prosecutor also argued that Wilders used rhetoric to ‘drive the room’, saying ‘The unnecessarily hurtful nature of the statements can exist without foul language. The grievance lies mainly in the tone of speech, and inflammatory character…Here Wilders failed as a politician.’

The court found Wilders not guilty of hate speech, as his comments were not a call for violence. However, he was found guilty of discrimination and group insult. It was ‘legally and convincingly proven’ that Wilders had insulted Moroccans as an ethnic group, violating the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.

He will not pay a fine, as the prosecution requested, as the court ruled that a criminal conviction was sufficient punishment.

Three PVV hating judges declare that Moroccans are a race and convict me and half of the Netherlands. Madness. — Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) December 9, 2016

Wilders questioned the legitimacy of the court, and his lawyer announced that they will appeal the decision.
There are many short track drivers out there who dominated their local tracks and touring divisions but never got a chance to make it to the big time. There's also some out there who did make it to NASCAR's top levels, only to be phased out by younger, more funded drivers.

While they may have had to hang up their helmets for one reason or another, many of those drivers are still around the racetrack.

They're not behind the wheel anymore. Instead, they're up on the spotter's stand.

Spotting wasn't something that guys like Freddie Kraft, Mike Herman, Jr., Tim Fedewa and Eddie D'Hondt started out doing. It was something that they did on the side when they had free time.

"Towards the end of my career when things weren't going the way I wanted them to... through some mutual friends I heard that Bill Elliott needed a spotter for a few races here and there so I said I'd do it," said Tim Fedewa who now spots for Stewart-Haas Racing in the Sprint Cup Series. "I'd race Saturday in the Busch car and Sunday I'd stay over and help Bill occasionally.

"When I couldn't drive anymore I needed to make a living," said Fedewa. "I just kept spotting and it's come to this."

The 47-year-old Fedewa from Holt, Michigan scored four wins in what was then known as the NASCAR Busch Series. He said that his favorite moment behind the wheel was the day he won his first Busch race at Nazareth Speedway (PA) in 1995.

"They had a memorial service in Michigan that day for my grandmother so it was pretty surreal that they were burying her at the same time the race was going on and I couldn't be there," said Fedewa. "But I know she was there with me so it was pretty special."

Mike Herman, Jr. was racing on the USAR Hooters Pro Cup circuit while at the same time spotting for Joe Gibbs Racing in the K&N Pro Series East. Herman is a two-time champion in Late Model Stock Cars at Concord Speedway (NC) and now spots for Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. in the Cup Series.

"It just so happened that the East schedule and the Pro Cup schedule didn't overlap so it worked out well," said the Kannapolis, NC native who also raced Modifieds at Bowman Gray Stadium (NC). "I basically worked through East, ARCA, Trucks, Nationwide. Basically like a driving career you're just making the right moves and it led me to where I'm at today."

Freddie Kraft spots for Michael Annett at the Cup level as well as for Darrell "Bubba" Wallace, Jr. in the Camping World Truck Series. He raced at Long Island's Riverhead Raceway in the Figure 8 division for three full seasons and he'll quickly admit that he wasn't the best driver out there.

"In 1999 I spent most of my time parked on the backstretch trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my car," said the 32-year-old Kraft who grew up in Kings Park, New York. "I wasn't into it like I needed to be. Didn't put enough time into the cars. It was more about hanging out with my friends. More about spotting for my buddies."

But Kraft has an interesting claim to Riverhead fame.

"I actually won Rookie of the Year twice (1999 and 2004) which is pretty impressive because it's the same division," said Kraft with a laugh. "I think it was a lack of options the second year. I don't think there was anybody else. Maybe they kind of played some kind of joke on me, but that's the story there. I think they kind of forgot."

Kraft started spotting for Jarrod Hayes at Riverhead, then started spotting for Jimmy Blewett and others before making his way up the ladder to where he is now. Kraft has even won a couple of championships spotting for fellow long Islander George Brunnhoelzl, III on the NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour.

"It came time to make a decision about whether I wanted to race or do what I do now," said Kraft. "I picked spotting obviously."

Kraft is accompanied by another Long Islander on the spotter's stand. Eddie D'Hondt, from Levittown, NY, spots for Jeff Gordon. D'Hondt raced at Riverhead as well as Islip Speedway (NY) before running on the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour.

"In 1996 Tommy Baldwin, Steve Park, Bono (Kevin Manion) and myself all moved to Charlotte," said D'Hondt. "We got a house together and just went to work. I started out as a mechanic and a pit crew guy. Then I started spotting for Bill Elliott back in 1999 so I just kept on doing it."

The spotter is one of the most important pieces to the race team puzzle. Thanks to all the safety devices the drivers have now like the HANS device and containment seats their visibility is extremely limited. The spotter is a second set of eyes for the driver. But does being a former driver make for a better spotter?

"I feel it definitely helps but to be a good spotter you don't have to have driving experience," said Herman. "From my standpoint it definitely plays into what I say every time I key the mic to talk. Because I know I've seen the view. I know what he's thinking. I know what he's feeling."

Fedewa said that being a former driver helps him deal with his current driver, Kevin Harvick, when he gets angry and goes on a rant over the radio because he's been in that position before.

"I know when I was driving I blew up and cussed and threw a fit," said Fedewa. "It wasn't directed at anybody in particular. Besides all the outside pressures, your sponsors, owners, it's the personal pressure you put on yourself as a driver. I try to say something that will make sense to him and calm him down instead of irritating him some more. Or I just say nothing and let him go. Usually five or 10 laps later they forget about it and it's over with."

They haven't forgotten their roots either. Herman and Kraft still like to spot some short track races when they get the chance to. Herman will go spot for Ryan Preece on occasion like he did on Mother's Day weekend this year at Lee USA Speedway (NH).

"I have an extreme love for short track racing to this day," said Herman. "I love the venues. It's rough and tumble. Short track racing is tough. Every lap is a battle. Sometimes at the big tracks it kind of gets spread out and it's all about the speed."

Kraft likes to spot for Timmy Solomito for NWMT races whenever there isn't a conflict with his other responsibilities.

"Any time I get to do short track racing I jump right on it because I love it," said Kraft.

They may not be behind the wheel anymore battling it out on the short tracks like they used to, but they're still winning races and doing it at the highest levels of the sport.

"It never ever gets old to win," said D'Hondt. "That's why we make all the sacrifices we made our whole lives to stay in this business as hard as it is and as strenuous as it is at times."

-By Rob Blount, Speed51.com Regional Editor (Long Island, CT, and NJ) -Twitter: @RobBlount

-Feature Photo Credit: Freddie Kraft Facebook.

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Leicester were twice denied by the woodwork as well as by saves from Ben Foster

Leicester missed the chance to go five points clear at the top of the Premier League as West Brom came from behind to claim a thrilling draw.

Salomon Rondon shrugged off Robert Huth to give West Brom the lead, but a Danny Drinkwater deflected shot levelled it.

Andy King finished a wonderful move to put Leicester ahead only for Craig Gardner to equalise with a free-kick.

Leicester twice hit the bar at a raucous King Power Stadium, but could not find a winner.

The draw leaves the Foxes three points ahead of Tottenham, who can go top with victory at West Ham on Wednesday, and six ahead of Arsenal, who face Swansea.

West Brom, who have now lost only two of their past 10 league games, stay 13th - 12 points clear of the relegation zone.

Relive Leicester's thrilling draw with West Brom

No more late drama

Media playback is not supported on this device No negatives despite a draw - Ranieri

Leicester were below their best on Saturday but still managed to beat Norwich thanks to a late winner - here they were much improved, but could not conjure similar drama despite laying siege to the West Brom goal.

West Brom may have planned to concede possession and defend deep, and they were duly bombarded by wave after wave of Leicester attacks, mainly down the flanks through the excellent pair of Riyad Mahrez and Marc Albrighton.

On Saturday, the Foxes had 13 attempts on goal - here they had 22, with headers from Jamie Vardy and Shinji Okazaki hitting the woodwork.

Ben Foster also saved well from Jeffrey Schlupp and Wes Morgan, while Leonardo Ulloa could not repeat his weekend heroics when the ball flashed across the face of goal in the very last minute.

Baggies forced out of their shell

Eight of West Brom's 11 attempts on goal came in the second half

West Brom could have been forgiven for thinking that allowing Leicester the lion's share of possession was a sound approach.

Against Norwich, Leicester had the majority of the ball for only the third time this season and struggled. Whether by design or necessity, the Baggies were happy to sit back in the first period, especially after Rondon got on the end of Darren Fletcher's through ball to put the visitors ahead.

However, even with nine red shirts behind the ball, Leicester still found a way to lead, meaning West Brom had to make more of the play in the second half. It worked to their advantage as, after Mahrez needlessly handballed, Gardner curled in a sublime free-kick.

Rondon could even have won it but somehow turned over from inside the six-yard box, and the Baggies ultimately needed some fortune to hang on at the end of a breathless night.

King of the King Power

King (10) finished from Mahrez's wonderful back-heel following a cross-field ball from Albrighton

King was making only his seventh league start of the season, in the side for the injured N'Golo Kante.

The Welsh midfielder is the only member of the Foxes squad remaining from their time in the third tier seven years ago and has winners' medals from both League One and the Championship.

Here he looked to have taken a stride towards adding a Premier League medal when he met Mahrez's athletic back-heel to finish sharply past Foster.

But in the end the odds on King completing an unlikely hat-trick lengthened - and Leicester could be back to second in the table as early as Wednesday night.

Man of the match

Marc Albrighton was a constant threat down the Leicester left before being substituted

What they said

Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri: "I am very pleased with our performance. They played so well - there was no panic after the first goal. We played much better than against Norwich. I am satisfied with the performance. Just sometimes you can do everything but the ball doesn't want to go in.

"I want to create a lot of chances and sooner or later we score. Tonight wasn't the right moment but we are alive and we fight to the end. Everybody is ready to fight, to play well, to create chances. Only the victory was missing.

"We tried to do everything and well done to my players. We never never give up. We always try the best in every situation. Every team plays football and we have to find the solution and try to win. It is important not to lose the match too as they could have counter-attacked."

Media playback is not supported on this device Pulis happy with Baggies' form

West Brom manager Tony Pulis: "Leicester are a good side. They ask questions of you.

"It's another point on the way for us. It's important for us to get to 40 points and we are happy with the way things are going. We need the hunger and desire to get to 40 points. We should have kept the ball better tonight. I'm really pleased with the players though.

"I'd love to see Leicester win the title."

The stats

Leicester are the first Premier League team this season to score 50+ goals in the competition.

Two of Leicester's three top-flight goals from outside the area this season have been scored by Danny Drinkwater.

Leicester's record as the only Premier League side not to concede at home in 2016 ended.

Riyad Mahrez has had a part in a league-high 25 Premier League goals this season (14 goals, 11 assists).

Salomon Rondon has scored in three of his past five Premier League games, having failed to score in his previous nine in the competition.

Andy King is the fourth Welshman to score on St David's Day in Premier League history (also Pembridge, Saunders and Collison).

Craig Gardner has had a role in three of the Baggies' last five Premier League goals (scored two, assisted one).

Gardner has also scored in back-to-back Premier League games for the first time since last April (also v Palace and Leicester).

What's next?

Leicester travel to Watford on Saturday, while West Brom welcome Manchester United on Sunday.
Peretz Partensky/Langton Labs Aaron Swartz speaking at Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2012.

Tributes to Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist who was an early builder of Reddit, were popping up across the Web on Saturday, after reports of his suicide began to circulate.

A spokeswoman for New York’s medical examiner told the Associated Press that Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment and was found Friday. Swartz was a computer prodigy who as a teenager helped create the RSS news reader and later fought to make online content available for free.

BoingBoing writer Cory Doctorow has a lengthy post about Swartz’s life and character, and it’s an absolute must-read. For example, here are some of his accomplishments, as referenced by Doctorow:

Swartz “co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14.” RSS is a news reader that is still in use by many today, though the technology has certainly evolved.

He was an early builder of Reddit, but was close enough to a co-founder “as makes no damn,” Doctorow wrote.

“At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law.” Swartz used a system that gives Americans access to their own public domain case-law to put that data in the public domain.
(Editor’s note: The following is an email we received from a listener and his wife, who play Oxi and Kitkam on The Shadowlands server. Our sincere thanks to them both for providing such a comprehensive report!)

I thought I’d give you an exclusive on the happenings at the Cantina Tour in Dallas on May 17th. My wife and I went to meet with the developers and other fans. Yes, she is an active SWTOR player, I am a very lucky man and acknowledge this.

We had a great time. About eighty people showed up, nearly all of them players. It’s worth noting that about a quarter of them were women, and there were many player couples there as well.

Four BioWare people were there to answer questions and meet the fans. Damion Schubert (Lead Designer), Jesse Sky (Senior Designer), Amber Green (Live Services Specialist – a.k.a. helps fix bugs and writes the patch notes) and Eric Musco (Community Manager a.k.a. a ball of energy).

Overall it was a very casual atmosphere. All types of fans were present (both the good and the troll). The room was packed, especially at the beginning. Free appetizers and drinks were available all night, provided by BioWare.

Prizes were also given out. Everyone got the much coveted Tauntaun Fawn code. A couple of people got Star Wars Gentle Giant bookends (pricey!), signed copies of SWTOR books were given out, and even clothes and hats.

Most of the night was spent mingling, but for about an hour the developers took a casual Q&A from the room-at-large and were very honest and as candid as they could be.

I tried to write down most of the questions. I’ll paraphrase their answers. I wasn’t able to cover all the questions asked at the event, nor their answers. Please note that any answers I heard from the BioWare team are being interpreted by me writing quickly on a small notepad, and thus should not be weighted with the same degree of importance as if they’d come from BioWare. Any errors reporting are my own, not theirs.

Questions

1) Will we get Legacy Datacrons?

Jesse Sky: High on his own list of wants, but no ETA.

2) Can we get Dye Packs for Speeders?

Eric Musco: Probably not, because speeders are an ABILITY, not an item.

3) Legacy Commendations Transfers?

Jesse Sky: Likes idea but no ETA. They’ve talked about this before, but worried about unintended consequences.

4) Will guild members be able to auto-fund their guilds by doing missions, where both the player and the guild get credit equally?

Damion Schubert: It’s on our Wall of Crazy. No ETA.

(The “Wall of Crazy” refers to the abundance of good ideas for content that they want to put out, but can only take on so many ideas with finite resources and various larger priorities. It’s crazy the amount of good ideas they have.)

5) Legacy Chat System?

Damion Schubert: It’s on the Wall of Crazy, but recently became more of a possibility due to the recent unintended bug, where players could chat with someone across all of that player’s toons.

6) Why aren’t Dreadtooth Masks under hoods and why aren’t they Legacy in the new Collections?

Damion/Eric/Jesse: They are an item they want you to earn on your individual character, not as part of a Legacy. It’s part of the high end-game content. There would be many technical issues to overcome in order to make that happen. Also it’s a HELMET in their view, not a mask, and you don’t usually put hoods over helmets.

7) Why weren’t the Cathar discounted for subscribers?

Eric Musco: They’ve very much heard the community on this, and are actively coming up with more ideas for future subscriber benefits or discounts.

At this point, Eric actively stressed how much they care about subscribers getting much more out of the game than free-to-play. Damion also then stated that his team at BioWare now is the best they’ve ever been at implementing and fixing content as well as actively listening to feedback throughout the community. Damion also said that subscribers will be getting a lot better PvP experience over free-to-play in the future. Then they talked in-depth about the struggle it is to balance subscribers and free-to-play.

(In my opinion, it sounded like he was saying they might not always get it right, but that they care about getting it right in the long run, especially with subscribers. And that very HUMAN, not corporate, distinction is important to note.)

Damion went on to say that subscribers are buying the majority of the Cartel Coins and that information isn’t lost on them. Cartel success equals more resources that BioWare can have to develop more game content. He also stated very emphatically that in his personal philosophy he’s against “Pay to Win” gaming.

8) When are we gonna get Guild Ships?

Damion Schubert: Guild Ships are his baby, he really, really wants us to have them, but will be a long time before they come out. And ONLY when they look awesome.

Eric then went on to say that they know guild players are the most active and loyal subscribers statistically in the game and that this info isn’t lost on them.

9) More Open World PvP?

Jesse Sky: Difficult to implement and no plans ATM. If we do see more it’ll be more like the Gree event.

10) Guild banks on Ships and More Guild Bank Slots?

Damion Schubert: I’ll add that to my Wall of Crazy.

11) Why is Revan’s Mask not part of the Collections when it was used as an example as being something in the Collections?

Eric Musco: (He got very honest and open with us on this one.) Revan’s Mask should not have been used as an example. It was an honest mistake. Revan’s Mask is about a specific toon achievement gain, not Legacy. Sincerely apologize for the confusion.

Eric and Damion then went on to say that only so much gear can be a part of the Collections and the achievements because of technical limitations.

12) Will PvP arenas for small teams come out?

Damion Schubert: He couldn’t answer directly, but said that a big PvP patch was coming soon that should make us happy.

(In my opinion, it seemed they were very aware of the lack of love for PvP in recent months and are very excited at what will be coming out for PvP in the near future.)

13) Is Bolster now working?

Jesse Sky: Bolser is working better now but if you see problems please let them know through the official forums or tickets. Screenshots help.

14) Will more Collector’s Edition content be coming out?

Eric Musco: More CE content is coming out. Dyes not binding on CE and Security vendors was not intended. Future exclusive content is coming.

15) How successful was the Cathar?

Damion Schubert: Cathar was a very big day for them. Also because of Dye Packs and the ability to change your look. So successful that they’re actively paying attention for more ideas in the future for all of this. They’re closely watching the boards for feedback on the Cathar and body customization and how it will relate to the future content they implement.

16) Is Alacrity Working as intended in 2.0 for players?

Jesse Sky: No. It’s working as we originally implemented, but players aren’t using it as intended and that’s something we may work on.

17) Why aren’t same-gender relations in the story content?

Damion Schubert: At this point Damion got very sincere and earnest in his feelings about this subject and talked for a few minutes about it. Summarising what he said, same-gender was not part of the original design team’s implementation, so it didn’t get included. In retrospect they say this was a mistake. It will be too difficult technically to change the game story as it sits now to include same-gender, but moving forward they will not make the same mistakes. Additionally more story content is coming, but no ETA.”

18) Will we ever get flying mounts?

Damion/Jesse: (Both laughed at this.) Don’t hold your breath. To get flying mounts they’d have to redesign the entire game.

They went into some brief practical and technical reasons why not. It would be an enormous resource drain for a significant amount of time and that energy could be better spent elsewhere. If it were to ever happen in SWTOR (which it won’t), it would have to be in a new area of the game specially designed with flying mounts in mind.

19) Was the Cantina tour held in Dallas this weekend because of the Comic-Con event at the same time?

Eric Musco: Yes. As much as possible we’re combining like-minded events.

At this point someone asked about the restriction on the frequency of (player) name change to the game, and Damion said he needed to get “philosophical” with us. In his opinion, the less player names change the better. Why? Because to create a more stable community that can police itself, it’s better that trolls and jerks can’t change their name. If people were able to do this whenever they wanted with no monetary penalty, trolls would change their names all the time and degrade the overall community. He went on at length on this subject. If the internet were a happy perfect place he’s all for it, but because it’s not we need to be realistic and think about consequences. (Before this I was for name changes, after I heard him I was against it; he was very convincing!)

Finally, Damion, Jesse, Eric and Amber said they loved the Cantina tour because it keeps them motivated and in touch with the fans’ feelings that you only get in person.

We then spent the rest of the night talking with the developers either one-on-one or in small groups. For me, the thing I’ll take away from the event was that these are people who are trying their best with finite resources and time, and that they sincerely love this game. They play the game themselves and want it to succeed as much as, or more, than the players. They’re full of energy (amazing to me) and very funny. Amber joked that you’d be shocked at how much of their own money the people at BioWare have spent on buying the Cartel packs. Specifically Amber and Eric said that when they’re not working, they’re playing all the time and that when players are frustrated, so are they. They don’t have to relate, they live it with fellow players. When something bugs, they get mad too, and they work on fixing it. They encouraged players to submit tickets and post issues on the forums with screenshots. BioWare can’t spot everything, and need accurate feedback from the community to help them overcome bugs/issues.

All four of them handled the crowd pretty well. They each took a thousand rapid-fire fanboy and -girl questions for four hours. Major props for professionalism, especially when some of the fans lacked basic human interaction skills or hygiene.

The four of them gave real, down-to-earth answers. We shook hands, we broke bread, we shared beer and we could look each other in the eye. We came out of it more hopeful for SWTOR than before. We were very glad to have gone.

We would highly recommend for other fans to go to future Cantina Tour events. Make sure you get there early.

May the Cartel Coins be with you!
Wednesday’s domestic cup match presents a unique challenge for Ottawa Fury FC, one that the club has not yet faced in 2015: speed, all over the pitch.

That is the x-factor that FC Edmonton will bring to the midweek cup fixture tomorrow at TD Place Stadium. While Ottawa has certainly had a positive start to its spring campaign, with four points of a possible nine to start its season, it hasn’t faced teams with the kind of game-breaking speed and athleticism that the Eddies possess.

With the likes of Sainey Nyassi and Lance Laing on either flank, Eddies boss Colin Miller is sticking to his tried-and-true method of fielding athletes. Eddie Edward and Kareem Moses offer similar displays of athleticism on the flanks of FCE’s back four, and can pose offensive threats occasionally.

When Fury FC and FCE met in the first round of last season’s Amway Canadian Championship, everybody highlighted a strong second leg at home as the key to the Eddies’ victory. Of equal importance, however, was their ability to draw the first leg in Ottawa. Miller was visibly ecstatic after the 0-0 result in last year’s first leg, and will likely be looking to do the same thing tactics-wise on Wednesday.

Expect FCE to play defensively, but use the flanks heavily on counters. Young Hanson Boakai may slot into an Eddies lineup he has yet to truly crack in 2015. The 18 year-old’s slicing runs and quick feet gave Ottawa nightmares in last year’s Canadian Championship fixtures.

Things are certainly trending in the right direction in Edmonton; Sainey Nyassi picked up NASL Player-of-the-Week honours this past weekend, and the Eddies rallied to defeat the visiting Ft. Lauderdale Strikers 3-2. English midfielder Ritchie Jones has two goals in three games, and appears to have settled into the game on this side of the pond.

From a Fury FC perspective, this year’s edition of the Amway Canadian Championship represents a shot at not only redemption from last season’s first round exit, but a chance to earn the respect of potential MLS opponents. FC Edmonton managed to put a scare into the Montreal Impact in last year’s second round, and Marc Dos Santos’ side will be hoping to do the same if they can advance past the Eddies.

Romuald Peiser will likely carry the captain’s armband again on Wednesday, as skipper Richie Ryan was ruled out for at least the next three weeks by Dos Santos with a leg injury. Julian De Guzman will likely run the ship from the midfield as he did superbly on Saturday in the club’s 1-0 win over Minnesota.

All things considered, the odds are surely in Ottawa’s favour for Wednesday’s fixture; the club has grown substantially more than FCE in the year since the two last played, Fury FC are at home, and crucially, are on an extra day of rest. However, I would be foolish to bet against a Colin Miller side on the road, on what is shaping up to be a rainy, sloppy affair in front of a small crowd due to the Ottawa Senators NHL playoff game.

In England there is a saying which asks, “But can they do it on a rainy night at Stoke?”

In NASL circles, however, it should say, “But can they break down a Colin Miller team defending for its life on the road?”

Everything about this fixture is telling me that Fury FC will pound the Eddies and all but solidify a place in the second round. Then I remember Colin Miller’s 4-1-4-1, or deep-lying 4-4-2, and realize what a monumental task breaking down FCE’s defence may prove to be.

Prediction: 0-0 draw

Photo courtesy of Ottawa Fury FC.

Liked it? Take a second to support NSXI on Patreon!

Carlos Verde Carlos is a first-year journalism student at Carleton University in Ottawa. A former communications intern with Fury FC, he supports Newcastle United and Sevilla. In terms of his writing, he is a Yaya Touré – big, physical, yet oh so dainty.

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Saying that the Pledge of Allegiance has no educational value, an activist group is pushing for Brookline to stop recitations of the pledge in public schools.

Members of Brookline PAX are asking the Town Meeting this fall to vote in favor of a resolution calling for the town’s School Committee to rescind its pledge policy and stop it from being recited in the schools.

Martin Rosenthal, the cochairman of Brookline PAX, said that although the recitation of the pledge is voluntary, there is subtle and sometimes overt pressure on students, especially younger children, to participate.

“It just puts kids in an uncomfortable situation,’’ Rosenthal said. “How do you say that to a 6-year-old? . . . We just don’t think it belongs in the schools.’’

The article Brookline PAX submitted for Town Meeting comes just months after the town’s School Committee approved a revised policy requiring principals to allow a weekly recitation of the pledge during morning announcements. Participation in the recitations is left up to the individuals at the schools.

The School Committee chairwoman, Rebecca Stone, said the new policy was approved in the spring after discussion began over saying the pledge at the Devotion School, where recitations were not a regular occurrence. While weekly recitations of the pledge had been held at most Brookline K-through-8 schools, the pledge also was not said regularly at the Lincoln School.

Stone said it has been a historical practice to say the pledge.

“I agree with [Rosenthal] that it’s not of great educational value,’’ she said. “We’re recognizing established and in some cases revered practices of the citizenry.’’

Misti Jaynes, who has two children in Brookline’s Devotion School, said she is glad that her children began having the opportunity to say the pledge at school in April. Jaynes and several other parents lobbied the School Committee in April for recitations, and she supports saying the pledge to show patriotism and to bring Americans together.

“If someone else doesn’t want to say it that is fine, but don’t take it away from my children,’’ Jaynes said. “Don’t take away my rights.’’

Rosenthal, who has a daughter at Brookline High School, called the pledge a loyalty oath loaded with complex issues.

“Are you supposed to just say something like this,’’ he asked, “or are you supposed to think about it?’’

Brock Parker can be reached at Brock.globe@gmail.com.

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
Inside Publishing NO WORD UNSPOKEN Midway through the Confessions, St. Augustine recalls how he used to marvel at the way Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, read his manuscripts: "His eyes traveled across the pages and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and tongue stayed still." Scholars have sparred for decades over whether Augustine's offhand observation reveals something momentous: namely, that silent reading--that seemingly mundane act you're engaged in right now--was, in the Dark Ages, a genuine novelty. Evidence abounds that ancient and medieval readers relished giving voice to their favorite texts in order to appreciate more fully the cadences of Homer and Lucian. Of course, we equally enjoy reading poetry aloud. The question is: Could the earliest readers literally not shut up? Paul Saenger thinks so--but his argument for the onetime dominance of the spoken word doesn't rest on Augustine. Saenger, a medieval-manuscript expert and a curator of rare books at Chicago's Newberry Library, believes that reading aloud wasn't a mere preference for the ancients, but a practical necessity. His explanation is simple: Ancientandmedievalmanuscriptslookedlikethis anditwaseasiertoreadthemaloud. In his provocative new book, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford), Saenger argues that the practice of transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts without spaces, or in scriptura continua, made reading silently a mind-bogglingly difficult task. "It wasn't literally impossible to read silently," Saenger says, "but the notation system was so awkward that the vast majority of readers would have needed to sound out the syllables, if only in a muffled voice." Saenger's book asserts that only at the end of the seventh century, when Irish monks introduced regular word separation into medieval manuscripts, did swift, silent reading become feasible. Why is it so hard to read text without spacing? Just imagine how difficult it would be for your computer's spell checker if you wrote a document in scriptura continua. The program would initially have to determine which syllables to slice into words, and then proceed with its main task. The human brain, fortunately, is more dexterous than a word processor, but the burden of breaking strings of letters into words is, nonetheless, a laborious first step. And therein lies Saenger's thesis: "There is a correlation between a propensity to read orally in both past and contemporary cultures and the duration of cognitive activity needed to achieve lexical access in that culture's script." Saenger, who has a Ph.D. in medieval history, backs up his claims with cutting-edge scientific research. (To his delight, he discovered that psychologists had been testing adult abilities to read English versions of scriptura continua for decades, "without being aware of its real-world precursor.") Clinical tests reveal that the brain processes the reading of spaced text--in which words are essentially digested whole--differently from the syllable-by-syllable decoding of continuous script. In fact, different parts of the brain handle these two tasks: Studies of brain-injured Japanese patients demonstrate that, depending on the site of a cerebral lesion, a person may lose the faculty for reading kanji ideographs, but not Japanese phonetic script, which lacks regular word separation--and vice versa. The implication is that, even if early medieval readers of scriptura continua somehow managed to keep their mouths shut, they were performing a mental task fundamentally different from that of contemporary readers. To modern eyes, the benefits of word spacing seem obvious. What took so long, then? Actually, word spaces can be found in ancient Hebrew manuscripts, as well as in a few of the very earliest Greek papyri. But Saenger doubts those word spaces engendered fluid silent reading at the time. After all, he notes, these manuscripts were all written without vowels, making the use of word spaces a virtual necessity for any kind of deciphering. In any case, following the Greeks' swift incorporation of Phoenician vowels in the ninth century b.c., scribes began crushing all the words together and writing in scriptura continua. Indeed, the entire Greek literary canon, from The Iliad onward, was written down this way. Why? Were the scribes trying to save paper? Saenger offers an explanation for this baffling step backward. "The ancient world did not possess the desire, characteristic of the modern age, to make reading easier and swifter," he writes. "Those who read...were not interested in the swift intrusive consultation of books." The canon was small, and prized texts were typically memorized. Who cared, then, if it was hard to slog through a manuscript the first dozen times? And let's not forget the inherent elitism of Greek and Roman readers. "The notion that the greater portion of the population should be autonomous and self-motivated readers was entirely foreign to the elitist literate mentality of the ancient world," Saenger writes. Fortunately, this situation didn't last forever. While an ambiguous text format "enhanced the mystery and power of clerics," Saenger notes, such awkwardness served no purpose in a scholarly universe in which readers began "to grapple with highly technical concepts" of science, law, and theology. Starting in the fifth century, scribes began to speckle manuscripts with spaces. As Saenger writes, "The introduction of word separation reflected a mentality in which reading was primarily a visual process for which the stylistic virtue of mellifluous sound was subordinate to rapid access to meaning." Most classicists have decried sporadic spacing as a sign that medieval monks didn't fully understand what they were transcribing. But Saenger sees it as a "great leap forward. It allowed the brain to find its bearings." He's even coined a new term, "aeration," to describe such manuscripts. Having spent the past fifteen years combing medieval manuscript libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, Saenger identifies the first properly spaced Latin manuscript as the Irish Book of Mulling, an illuminated translation of the Gospels dating from around 690 a.d. Indeed, he notes, the Irish soon adopted the the verb videre, "to see," as a way to describe reading. In a similar spirit, an Irish monk compared the activity of reading to a cat silently stalking a mouse. Why Ireland? For one thing, Irish monasteries were home to a select collection of Syriac-language biblical texts from late antiquity, all of which featured word spacing (but no vowels). Moreover, the Celtic-speaking monks approached Latin as a foreign language, and word separation greatly aided readers struggling with the vocabulary. (The French, in contrast, didn't think of their vernacular language as particularly different from Latin.) In the end, muses Saenger, "people at the frontiers have always been more open to linguistic innovation and combining things in new ways." Over the next couple of centuries, this Irish innovation spread to other countries--first to England, then to the Low Countries and the rest of Europe. By the twelfth century, reports Saenger, murmuring monks had become a relic of the past. (There's no precise date available, alas, for the first appearance of a SILENCE, PLEASE! sign.) As reading became a silent activity, new types of manuscripts that took advantage of this intimacy were produced, from pocket prayer books to erotica. More important, the intellectual orthodoxy enforced by group readings of manuscripts melted away as scholars retired to private rooms for quiet study. Saenger's book is sure to meet some strong resistance. Many simply refuse to believe that the ancients didn't learn to read scriptura continua silently. In a classic 1968 article, "Silent Reading in Antiquity," Bernard Knox wondered sarcastically, "Are we really to imagine that Aristarchus read aloud all the manuscripts of Homer he used for his edition?" Last year, Russian classicist A.K. Gavrilov dug in his heels, insisting in Classical Quarterly that "the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in modern and in ancient culture." Why are some scholars so opposed to the idea that scriptura continua would impose limits on the ancients' reading abilities? "It's funny," laughs Saenger. "Mathematicians have no problem seeing the importance of notation. Newton's contribution in the Principia was both intellectual and notational, with all its symbolic innovations. But classicists refuse to accept that reading has anything to do with the page it's printed on." Of course, classicists aren't the types eager to jump on the interdisciplinary bandwagon. "These folks tend to be tremendously conservative by orientation," Saenger muses. "They tend to be frightened by modern things like psychological research. At one conference, after I laid out my ideas, some classicists called me a Freudian." DANIEL ZALEWSKI
Image caption The government is keen to convince NHS staff of the merits of its reforms

The government looks set to increase the amount it spends on advertising and PR to help it sell NHS changes and other policies to the public.

Next year's marketing budget is £285m, according to Cabinet Office figures.

That is an increase on the £168m spent by the now axed Central Office of Information in its final year.

The Cabinet Office says it is not fair to compare the figures and the overall budget is still far below that spent by the previous Labour government.

A spokeswoman said not all government marketing money was spent through the COI so it was misleading to compare the organisation's budget for 2010-11 with the projected spend for next year, which will include all marketing activity.

In addition, there was no "meaningful" figure for 2011-12, when the COI, which bought advertising space and commissioned public information films on behalf of government departments, was being wound up.

Complex changes

But marketing industry insiders say the figures, which are included in the government's new marketing plan for 2012-13 released this week by the Cabinet Office, clearly indicate an increase.

Oliver Hickson, former PR chief at the COI, said: "My view on this is that spending is going up.

We are determined to ensure spend never returns to anything like the highest levels seen before Cabinet Office

"The vast majority of central government marketing spend was through the COI.

"There was some other spend but I would suggest that was either internal press offices or local authorities, which will still carry on."

Part of the planned increase in spending is likely to go on explaining complex changes to the welfare system and trying to convince health service workers and the public of the merits of NHS reforms, says Mr Hickson, who now runs his own public sector PR consultancy.

"They are quite big and potentially sensitive issues that you would imagine would need a reasonable amount of money spent on them to talk to stakeholders and the public," he told BBC News.

But he says it is "sensible" for the government to spend money on communication, particularly if it is targeted at "hard-to-reach groups" such as young people and pensioners.

In its "annual plan for proactive government communications" the Cabinet Office details how departments are being forced to work together on marketing to save cash.

Campaigns

It also sets out each department's "priority communication activities" for 2012-13.

The health department's priorities - in addition to long-running campaigns against smoking, obesity and other public health problems - include "supporting the implementation of the NHS's efficiency and productivity challenge" and "informing and engaging staff groups and stakeholders in the health and care reforms".

The department for work and pensions' priorities include "building understanding and positive perceptions of Personal Independence Payments as a fair benefit, personalised to reflect claimants' needs".

And the business department plans to spend money on "communicating the government's macroeconomic strategy" and "supporting policies designed to boost enterprise and manufacturing".

The COI was axed in April with the loss of 400 jobs as part of coalition efforts to cut the amount of money spent by the government on marketing, which reached more than £500m a year under Labour.

A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said the coalition was "determined to ensure spend never returns to anything like the highest levels seen before".

She said the Cabinet Office was working with the Government Procurement Service to put in place a new system for "accurately capturing, on a monthly basis, all central government communications spend" for the first time.
Why Meditate? Steve Pearl has been meditating for over 40 years since he became a Buddhist in the 70’s in Dharamsala, India.

As a child of the 60’s Steve was active in the counter-culture movement in Palo Alto, CA. Bitten by the wanderlust bug, he found a loophole little-known loophole and managed to dodge the draft when he moved to Europe with his mother and brother from Veracruz, Mexico on a frigate ship.

He and his brother Andy, drove a red VW van across the former Yugoslavia, a pre-revolutionary Iran, and Afghanistan where they bartered the van for six horses. They made their way to India through Pakistan on these horses with a band of friends. He almost died on a mountain pass along the way.

He worked on a pirate ship in Ibiza back when it was still a small fishing hamlet. He even made and sold sandals on the Spanish Steps in Rome.

He first came in contact with Buddhism in Dharamsala, India and was a Buddhist monk for well over a decade. He was also a pilot doing aerial photography.

Steve is currently retired and has chronicled the adventures of his youth in a book called From Kalamazoo to Kathmandu. Learn more about Meditation:

5 Tips for Getting Started with Meditation
The defunct company that used to own the 747 parked at Quonset State Airport that a New York businessman wants to convert into a replica of Air Force One holds a storied place in aviation lore, including transporting the deposed Shah of Iran, buying Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and, allegedly, doing work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Evergreen International Aviation got its start in 1960 as Evergreen Helicopters, a company founded in Oregon by Delford M. Smith.

By 1975, the company was flying airplanes as well when it bought an aircraft maintenance center outside Tucson, Arizona, that was run by the CIA, according to the Oregonian, Oregon's largest newspaper. In 1980, the company was commissioned by the U.S. government to fly the deposed Shah of Iran from Panama to exile in Egypt, the newspaper reported. In the 1980s, Evergreen transported U.S. troops on drug raids in Central and South America, the paper said.

Over the years, company officials denied working for the CIA.

When contacted Wednesday by The Providence Journal to discuss Evergreen's relationship with the CIA, a spokesman for the spy agency declined to comment.

The company also had contracts to carry U.S. Mail, as well as transporting cargo and personnel for private businesses.

Evergreen filed for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on Dec. 31, 2013, in the Delaware District.

While the bankruptcy was pending, the 747 now parked at Quonset, tail identification number N485EV, sat for several years on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where it earned the unofficial title of airport mascot.

As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, the company's aircraft were sold off.

The 747 at Quonset was purchased in the bankruptcy proceedings by Jet Midwest Group and is registered with the Federal Aviation Administration by a related company, Mojave Jet Services, which has an agreement with the businessman behind the Air Force One project.

The plane began service in 1973 as part of the fleet of Singapore Airlines. It also had been owned by Flying Tiger Line and Pan American World Airways before coming to Evergreen in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

(The Spruce Goose is owned by a separate nonprofit arm of Evergreen and was not involved in the bankruptcy.)

pparker@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7360

On Twitter: @projopaul
Want to download torrents on iPad at full speed, but afraid of jailbreaking your iOS device? Wondering if you can download torrents on your iPhone without jailbreak? Well, that should not be a problem if you follow the method featured in this article.

Introduction

Previously, I had written a post featuring the best torrent downloader app for an iPhone. In that I had mentioned a much easier way to download torrents on your iPhone, iPad or even on an iPod touch. But there’s a catch in that.

These torrent downloading apps can be installed only on a jailbroken iOS device from third party app stores like Cydia. This can be a problem to some iOS users for whom jailbreaking may be a strict no-no. However, the good news is that, there is a work around to this problem.

In this article I am sharing a new idea that would help you download torrents on your iOS device without the need of a jailbreak.

What are torrents?

Torrenting is a file sharing protocol on the internet that is fundamentally different from all other ways of downloading a file. In the traditional way of downloading a file, a file can only be downloaded from a single source on the internet. However, in torrents’ case, a file can be downloaded, bit by bit, from the source of upload as well as from fellow downloaders. Hence, by using up multiple sources of downloading simultaneously, torrents can potentially increase the speed of download of a file when compared to direct downloads.

While downloading a torrent file there are three types of sharing sources that you will come across.

Users who have completed their download and are sharing/seeding it for others to download are called seeders. The more seeders a file has, the faster the download is bound to complete. Users who only have a portion of the file, but are uploading it and downloading the rest at the same time are called peers. Peers are very useful in increasing the overall speed of downloading a torrent file. Users who have just started downloading the torrent and have no portion of it to share with the others are called leechers.

The torrent files themselves are just trackers that keep track of the different download locations in real time. They manage the seeding and leeching of a file to different computers.

Why Torrent?

The internet has developed rapidly in the past two decades, but not everyone can afford a high-speed internet connection yet. As a result, slower internet speeds may make it cumbersome for such users to download heavy sized files.

In that context torrents have emerged as the easiest means to share large-sized files among multiple internet users. Additionally, the speed of downloading torrents may not be limited to your ISP speed. Using proper porting techniques anyone may get download speeds that are much faster than what they are otherwise used to.

No Torrent Clients in App Store

Android users have access to loads of torrent clients such as bittorrent and utorrent on Google’s Play Store. These apps can download torrents without jailbreak or root on android devices. At the same time, iOS users struggle to find even a single such app in Apple‘s App Store.

The reason?

Well, over the years Apple has been keen on implementing copy right infringement laws a tad more seriously than many of its rivals in the tech industry. The curators of Apple’s App Store try very hard not to allow torrenting apps to enter the iOS platform. And they do succeed in their efforts for the most part.

That’s where iOS jailbreaking comes into the picture. Jailbreaking unlocks a number of commonly used features that iOS users are otherwise deprived of. One such feature would be the ability to download third party apps like utorrent.

But, if you are one of those users who are skeptical of jailbreaking your device then the following guide is for you. Use it to simply download torrents on iPad without jailbreak.

How to Download Torrents on iPad (iOS)

In this guide we are going to use a download manager such as ‘iDownloader’ or ‘UC Browser’. We shall use this manager to download torrents so that no jailbreak is required as promised earlier. We will also use two other websites in the process to download torrents at high speeds.

Requirements before downloading torrents on iPad

1. Install a download manager like iDownloader or UC browser that can be quickly downloaded from Apple’s App Store within a minute or two.

2. Secondly, you will need a torrent website for browsing and saving the torrents you would like to download. For this you will have to look for a torrent website that is online or active. A simple Google search for active torrent sites should suffice.

Steps to download torrents on iPad

Step 1 : Open iDownloader or UC browser on your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and open the internet browser given in that app. Browsers of different download managers work differently.

Step 2 : Go to any working torrent site. Here, we have used “Piratebay” as an example. You can use any working torrent site of your choice. In that torrent site, search for the legal torrent you want to download.

Step 3 : Long tap the Download link of that particular torrent.

Step 4 : You will get a pop-up with 3 options – ‘Open’, ‘Copy’, ‘Cancel’. Select ‘Copy‘ by tapping on it.

Step 5 : Now, open a new tab on your browser and go to www.zbigz.com.

Step 6 : On the Zbigz website you’ll see a URL field. Paste the Torrent link (which you had copied in step 4) in there and tap on the GO button.

Step 7 : Wait for a moment. Zbigz will now create the download link.

Step 8 : After you get the link, just tap on the download button in the shape of a “down-arrow” which is located beside the file name.

You should see these three options – ‘Download’, ‘Open’ and ‘Copy Link’. Choose the ‘Download‘ option in order to download the file to your iPad.

Alternatively, you can just tap on the download icon in the shape of an ‘up-arrow’ at the bottom of the page in iDownloader. The downloaded file is stored in the ‘Files‘ segment of iDownloader.

That’s it. You have now successfully downloaded a torrent file to your iDevice without having to jailbreak it.

Update

It is common practice to use ‘Safari‘ in the process of downloading files from sites like ZbigZ. But, the Safari browser sometimes downloads the files and other times streams them directly, which can be a problem. So, sticking to the likes of UC browser and iDownloader can be the better option.

Got a question? Please feel free to voice out in the comments below.
Last Thursday night, a gay couple was brutally beaten by a group of two men and six women who were “visibly intoxicated.” NBC Philadelphia reports, “Witnesses say someone in the group asked, 'Is this your f****** boyfriend?' When one of the victims told them yes, the group allegedly attacked them, punching and kicking them in the face, head and chest.” One of the attackers grabbed a victim's bag and fled. At least one of the victims was taken to the hospital for fractures to his face and had to have his jaw wired shut.

Generally after an attack of this kind, the investigation can draw out indefinitely. The Philadelphia Police Department said it was looking for as many as 12 people in relation to the attack.

But today Philadelphia's ABC News syndicate reported that some of the suspects are expected to surrender to police in the near future.

Why the sudden change of heart? A number of good actors on various social media used Twitter, Facebook, and some CCTV footage to track down the attackers and alert police of their possible identities.

When the Philadelphia police released grainy CCTV footage of the group of attackers on YouTube on Tuesday, Greg Bennett, a former Real Housewives of New Jersey star, tweeted the video with the message, “Video of the 10-12 pieces of garbage suspected of a gay bashing in Philly. Spread it round.” Bennett, who has hundreds of thousands of followers, received a photo from one of his followers of a group of people at a restaurant in the area who looked similar to the people in the CCTV video.

At that point, a Twitter user called @FanSince09 retweeted the image from the restaurant and discovered that the restaurant was called La Viola. The Twitter user then went to Facebook to find out who had checked into La Viola on Twitter on Thursday night and found at least three people who checked into the restaurant and whose faces seemed to match those in the CCTV video.

@FanSince09 reportedly took that information to the police, and Philadelphia Detective Joseph Murray tweeted this morning, “S/O to @FanSince09 This is what makes my job easy. Sure, it's up to me to make the arrest but we are all in this together.”

Since then, sources have told various news outlets that the people in the photo were former students of a local Catholic high school who were in town for a dinner. NBC Philadelphia said that some of the suspects have lawyered up and told the police department they would surrender today, but they have kept the department waiting, and officers were considering going to the suspects' homes to make the arrests.

Use of CCTV footage has often been highly controversial. In the UK, privacy groups balked at widespread CCTV use, which was later shown to not have much of an impact on crime prevention. But occasionally good can come of the ever-watching eye. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin woman was cleared of responsibility in a car crash with a Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office Deputy when CCTV footage was discovered that showed that the Deputy was responsible for the crash.

Still, using the hive mind to solve crimes and mysteries doesn't always have a happy ending. In the wake of the Boston bombings last year, amateur investigators on reddit accused several innocent people of being the perpetrators, and the site manager, Erik Martin, issued a public apology for "online witch hunts and dangerous speculation."

It's still unclear whether suspects will be arrested and charged—as Detective Murray tweeted today, “Let's be clear here. No arrests made. Central Detectives have done a ton of work and have a lot more to do. (Not a Law & Order episode)”. But it is clear that social media contributed to speeding up the process of justice.
2012 might have been too early for a price cut on Sony's flagging PlayStation Vita portable, but early 2013 is obviously a different matter. Sony Japan announced today that both the Wi-Fi and 3G enabled versions of the system will be lowered to a price of ¥19,980 (around $215) starting on Feb. 28; a price drop of 20 to 34 percent (depending on the model).

The reduction comes none too soon to try to revive the powerful portable's standing in the country. After a relatively healthy launch weekend, Japanese sales of the system plummeted in its second week on store shelves. Those sales continued to sag week by week, except for brief spikes surrounding new software launches that weren't sustainable. The system reached a new sales low in November when it managed to sell only 4,021 units across Japan in a week, placing behind even the ancient PlayStation Portable and selling less than 1/46th as much as the 3DS in the same period.

Are the US and Europe set to see similar price cuts in the near future? In the US, Sony's descriptions of Vita sales have gone from "exceptional" to "acceptable" to estimates of only 35,000 sales in January 2013, which can only be described as "unacceptable." Europe's Vita sales have looked more like Japan's, falling behind even the PSP and well behind the newer 3DS in the region last year.

Sony also scaled back its worldwide sales expectations for the Vita two times last year after the market gave a collective shrug to show less than predicted levels of interest in the system, and Sony President Kaz Hirai said in January that system sales were on the "low end of what we expected."

That all points to a system that needs to quickly come down in price worldwide if it's going to have any hope of stopping its downward spiral. Perhaps Wednesday's PlayStation Meeting will include some portable pricing news in addition to word of Sony's future home console plans.
Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.

Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way.

Logic would lead one to believe that "dyslogistic" is somehow related to the Greek word "logos," from which the words "logic" and "logistics" are derived. In actuality, however, "dyslogistic" is a 19th-century merger of the prefix "dys-," meaning "bad," and "eulogy," referring to an expression of praise. English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) often used "dyslogistic" in his writings as an adjective to convey dispraise or opprobrium. And even today the word is likely to be encountered in judicial and intellectual writings.

Examples

The blogger used many dyslogistic adjectives to express his dissatisfaction with the mayor.

"One answer lies in ... the dyslogistic school of memoir written by former officials who present themselves as disillusioned innocents." - From a book review by Jacob Heilbrunn in The New York Times, June 22, 2008
We’ve all seen them before. Walk three blocks in Boston and you’re bound to encounter megaphone-wielding “Men of God” telling us we’re all going to Hell. But one little girl in Salem took exceptional offense to a proselytizing loudmouth attempting to ruin the sacred institution of Salem Halloween, so she told him what we’ve all secretly dreamed of saying.

I know I wrote yesterday about two Boston kids telling their Mom to shut up and how wrong it was, But I’m willing to make an exception to the “respect your elders” rule when said elder is telling everyone within earshot they’re going to Hell unless they subscribe to his very specific brand of Christianity. And in Salem on Halloween, no less! Let the Pagans have their day of fun in the unholiest of lands, and leave the sermons on every other sidewalk in Boston like you normally do.

[h/t Reddit]
Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem and Liam Gallagher set for Malahide Castle Next Year?

Ah, the old internet rumour mill. What on earth was life like before you?

According to reports on a couple of mammoth Irish digital content pedallers, LCD Soundsystem are primed to play Malahide Castle on Tuesday, June 5, Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz will play Saturday, June 9 and Liam Gallagher (whose debut solo album Christine Costello reviewed for us over here) will play an as-of-yet unspecified date in the month.

According to a post by Enjoy Malahide (and let’s face it, who wouldn’t enjoy Malahide?) the shows are provisional and dependent upon successful planning permission. Assuming that’s granted, and these shows are, you know, actually in the pipeline, we can expect three sell-outs right off the bat there.
heic1217 — Science Release

Hubble helps find candidate for most distant object in the Universe yet observed

By combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and one of nature’s zoom lenses, astronomers have found what is probably the most distant galaxy yet seen in the Universe. The object offers a peek back into a time when the Universe was only 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.

We see the newly discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, as it was 420 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has travelled for 13.3 billion years to reach Earth, which corresponds to a redshift of approximately 11 [1].

This is the latest discovery from the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) [2], which uses massive galaxy clusters as cosmic telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them, an effect called gravitational lensing.

“While one occasionally expects to find an extremely distant galaxy using the tremendous power of gravitational lensing, this latest discovery has outstripped even my expectations of what would be possible with the CLASH program,” said Rychard Bouwens (Leiden University, Netherlands), a co-author of the study. “The science output in this regard has been incredible.”

Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, the galaxy’s light took a detour along multiple paths around the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647.7+7015. Due to the gravitational lensing, the team observed three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with Hubble. The cluster’s gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear far brighter than they otherwise would, although they still appear as tiny dots in Hubble’s portrait.

“This cluster does what no manmade telescope can do,” said Marc Postman (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), leader of the CLASH team. “Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy.”

The object is so small it may be in the first stages of galaxy formation, with analysis showing the galaxy is less than 600 light-years across. For comparison the Milky Way is 150 000 light-years across. The estimated mass of this baby galaxy is roughly equal to 100 million or a billion suns, or 0.1 - 1 percent the mass of our Milky Way’s stars.

“This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy,” explained Dan Coe (Space Telescope Science Institute), lead author of the study. “Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments.”

The team spent months systematically ruling out all other alternative explanations for the object’s identity before concluding that it is the distance record holder. This was important, as nearby objects (such as red stars, brown dwarfs and old or dusty galaxies) can mimic the appearance of an extremely distant galaxy and must be carefully excluded.

The area around the galaxy was observed by Hubble through 17 filters — spanning near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths — with the galaxy appearing only in the two reddest filters. This was consistent with a highly redshifted galaxy, but did not fully exclude other possibilities. Images of the galaxy at longer infrared wavelengths taken by Spitzer were more conclusive, however: if the object were intrinsically red, it would appear bright in these images. Instead, the galaxy was barely detected, if at all.

MACS0647-JD may be too far away for any current telescope to confirm the distance with spectroscopy [3]. Nevertheless, all the evidence points towards the fledgling galaxy being the new distance record holder.

The galaxy will almost certainly be a prime target for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, which will be able to conduct spectroscopy to make a definitive measurement of its distance and study its properties in more detail.

Notes

[1] Redshift is a consequence of the expansion of space over cosmic time, which stretches the wavelength of light. This has the consequence of making a distant object appear redder than it really is. Objects with a higher redshift have had their light stretched more, and are more distant. The previous candidate for the most distant object observed has a redshift of 10.3 (heic1103); confirmations of several objects with redshifts between 7 and 9 have been reported using spectroscopy, which gives more robust results (see for example eso1041). This newly discovered galaxy’s redshift has been calculated as being approximately 10.8, with a 95% confidence that it lies between 10.3 and 11.3.

[2] The new distance champion is the second remote galaxy uncovered in the CLASH survey, a multiwavelength census of 25 hefty galaxy clusters with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments. Earlier this year, the CLASH team announced the discovery of a galaxy that existed when the universe was about 490 million years old (redshift 9.6), 70 million years later than the new record-breaking galaxy. So far, the survey has completed observations for 20 of the 25 clusters.

[3] Redshift can only be precisely measured using spectroscopy, in which an object’s light is dispersed and its colour probed in detail. However, it can be estimated by comparing images made of an object through different coloured filters, a method called photometric redshift. The galaxy will only be visible in some of the filters (having been redshifted out of some filters altogether), and the redshift is derived from the bluest filter in which the galaxy is visible. Photometric redshifts, as used in this study, provide less certainty, but they can be calculated for objects much fainter than is possible with spectroscopic redshifts. For this reason, the paper refers to the object as a 'candidate z≈11 galaxy'

More information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of:

Dan Coe (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), Adi Zitrin (Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, Heidelberg, Germany), Mauricio Carrasco (Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, Heidelberg, Germany and Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile), Xinwen Shu (University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China), Wei Zheng (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Marc Postman (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), Larry Bradley (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), Anton Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), Rychard Bouwens (Leiden University, Netherlands), Tom Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain and Ikerbasque Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain) Anna Monna (Universitätssternwarter München, Munich, Germany), Ole Host (University College London, London, UK and Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Leonidas A. Moustakas (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, La Cañada Flintridge, USA), Holland Ford (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), John Moustakas (Siena College, Loudonville, USA), Arjen van der Wel (Max Planck Institute for AStronomy, Heidelberg, Germany), Megan Donahue (Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA), Steven A. Rodney (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Narciso Bentez (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Granada, Spain), Stephanie Jouvel (University College London, London, UK and Institut de Cincies de l’Espai, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain), Stella Seitz (Universitätssternwarte München, Munich, Germany and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany), Daniel D. Kelson (Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, USA), and Piero Rosati (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany)

The research is presented in a paper entitled “CLASH: Three Strongly Lensed Images of a Candidate z≈11 Galaxy” to be published in the December 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Links

Contacts

Rychard Bouwens

Leiden University

Leiden, Netherlands

Tel: +31 71 527 8456

Email: bouwens@strw.leidenuniv.nl

Dan Coe

Space Telescope Science Institute

Baltimore, USA

Tel: +1 410 338 4312

Email: dcoe@stsci.edu

Oli Usher

Hubble/ESA

Garching, Munich

Tel: +49-89-3200-6855

Email: ousher@eso.org
Web comics are a great way to get some much-needed downtime and inspiration, and are a nice, creative way to fill a break in work. Web comics are free and easily accessible, and there are plenty of great ones out there. In this article, we've picked some of the best web comics to explore.

Some of the world's most well-known fictional characters were born through the medium of comics. The likes of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man have all won the hearts of successive generations of readers – to such an extent that, despite the rise of the internet, the printed comic industry is still booming.

If you're inspired to create your own, take a look at our guides to how to create a comic page, and how to colour comics.

Nedroid (pronounced 'NEH-droid') is a web comic by artist Anthony Clark. He has his fingers in a few different comic pies, but is best known for a goofy comic series featuring Beartato – a potato/bear hybrid, of course – that has been running since 2006.

James Squires is an illustrator based in New Zealand who describes himself as a 'delusional comic person, coffee drinker, cat owner'. He's the artist behind web comic Moonbeard. These surreal, standalone cartoons often feature surprising twists, and they're well worth a browse. You can also browse his work via his Instagram feed.

Webcomic Name first appeared in July 2016 and swiftly became a firm favourite. It's the work of UK-based artist Alex Norris and it never fails to amuse us with its excellently naive artwork, blobby characters and simple jokes, usually topped off with Webcomic Name's staple 'oh no' punchline. It shouldn't really work but it very much does, every single time.

Anne Szabla's Bird Boy follows the story of Bali, a 10-year-old Nuru boy who is keen to prove his worth to his tribe. After being banned from the ceremony that would make him an adult, he stumbles upon a legendary weapon and must flee across a dangerous land of gods, men and beasts to prevent it falling into the wrong hands.

The story was picked up by Darkhorse comics and has been compiled into graphic novels Bird Boy Volume 1: The Sword of Mali Mani and Bird Boy Volume 2: The Liminal Wood. With a thumbs up from Mike Mignola, it's definitely worth checking out.

Canadian comic artist Kate Beaton, blended her expertise in history and anthropology with a talent for visual storytelling to give us this popular webcomic. Kate started the web strip during her breaks from her day job and they were all created in MS Paint (really).

Beaton's simple, whimsical style, caricaturing Western historical figures from James Joyce to Ada Lovelace make Hark! A Vagrant a particular favourite of ours, and have won the artist multiple awards. She's no longer adding to the collection, but the archived version is well worth a browse.

Written and drawn by Jake Wyatt with a helping hand from Kathryn Wyatt, this ongoing fantasy web comic is the tale of one girl's quest for revenge. This web comic is updated every Wednesday, and has gained popularity for its stunning visuals and engaging story. When the story finishes (we're not sure when this will be yet), there are plans to released by Image Comics as a print version.

Run by Lize Meddings and Laura Jayne Cox, The Sad Ghost Club is a web comic with a cult following. "The Sad Ghost Club is a club for anyone who’s ever felt sad or lost," they explain in their manifesto. "It's the club for those who don’t feel like they're part of any other club; we love creating comics and zines to highlight the issues that a lot of ghosties go through."

Branching out into tote bags, beanies, T-shirts, badges and more, the duo have come a long way with their tales of a lonely little ghost. Meddings and Cox's approach ensures you'll be smiling through each story, knowing you're not alone in the world after all.

Created by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne, Oglaf is often a very NSFW web comic centred on a medieval fantasy realm which is decidedly sexual in nature. Not for the faint-hearted, Cooper and Bayne bring their world to life through hilarious short stories and inspirational illustrations – just don't let your boss catch you reading it.

If you've embarked on role-playing games or dipped your toes into the world of medieval fantasy stories, you'll know that people tend to take both very seriously. The Order of the Stick is a web comic that pokes fun at the subjects with a unique flair. It was created by artist Rich Burlew, who brings the stick figure into the modern age.

Artist and writer James Hornsby has been parodying and lampooning professional wrestling culture with his hilarious Botched Spot ever since 2008. Creating his own characters including Olav Orlav and Rad Bad DeBone, this is one of those web comics that anyone can enjoy – whether you like wrestling or not.

Deathbulge was initially a comic series about a death metal band, but illustrator and writer Dan came to believe that was too limiting, so decided to draw whatever he felt like. It seems his change in direction worked, as the web comic has become a firm favourite among web comic fans. With out a new issue every Monday, there's always something fresh.

Scary Go Round is the home of the web comics of John Allison. There are a few different stories there, all of which form part of a shared universe, and take place around the city of Tackleford. The current comic, Giant Days, follows regular Esther de Groot as she attends university. An inventive web comic with colourful illustrations and witty dialogue that MTV favourite Daria would be proud of.

Tom Gauld is a hero of sorts among the illustrator and comic-loving crowd. Based in London, not only does he draw a regular cartoon for the Guardian newspaper, he's also created a number of comic books. Although You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack is indeed, a printed publication, you can sample its delights on his Tumblr.

Gemma Correll charts her 'mostly boring' life in her daily diaries

Gemma Correll describes herself as a cartoonist, writer, illustrator and all-round small person. It's arguable whether her sketchbook diaries technically count as a web comic, but they're so charming that we just had to include them here. Charting her 'mostly boring' life, cute illustrations teamed with refreshingly honest observations make for some delightful reading.

Related articles:
When it came to choosing my first “older” Only the Music choice of 2019 it was very clear which route I’d be taking. Fresh in my memory as I type is the recent launch of Venus Unwrapped, the concert series at London’s Kings Place which will spend the next eleven months throwing a light on the achievements of women composers. That opening event saw soprano Mary Bevan and members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment perform the music of seventeenth century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, and by the time the year is out over 100 women composers will have been represented across over sixty events. It should be fascinating, and I suspect many of us will emerge the other end having had previously-held perceptions challenged and changed. So the first track on this month’s playlist is the first movement of French composer Louise Farrenc’s 1847 Symphony No 3 in G minor, a magnificent work that represents a colossal achievement not simply for the fact that it was composed at a time when women were barred from composition classes at the Paris Conservatoire, but also because this was an era during which symphonic music in general was out of fashion on Parisian stages, audiences instead preferring grand opera. Opening with solitary oboe, before quickly and expertly building to a huge full-orchestra climax, this is a brilliantly crafted and thoroughly ear-grabbing work which thoroughly explains why Robert Schumann admired her music so much.

It’s Schumann who then tops this month’s three new release choices, in the shape of cellist Gautier Capuçon’s new all-Schumann programme for Warner Classics, after which we have Early Music vocal ensemble Stile antico on Harmonia Mundi, with a programme centred around English Elizabethan composers in exile. Then to finish, a first foray into the recording studio from the young Consone Quartet that’s resulted in a programme of Mendelssohn and Haydn which I’ve no doubt I’ll still be describing in eleven months’ time as one of the most satisfying recording debuts of 2019.

Schumann

Years in development, Gautier Capuçon’s latest album is an all-Schumann programme of live concert recordings dating between 2009 and 2015, made with some of his longest-standing musical collaborators and champions. Its superlative curtain-raiser is the Cello Concerto (composed so the three movements flowed seamlessly into each other with no breaks, such was Schumann’s dislike of mid-work applause), recorded in 2015 in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitinck (first concert together 1997). Capuçon’s playing here is supremely elegant and unfailingly beautiful of tone. However equally it’s taut with drama, and with a wonderful ever-so-slightly-untamed quality which brings to the fore the turbulence and instability which dominated so much of Schumann’s life and psychological state. Haitink and the COE meanwhile are with Capuçon every step of the way, with a multi-coloured reading imbued with understanding of both composer and soloist. The rest of the album then underlines Capuçon’s status as one of the world’s finest chamber musicians, with recordings made with pianist Martha Argerich (first concert 2002) at her Martha Argerich Project Festival in Lugano: the Adagio and Allegro op.70, the Fantasiestücke op.73 and the Fünf Stücke im Volkston op.102; then the Fantasiestück op.88 for which they’re joined by Capuçon’s violinist brother Renaud (first concert 1997). With all of these it feels every bit as much like perfection every step of the way, with chamber bonding which couldn’t be any tighter, closer or more instinctive. Or indeed more exquisite, when it comes to moments such as the brothers’ dovetailing lines of the op.88 central slow movement. Obviously it’s early days, but I have a feeling this will turn out to be one of this year’s stand-out albums. So lucky us that we get it as early as January.

Stile antico

This latest beautifully conceived album from Early Music vocal ensemble Stile antico is built around the music of Elizabeth composers who found themselves in exile as a result of their Catholic faith. Sometimes this was textbook geographical exile, with composers such as Peter Philips, Richard Dering and John Dowland effectively choosing spiritual home over physical home by leaving England’s shores for new lives on the continent. For other composers though, such as Robert White and William Byrd, the exile took the form of spiritual exile in England itself.

The works Stile antico have chosen span the emotional and stylistic gamut. On the one hand, there’s Robert White’s (1538-1574) affecting Lamentations a 5: a dramatic and individual setting of the Old Testament Lamentations from Jeremiah, meditating on the Babylonians’ destruction of Jerusalem, which would have felt especially pertinent subject matter for an England-based Catholic. But on the other hand there are works such as Peter Philips’ joyous and slightly more archaic-sounding “Gaude Maria virgo”. The Stile antico sound itself is clear and agile, with female sopranos so boy-treble-like of tone that at points you can’t believe that’s not what you’re listening to, and the two tracks I’ve chosen show that off to the full. First, Richard Dering’s Italianate, madrigal-like “Factum est silentium”, which sets a dramatic passage from the book of Revelation. The second extract is then the recording’s only modern piece, from one of today’s finest British composers: Huw Watkins’ 2014 setting of Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, which on the surface describes the funeral rites of the phoenix and the turtle dove (symbolic of perfection and devoted love), but which may also have been an allegory about Catholic martyrs.

Consone Quartet

Every so often a debut recording comes along which absolutely leaps out of the stereo at you as something special right from its first seconds, and this is one of these.

Formed in 2012 at London’s Royal College of Music, the Consone Quartet focusses on exploring Classical and Early Romantic period repertoire on period instruments, and their successes to date include winning the 2016 Royal Over-Seas League Ensemble Prize, and two prizes at the 2015 York Early Music Competition, including a place on the Eeemerging Scheme for young artists at Ambronay. At the centre of this programme now recorded through that same Eeemerging Scheme is the first of Haydn’s late-life op.77 pair of string quartets of 1799, commissioned by the wealthy Viennese patron Prince Maximilian Lobkowitz who at the same time commissioned a set of quartets from the young Beethoven. Bookending this are two Mendelssohn quartets: the String Quartet No 1 of 1829, written by the eighteen year old composer shortly after Beethoven’s death sent shockwaves across the musical world; then the four string quartet movements dating from various periods of Mendelssohn’s life, which after his death in 1847 were grouped together and published (in 1850) as his op.81. It’s Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 1 you’ll find on this playlist, and the Consone Quartet’s tender and poised reading displays all the qualities you’ll hear across their programme: clean, lucid tone; tonally zinging and tightly superglued ensemble playing; beautifully spun long lines; and a compelling narrative to the phrasing which has you hanging on for their every next musical word.
If antioxidant supplement labels are to be believed, you should stop reading this article and gobble down some pills: Spurred by the rising sales of antioxidant supplements, Pom Wonderful, makers of pomegranate juice, now makes an antioxidant supplement that they claim has "extraordinary health benefits."

This proclamation is echoed by numerous health supplement ads in health food stores and on the Internet. For instance, Source Naturals Resveratrol advises on the General Nutrition Centers Web site that taking antioxidants "…may help prevent free-radical damage throughout the body and provide protective support to the cardiovascular system.*" Problem solved. Except a bit of a buzz-kill is delivered by the asterisked footnote: "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

So, do the purported health benefits of antioxidants actually exist?

Here's the theory: Just as the name suggests, antioxidants slow down oxidation, a process that is part of normal bodily functions but can also damage cells. Oxidation can even increase the stickiness of cholesterol, upping the risk that it will block circulation and cause heart attacks or strokes.

So it at least theoretically makes sense that antioxidants such as vitamin C, vitamin E and other antioxidant compounds found in carrots and other vegetables, are good for you. Ditto antioxidants found in pomegranates, red wine and licorice root. And early studies in the 1990s showed that people who ate more antioxidants had a lower risk of heart disease and stroke.

But those findings didn't hold up for antioxidant supplements. In later studies, such supplements did not affect risk of—and in some studies actually increased—heart attacks and strokes.

Nancy Cook, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a co-author of one of these studies, suggests two possible explanations for these results: It could be that studies of supplements are using the wrong doses and combinations of antioxidants. Or, people who eat lots of antioxidants—in foods, not supplements—are already doing the kinds of things that lower heart disease risk, namely exercise and, well, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Biochemist Michael Aviram of the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, suggests another alternative. His research focuses on pomegranates. In a recent study, he found that mice bred to have blockages in their arteries and developed fewer blockages in their arteries after they were fed parts of pomegranates. Because such blockages can cause heart attacks and strokes, he says his studies suggest antioxidants work against such events. And although earlier studies found that vitamin E—another antioxidant—didn't clear such blockages, he found that the kinds of antioxidants in pomegranates do. His theory: there are many sources of oxidative stress—viruses, toxins, physical strain—and each antioxidant might be effective against a particular type of stress, but not the others.

In other words, it depends whether the antioxidants you're taking are fighting against the good, normal oxidation in your body or the bad oxidation. "The devil's in the details in a lot of these things," says Andrew Shao of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association in Washington, D.C., representing supplement manufacturers. "If you were to take all the marketing at face value, you might think that the ideal situation is to have no oxidation whatsoever. That is not what you want. It's part of normal biochemistry, part of the immune system."

"Most [antioxidants] don't work alone," he adds. "They're not drugs."

Like Cook, Shao recommends a diet high in antioxidants and a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise. "That may run counter to what you see in some marketing," he says, although he refused to say which ads he meant.

Marketing also makes it difficult for consumers to know what they are getting. "Is the product on the shelf the same one that was studied in clinical trials?" Shao asks. For foods, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission monitor claims made on the label or in advertising, but "it very much depends on the strength and specificity of the language in the claim," he says. A product that claims "antioxidant support" will raise less ire than one that claims to lower the risk of a particular disease.

In any case, the research is clear: Large, carefully controlled studies and trials have consistently found no benefit to antioxidant supplements, says Alice Lichtenstein of Tufts University.* "You have to take the totality of the data, and that's what we normally do [in science]," she says. "Why are they popular? I don't know. Maybe because it sounds like the easy answer."

With reporting by Willa Austen Isikoff

* Note (7/7/08): This sentence has been modified since the original posting.
ArenaNet seems to have a bit of a problem with finding good names relating to the heavily armoured profession that serves as the Monk’s spiritual successor.

It’s understandable, really. While the guardian has many similarities with existing archetypes, the precise composition of the guardian is something that doesn’t really have an established name in the genre. While the ‘paladin’ archetype is probably closest, the guardian extends much broader (as I discussed after the guardian’s release) and paladins are typically associated with having a specific religious belief, which would fit poorly with the range of religious positions (or lack thereof) of the playable races.

With that said, the term ‘guardian’ has made for a fair label. It may not be as evocative as terms like ‘ranger’ and ‘elementalist’… however, it is functional and descriptive enough for the guardian’s abilities and role, and there aren’t really any more exotic terms that fit.

The term ‘dragonhunter’, on the other hand… Skyrim jokes aside, it feels a bit like a development placeholder term that never got replaced. While both terms are somewhat pedestrian at first glance, ‘guardian’ is descriptive to the general (but not exclusive) focus on defensive magic while remaining generic enough that it is easy to expect any organisation to include guardians within its ranks (some more than others, of course). Similarly, each of the other profession names, including the chronomancer specialisation, focus on abilities rather than goals.

Unlike the Chronomancer, whose name identifies their abilities, the name ‘dragonhunter’ seems to dictate the character’s objectives and personality while saying little about their abilities.

For the dragonhunter, this is turned on its head. The term says little about the character’s abilities, while limiting the character in goals: by its name, a dragonhunter is implied to only be focused on fighting the dragons, rather than pursuing other threats and goals. In the latest Ready Up, in fact, we are explicitly told that dragonhunters focus their efforts on hunting dragon minions, including taking up something of a ‘witch hunter’ aspect in sniffing out Mordremoth-influenced sylvari and other dragon-corrupted individuals among their allies. While it is a reasonable assumption that the PCs would have such a primary goal, it does lead to the impression that ArenaNet is telling us what the personality of the character should be, rather than letting the player come to their own opinion of their character’s goals and motivations.

Also, unlike the term ‘guardian’, it does not feel as if there is a lack of other terms that can be used. For instance, one proposal I would be inclined to make would be “Vigilant” – the implied connection to the Vigil can still indicate that it originates from dragon-fighting organisations, while also evoking the image of a sentinel standing watch over a town, ready to defend against interlopers through skilled archery and well-placed traps.

Now that we’ve got the complaining about names out of the way, let’s look at the profession itself…

What’s Old Is New Again

The new guardian elite specialisation feels a lot like ArenaNet is adding a ranger-like option for the guardian.

I’ll have to admit that I’ve flip-flopped a bit on my impression of the new specialisation. On initial reaction, the skills do look like they’ll be fun to use. On further reflection, however, while the new chronomancer skills and abilities neatly fit within the general theme of the mesmer, the dragonhunter takes the guardian in a very different direction, the combination of traps and archery feeling very much like a ranger enhanced with guardian magic.

With additional thought, however, it struck me that this might actually be the point. One of the main sources of nostalgia from Guild Wars 1 players was the secondary profession system, allowing a character to pick up traits and skills from another profession, even to the point of ‘playing to your secondary’, relying primarily on the skills of a secondary profession combined with the primary attribute of the main profession – a tactic particularly employed by touch rangers and “bunny thumper” hammer rangers, among others. The dragonhunter, then, can possibly be regarded as the first of a new set of specialisations that simulate secondary professions, granting a set of abilities normally associated with another profession while maintaining some of the flavour of the original profession.

Come Into My Parlour

So how does it all go together?

The dragonhunter could prove to play very similarly to trapper rangers.

Played in a pure sense, the dragonhunter would likely play very similar to a traditional trapper ranger. Plant a few traps between your firing position and the enemy, and open fire – if the enemy remains at range it may be conceding an advantage to the dragonhunter (especially given that one of the traits increases damage if you maintain a certain distance from the enemy). Conversely, if the enemy approaches, they will need to run the gauntlet of traps – some of which may include potent crowd control effects such as Dragon’s Maw. This is reinforced by the additional effects on the activation of Virtues – Courage allows a period of negating enemy ranged attacks, while Resolve can be used for a quick getaway.

One distinction between the dragonhunter longbow and the traditional ranger longbow is a greater focus on striking multiple targets. While rangers have a trait that allows arrows to pierce through targets, this is a fairly narrow line. In practise, even with this trait, longbow rangers tend to focus on a single target at once unless firing upon a closely packed group. The dragonhunter longbow attacks (as well as the Spear of Justice), on the other hand, are more focused on striking multiple targets, whether a circular area or a line, with the basic attack having a requirement to hit multiple targets in order to have the full effect. The line-based effects, however, appear to be more forgiving than the ranger’s Piercing Arrows trait, affecting a broader area, and while the auto attack requires the second target to be behind the first, a fairly wide angle is allowed.

The dragonhunter’s bow attacks show a strong focus on area attacks.

However, the new features of the dragonhunter do not necessarily need to be combined with the longbow. While the traps have a slight delay when set beneath a target’s feet rather than triggered by an enemy’s movement, it’s still quite possible for an enemy to be caught within the area when used in this manner, especially when combined with other crowd control effects such as Ring of Warding. Meanwhile, the traps that have a crowd control effect themselves can be used to keep the enemy within an area where they can be subjected to symbols and/or melee attacks. The enhanced Virtues, on the other hand, grant additional options that can be useful when combined with any weapon.

This last point, in fact, may be a bit of a balance concern. Simply by taking an elite specialisation, a guardian can gain three additional, quite potent skills to their bar, in addition to access to the new skills. While the benefits of traits from the existing core specialisations such as Altruistic Healing and Pure of Voice are not to be underestimated, it could be hard for the core specialisations to compete with a projectile blocker, a leap, and Spear of Justice on top of the rest of the line.

No More Tomes?

There’s one last thing to note, which from what I’ve seen was missing from the Twitch program: Jon Peters has raised the possibility of dropping the tomes from the guardian elites and replacing them with new skills. Tome of Courage may be replaced with Signet of Courage, which generates regular healing and can be activated to generate Light of Deliverance for an instant full party heal. Tome of Wrath, on the other hand, is proposed to be replaced by the “Feel My Wrath!” elite shout, which grants Fury and Quickness – although it’s not clear if this is just for the guardian, or whether it might affect allies as well (making it potential competition for a mesmer’s Time Warp).

I’m of mixed thoughts on this. It’s true that tomes tend not to be used by most guardians in most situations, however, I would be saddened to see that aspect removed. On the other hand, the proposed alternatives would be much more useful in most circumstances and allow for more fluid use than the current tome mechanics. The suggestion of bringing back the tomes in a specialisation may well be the best compromise, giving the core guardian gameplay more elites that do not have the unwieldiness of the tomes, while still keeping the tome concept available (once the tome-focused specialisation comes around) to those who wish to use them.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.

If you prize clarity, then these past weeks were some of the best in memory.

1. When America leads, the world is better.

For the first time in eight years, the allies of America and the world's decent people celebrated America's return to leadership. Just about all of them understand that if the United States doesn't exercise its power, the worst regimes on Earth will.

The left claims to care about the downtrodden of the world, but this concern is a moral fraud. The downtrodden the left most care about are American blacks, women and gays. And Palestinians. But these groups aren't downtrodden; they are merely a vehicle by which the left attacks America and Israel to gain power. The truly downtrodden -- that is, the most oppressed people in the world, such as Christians living in the Middle East, and the victims of Syrian President Bashar Assad's tyranny -- know who really cares about them: Trump and America's conservatives.

2. The terrible presidency of Barack Obama is beginning to be acknowledged.

Following President Trump's order to attack Syria about 63 hours after the Syrian regime seemingly used chemical weapons, even many in the mainstream media couldn't help but contrast his prompt response with Obama's nonresponse to Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013. And almost every report further noted that Obama failed to do anything after having promised that he would regard the use of chemical weapons by Assad as crossing a "red line."

Likewise, Obama's do-nothing policies vis-a-vis North Korea are being contrasted with Trump's warnings to leader Kim Jung Un about further testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pressure on China's leaders to rein in the North Korean regime.

These contrasts are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which being there is now hope that Obama's star will dim as time goes on.

This will come as somewhat of a surprise to those on the left, but many of us who are not on the left believe that Obama did more damage to America than any previous president -- economically, militarily and socially.

Regarding the social damage, as the first black president in American history, he could have been an unprecedented force for racial healing but instead left America more racially divided than any modern president. In his repeated citing of Ferguson, for example, he helped spread the lie that a racist white Missouri police officer had killed an innocent black teenager without reason (other than racial bias).

He deceived the American people (the "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" assertion and more) in order to pass Obamacare, one of the largest government-expanding programs in American history. He used presidential power in an unprecedentedly authoritarian manner. He showed far more understanding of the Iranian theocracy than of the Israeli democracy. His Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice were politicized in ways reminiscent of corrupt Third World regimes. And he left America fighting a (thus far nonviolent) second Civil War.

3. The interminably repeated left-wing lie that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are in cahoots has exploded. With Trump's military attack on Assad and verbal attacks on Russia, that claim has been shown to be what those with a little common sense knew it to be: a baseless, wholly made-up conspiracy theory meant to explain an election loss with which Democrats still haven't come to grips. In fact, President Trump has shown more backbone with Russia in his first 100 days in office than President Obama did in eight years.

4. Another charge made over and over by the left -- the mainstream media, academia and the Democratic Party -- that the Trump election had unleashed an unprecedented amount of anti-Semitism was proven to be yet another left-wing hysteria based on a left-wing lie. It turned out that bomb threats phoned into Jewish community centers and Jewish agencies came not from Trump supporters and "white supremacists" but from a black radical and a disturbed young American Jew living in Israel.

Given that factual and moral clarity are conservatism's greatest allies, we may be witnessing the beginning of a conservative Renaissance, the likes of which we haven't seen since the advent of progressivism.
Using React components in non-React websites

Seven leaps Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 5, 2016

This is something that I needed to do recently and I was surprised by how hard I found it to find information on it. A few hours of doubting my ability as a developer and 20+ browser tabs later I discovered that it actually is relatively straight forward using webpack and babel.

TL;DR — use this github project as a template to bundle the component

The aim:

Friends of mine had created a really cool React component, Chat-Template, a configurable component that simulates instant message conversations. I wanted to make this component easily consumable for non-react websites as well.

Chat-Template in action on http://mrwgame.com

The approach:

One thing that was clear from the start is that in order to make the component consumable, I was going to need to package it up webpack.

Webpack takes modules with dependencies and generates static assets representing those modules

A lot of the examples I seen involved the consumer of the webpacked component including react.js on their webpage, this is something I wanted to avoid. I wanted the consumers of the component to not even need to know what React is! (Maybe they’re living under a rock?)

I wrote a node script to wrap the component. It included the component, React and ReactDom and exported a method to display it on a given dom element

Node script to wrap the component

As this code was to be consumed by browsers, I use babel to ensure the best compatibly. Babel is basically a javascript code compiler that converts EC6 javascript code to the much more widely compatible EC5

I now needed to configure webpack. One thing that was needed was to make the method a global variable, so the showChatTemplate function was available, this was done using the libraryTarget and library configurations. The webpack config looked like this

I now had a single javascript file that included everything the consumer needed and could be easily added to a web page.

Perfect! Except at 1.08MB, the generated file was a little on the large side! After running webpack with the -p flag and adding some configuration to make sure the production version of react was being used, the file size shrunk down to a much more manageable 0.283MB

Conclusion:

That’s how I was able to consume a React component in a non-React website. We’ve now added the generated files to Chat-Template so non-React users have the component available to them.

If you are interested in doing the same, use this github project as a starting point to wrap whatever component you want.

If you have any questions or suggestions I would love to hear them.
Ever want to put your old clothes to use, but are sick of just dropping off piles and piles of fabric to Goodwill and calling it a day, not knowing where any of it is actually going? Enter Cotton Incorporated's Blue Jeans Go Green Program, which has fulfilled its goal of gathering 10,000 denim items and using it all as insulation for 10 homes that were put up in the New Orleans Area Habitat For Humanity.

I've got to say — it's probably one of the trendiest initiatives. To start off, AnnaSophia Robb was one of the volunteers at the Habitat For Humanity Build-a-Thon in May in the New Orleans area. Robb herself gave Karen Walter a key to her new home. Robb worked with over 600 other AmeriCorps and various other volunteers from May 20 to May 30, according to WWD.

As if it couldn't get cooler, most of the denim pieces were collected in bins located in Madewell stores. People all over the U.S. dropped their items off at store locations, as well as mailed them in. After collected, the denim pieces were converted into "UltraTouch Denim Insulation" by Bonded Logic Inc., their manufacturing partner.

Pretty cool. Reminiscent of Pharrell's partnership with G-Star Raw called "Raw for the Oceans" that focused on turning plastic caught in the ocean into fiber, and then using that fiber to make clothing. Another win that Cotton Inc. mentioned was that over the past 40 years, pesticide applications have reduced by 50 percent by cotton growers, according to WWD. Which has also meant a reduction in irrigation water applications. This wonderful movement "brings the environmental gains cotton growers have made in the field and takes them full circle by diverting textiles from landfills and helping to rebuild communities," says WWD.

The program, alive since 2006, has produced a significant amount of insulation for Habitat for Humanity affiliates. Since its conception, the movement has collected more than one million pieces of denim from landfills and has created approximately two million square feet of insulation, according to WWD.

Andrea Samber, co-director of Strategic Alliances at Cotton Inc. told WWD, “The average consumer owns seven pairs of jeans. Giving just one of them to the recycling drive can make a big difference in a family’s life.”

Next time you go through your closet, consider donating to this initiative, cause it's a pretty sweet one. Donate a pair, and change a life.

Images: Pexels, hawtcelebs/Twitter
In a new book, Inventing the 20th Century: 100 Inventions That Shaped the World , I read that the inventor of the Slinky, Richard James, joined a cult in Bolivia to which he donated much of his profits. What cult? Do proceeds from sales of Slinkys still go to the cult?

Cecil replies:

What’s your problem with cults, Ken? Why, just this spring while writing a check I said to myself, this money is going to fund religious zealots bent on subverting everything I hold dear. But I mailed in my income tax anyway.

In any case, I don’t know that we want to call Richard James’s coreligionists a cult. Details about the group are scanty, and it’s possible they were just an exceptionally enthusiastic bunch of Episcopalians. Besides, it’s been more than 40 years since any Slinky money found its way into the organization’s coffers. During the 1950s, however, quite a bit did. Here’s as much of the story as I could piece together, based on conversations with Richard’s ex-wife, Betty, a remarkable woman who saved the Slinky company after her husband bailed.

It all started in 1943, when Richard, an engineer at a navy shipyard in Philadelphia, noticed a torsion spring fall off a table and wiggle when it hit the floor. In the metallurgical equivalent of Newton’s apple, Richard recognized a toy waiting to be born. Having succeeded in finding steel with the right combination of lightness and springiness — no small feat in wartime — he was ready to take his product to market by late 1945. Realizing that the key to selling the Slinky was showing it in action, he fabricated a display in which the toy walked down steps and persuaded the Philadelphia branch of Gimbel’s department store to let him give demonstrations. Shoppers went nuts, and in 90 minutes Richard’s entire stock of 400 Slinkys had sold out. The thing was a hit at a toy fair the following spring and soon had become a national phenomenon.

By the 1950s Richard was pretty flush. He and Betty lived with their growing family on a 12-acre estate near the suburb of Bryn Mawr on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line. But he wasn’t content and at some point got religion. Previous accounts have been vague on how this came about, and Betty herself doesn’t have a lot of specifics. She doesn’t know what religious organization Richard got hooked up with, only that it was an evangelical Christian sect that she termed a cult. Richard began consorting with what Betty considered dubious characters, made sizable financial contributions, and testified at revival meetings. She attended one and found it mortifying.

I asked Betty what had gotten into her husband. She said Slinky sales were slumping in the mid-50s and that Richard, a charismatic man who had gotten used to being a big shot, liked the attention he got while confessing his sins.

Wondering what kind of sins we were talking about, I asked: “Did Richard have, ah, personal issues that led to his religious conversion?” Yes, Betty said. He’d been a philanderer. She’d found out about it, they’d had discussions of the sort that usually ensue, but she’d stayed with him for the sake of their six children.

Finally, in February 1960, Richard announced to Betty and their two eldest children that he was moving to Bolivia to work for his religious group. They could either sell the business or run it themselves; he was cutting all ties. By July he was gone. What exactly he did in Bolivia, Betty doesn’t know, although there’s no reason to think it was anything along the lines of Jim Jones in Guyana — more like a mission, from the sound of it. At one point she heard he was printing religious tracts.

To provide for her family, Betty decided to keep the Slinky business going, but it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Richard had diverted the company’s resources to his religious interests and left millions of dollars in unpaid bills. Betty begged her creditors to be patient, and miraculously they all agreed. She wangled a TV advertising deal, moved the Slinky plant to her hometown of Hollidaysburg in central Pennsylvania, and slowly put the company back on its feet.

Every so often she got accusatory letters from Richard urging her to repent. At one point he asked that she leave the children and join him in Bolivia. She never replied. In 1974 she heard that he had died of a heart attack, and that was that.

Betty ran James Industries, as the Slinky company was officially known, for nearly four decades. In 1998, having produced close to 300 million Slinkys since the founding of the company, she sold out for a boatload of money to a Michigan company that promised to keep the Slinky plant and its 120-some jobs in Hollidaysburg. Your Slinky buck may have supported some dubious ventures prior to 1960, but it’s been well spent since.

Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.
After the Las Vegas murders, Sen. Brian Schatz Brian Emanuel SchatzDems mock Trump's pitch for Fourth of July celebration Democrats brush off GOP 'trolling' over Green New Deal GOP Green New Deal stunt is a great deal for Democrats MORE (D-Hawaii) urged Congress to “take a stand against gun violence by passing common-sense gun safety laws.” On Monday, after the mass murder in Texas, he wrote, “A simple idea: Anyone convicted of domestic abuse should see their rights under the 2nd Amendment severely curtailed.” On Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE (R-Ariz.) announced that he and Sen. Martin Heinrich Martin Trevor HeinrichOvernight Defense: Dems aim to block use of defense funds for wall | Watchdog issues new warning on Syria withdrawal | Trump wants to 'watch Iran' from Iraq Senate Dems introduce bill to block Trump from using military funds to build wall Puerto Rico statehood supporters pin hopes on House action MORE (D-N.M.) are writing a bill “to prevent anyone convicted of domestic violence — be it in criminal or military court — from buying a gun.

In the spirit of these proposals, here are some ideas for tough federal gun laws — most of which should have been enacted years ago.

For people convicted of domestic violence, even a misdemeanor, how about a lifetime prohibition on firearms possession?

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Further, a government license should be required for anyone who wants to manufacture, import, or sell firearms. The license should be mandatory not only for formal businesses, but also for individuals who make repetitive transactions for the purpose of profit. This would cover people at gun shows who put up signs declaring themselves to be “unlicensed dealers.” Anyone who engages in the firearms business without a federal license should be punished by up to five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

Manufacturers, importers, and dealers who are granted a federal license should have to keep meticulous records of every transaction. Their records and inventory should be subject to warrantless, random inspections by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). If a license-holder goes out of business, all the records of past sales should be delivered to the ATF.

Before a gun store can sell a firearm to an ordinary citizen, the citizen should have to get government approval. This should apply not only to storefront sales, but also if the retailer rents a table at a gun show. As for the Internet, retailers can be allowed to advertise there, but the actual transfer of a firearm should only be allowed at the retailer’s place of business.

The purchaser should be required to answer dozens of questions certifying her background information. It is important that the government know the purchaser’s race, and whether or not she is Hispanic. Before the sale is consummated, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a state counterpart ought to be contacted for a background check on the purchaser.

Any customer who purchases two or more handguns in a week should be automatically flagged and reported to the federal government and to local law enforcement.

Every handgun manufacturer should require handgun buyers to purchase a safe storage device for every handgun. Even if the buyer owns a gun safe, the buyer should always be forced to buy a separate locking device.

Of course, licensed manufacturers should have to put a serial number on every firearm. If someone alters or obliterates a serial number, the person should face five years imprisonment.

Felons should be forever prohibited from owning guns. They should never be allowed to hold a gun in their hands for even a few seconds. The lifetime prohibition should include non-violent felons who have been law-abiding for decades; anyone who was convicted of marijuana possession in 1971 should be presumed to be a continuing menace to society.

A lifetime prohibition should also apply to anyone who has ever been committed to a mental institution. Mental illness is not necessarily permanent, but the ban should be.

Patients prescribed medical marijuana should be banned, even in states where such use is legal. In fact, all medical marijuana cardholders should be automatically banned, regardless of whether they are current users.

Current federal gun laws provide a statutory procedure for prohibited persons to petition the ATF for a restoration of rights. For example, ATF would have discretion to restore the Second Amendment rights of a non-violent felon who has been law-abiding for many years. Congress should enact appropriations riders to prevent ATF from considering such petitions.

Only persons over 21 should be able to purchase a handgun at a gun store. That 18-to-20-year-olds defend our country with automatic weapons overseas does not mean that they can be trusted with handguns within our country. A similar law should bar rifle or shotgun purchases by persons who are under 18.

Assault rifles must be virtually banned. These, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, are “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power.” For example, the Russian AK-47 or the American M-16 rifles. No civilian should be able to transfer or possess any assault rifle that was not already in circulation by 1986.

Any of the older assault rifles in citizen hands should be registered with the government. If someone wants to acquire one, both the buyer and seller should have to file an application with the ATF. The tax for a transfer should be $200, to discourage ownership. In the application, the ATF should require fingerprints and two recent photographs. Local law enforcement should be notified. The FBI should conduct a background investigation, and the registration process should take months.

If the purchaser is permitted to acquire the assault rifle, she should be required to maintain records proving that the rifle is registered, and notify the government of any change in address. To take the assault rifle out of state, the owner should need written permission from ATF in advance.

Assault rifles are one type of automatic firearm, but there are many other types of automatics. All of them should be controlled just as strictly as assault rifles. A violation of the stringent laws on these guns should be a felony with up to 10 years imprisonment—and much longer in cases of multiple violations.

The above is just the minimum baseline for federal laws. States should be allowed to enact must more restrictive additional laws.

If you think that this legal system would make firearms the most-regulated common consumer product in the United States, you would be correct. Every one of the above restrictions is already federal law, and has been for decades. A few of these date back to the 1980s or 1990s. Most of them are from the Gun Control Act of 1968. The tax and registration laws on automatics are from the National Firearms Act of 1934.

For decades researchers have found that many Americans do not understand how strict gun control laws already are. Some elected officials and journalists are similarly misinformed. Widespread ignorance about existing law makes things easier for anti-gun lobbyists who always insist that every notorious crime proves that we need more gun control laws.

David Kopel (@DaveKopel) is research director for the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver, Colorado. Joseph Greenlee (@Joseph_Greenlee) is an attorney in Steamboat Springs.
METAIRIE, La. -- Drew Brees was critical Wednesday of the way NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has handled disciplinary issues in recent years - including the New Orleans Saints' bounty investigation.

And Brees said he hopes the NFL's latest controversies will finally lead to a new disciplinary system that is fair, transparent and includes the NFL Players Association and independent experts instead of the "unilateral" system that has been in place with "no checks and balances."

"Too many times, I'd say especially over the last few years, a punishment's been handed down and nobody has really seen the evidence except for those in the league office -- supposedly," Brees said. "So decisions were made in kind of a, 'Hey, trust us.' But did the public see any of the facts? Did the accused see any of the facts? In most cases, no."

Those were the biggest complaints among Saints players and the NFL Players Association during the drawn-out fight over bounty suspensions in 2012 -- which ultimately led to former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue vacating all of Goodell's player punishments.

Saints leaders such as coach Sean Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis, however, had no such recourse with which to fight against Goodell's severe punishments since Goodell handed out the discipline and heard the appeal.

"That's why you have multiple parties to make sure everyone comes together, cooler heads prevail. The decision isn't just based on emotion at the time, which I can say I believe has happened in the past in regards to commissioner discipline. It's been based upon emotion as opposed to maybe the facts," Brees said. "And (a new disciplinary policy would) prevent that from ever happening again."

Brees also echoed the sentiment of many former Saints players and media analysts who have pointed out that Goodell has not been held accountable for mistakes made during the investigation of Ray Rice's domestic violence incident. And Goodell is not holding himself to the same standard to which he held Saints leaders to in the bounty punishments.

"I think it's a great tie-in because obviously the same things that I've heard, the same things that I feel (about Goodell) are the quotes that were thrown out at members of the Saints organization in regards to why they were being punished," Brees said. "Things such as, 'Ignorance is no excuse,' and, 'if you didn't know you should've known,' are things that would absolutely apply in this case, except the roles are reversed and it's going back at Commisioner Goodell and the league office."

Drew Brees said the current disciplinary system lacks 'checks and balances.' AP Photo/David Richard

When asked if he feels that Goodell should step down after the way he's handled such issues as the Rice investigation, Brees said, "That's not up to me. I'm more focused on the solution, as far as creating and then maintaining policies that you can be consistent with and open with and transparent with, and bringing together all parties that should be involved. The players association, the NFL league office and independent experts."

Offensive tackle Zach Strief, who serves as the Saints' union rep, told reporters that he doesn't believe Goodell should lose his job. But he suggested that a season-long suspension would be a fitting punishment for Goodell since that's what Goodell handed Payton.

"What is the precedent for making a colossal mistake?" Strief told reporters. "The precedent has been you missed a season. It's very simple. The exact situation has already happened, and it happened here. There was a punishment and that was the punishment.

"Unfortunately for Roger, he set the precedent. He said, 'You made a big mistake, it cost the league, it's harmed the shield.' Here's what it was before. To me, that's the only fair thing. Not that that matters."

Strief also agreed with Brees on the need for a more transparent disciplinary process.

"That's why the players have forever wanted an independent appeal process or arbiter, because at the end of the day Roger is not perfect. And the system is now in place with that assumption - that Roger is going to know exactly what to do in every situation, and it clearly is incorrect," Strief said. "It's been proven many times over, and to be honest with you, I don't necessarily think that Roger is trying to do the wrong stuff. But he's a human. And saying that he's the end-all, be-all no matter what in any situation is saying that he is always going to be right. It's silly.

"So there needs to be a system of checks and balances in place, and I think there needs to be transparency in how that all goes down. I'm tired of this veil of secrecy behind it. You get stuck in a situation where nobody has a clue what's going on, you deal with assumptions, and it's a circus."

Brees, who recently stepped down after years spent as a member of the NFLPA executive committee, said this has long been an issue with players. Former Saints linebacker Scott Fujita, also a former NFLPA executive committee member, has made similar comments in the past week.

"I think that this has been a long time coming," Brees said. "It's really unfortunate that all of this had to happen in order for this to transpire or for this to become evident.

"But now the public knows, certainly the fan community knows, and it seems like that's gonna happen, which is a very good thing. And it's the right thing."
What is going on in men’s lifestyle media?

One need only look at the recent shuttering of Details, a string of layoffs at GQ (disclosure: I used to work there) and the recent launch of Sweet, a Snapchat-only lifestyle publication from Hearst, to get a sense of the current state of affairs.

We had a good run @detailsmag #ripdetails A photo posted by jonmroth (@jonmroth) on Nov 19, 2015 at 1:40pm PST

Like the struggles Gap, J.Crew and Urban Outfitters are experiencing in the retail sector, menswear-focused sites find themselves caught in the middle between easily digestible platforms with more quantifiable ROIs for sponsors (sup, Instagram?) and an old media guard that is finally becoming hip to a long-underserved market.

The New York Times now has a monthly section dedicated to men’s style; the Wall Street Journal is covering niche men’s trends like the current obsession with ‘90s skate style. New media platforms like Mashable, Business of Fashion and Quartz are seeing the advantages of covering men's style as well, with recent stories ranging from why square-toed shoes should be a federal offense to Helmut Lang’s lasting influence on men’s fashion.

But with so many outlets now covering menswear, has it become a saturated market? The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman thinks so, even positing whether menswear has reached its peak.

Brian Trunzo, cofounder of SoHo men’s shop Carson Street, agrees. For one, he says the market’s become inundated. “We feel the need to cover all of it, when in my mind, there’s only so much worth covering," he tells Mashable.

Brian Trunzo of Carson Street Clothiers in New York City photographed during New York Fashion Week: Men's. Image: Georgie Wileman/Getty Images

Just three years ago the idea of straight men talking about clothes on the Internet was almost unthinkable. It was novel enough that The New York Times featured five men’s style bloggers as examples of a “new breed.”

The “#menswear” subculture emerged around this time and took its name from the Tumblr hashtag, once curated by guys like Lawrence Schlossman, whose How to Talk to Girls at Parties Tumblr eclipsed the popularity of his service-oriented menswear blog, Sartorially Inclined. Having a select group of guys dictate what would populate on the hashtag resulted in the formation of a unique groupthink.

#Menswear defined itself by its convergence of classic tailored clothing, a healthy love of rap music, and a unique lingua franca in which double monk strap shoes would often be referenced in the same sentence as a Drake lyric about feeling overdosed on confidence. Industry figures like Nick Wooster, a retail veteran with stints at Neiman Marcus, JC Penney and GILT; Eugene Tong, stylist and former style director at Details; and Josh Peskowitz, former fashion director at Bloomingdale’s, became street style celebrities to a very specific set of dudes who couldn’t stop aggregating their photos — partly from outfit-envy, and partly because they just looked damn cool.

Josh Peskowitz, former fashion director at Bloomingdale's, attends New York Fashion Week: Men's. Image: Miles Goscha/Mashable

But beyond the social platform, its roots began in forum culture. Communities like StyleForum, SuperFuture and Ask Andy About Clothes predated Reddit’s popular Male Fashion Advice subreddit, and provided safe, anonymous spaces for guys to nerd out about pick stitches, fully canvassed suits, Filson bags and Alden Indy Boots alike. Guys were learning how to define themselves with clothes without fear of being judged.

But the insider nature of forums made it hard for neophytes to fully dive in.

Enter the menswear site circa 2008, a specialized vertical in which the basic tenets of how dudes dress — filtered through forum culture in an online version of "Telephone" — were made all the more digestible.

“Sites like Valet, Selectism and Uncrate that were looking to contribute to a conversation about men improving their life and style,” says Cory Ohlendorf, who founded Valet in 2008. “And you had regular guys like Lawrence Schlossman looking to be part of that conversation.”

11/13/15 - Last day A photo posted by Legend (@sartoriallyinc) on Nov 13, 2015 at 2:00pm PST

#Menswear’s Judgement Day, the moment a dandified Skynet achieved self-awareness, occurred when Schlossman and Kevin Burrows launched their parody site Fuck Yeah Menswear, a Tumblr that became a book in 2012. Later that year, Schlossman was appointed as the editor-in-chief of Four Pins, which carried the same spirit of the well-dressed snake eating itself.

Image: Daniel Zuchnik/Getty

“The aim was just to be completely honest that there are no real justifications for buying expensive clothes other than you wanting them,” says Jon Moy, one of Four Pins’ most prolific writers, on the site’s tone.

More traditional menswear nerd culture began to converge with hype culture, a digital consumer market obsessed with the latest and greatest obscure Japanese brands and anything emblazoned with labels from cult brands like A Bathing Ape, Supreme or Stüssy. And sneakers, always sneakers.

Supreme/The North Face® A photo posted by Supreme (@supremenewyork) on Nov 16, 2015 at 8:09am PST

For men, timelessness gave way to trendiness, and style wasn’t just about making yourself look good — it became about looking better than everyone else and being first at it.

“By the time a blogger maybe does some research, buys some pieces for himself, tests the look out, and wants to talk to about it, the trend has potentially eclipsed,” says Lawrence Schlossman. “The service angle of the blog — what is that anymore?”

Indeed, more and more men are discovering new brands, designers and even ways to wear certain items via Instagram, rather than men’s sites. As a result, context and storytelling are secondary to visual presentation. Learning about a label’s provenance or educating consumers about things like pedigree and history aren’t as important to the modern menswear guy.

“The media landscape has shifted so much towards Instagram that you don’t necessary need words,” adds Schlossman. “No one wants to consume directly from a website anymore, which is a bummer.”

Nick Wooster, arguably one of #menswear’s most prominent personalities, doesn’t see it as a zero-sum game. While he sees the current state of media as “in flux,” he thinks media companies and retailers just need to add yet another avenue to build brand awareness.

“You might learn about something on Instagram the way you learned about it from a magazine 20 years ago, but the way you still consume it or get further information is a traditional channel,” he says.

Nick Wooster models for Public School's men's fashion week showing in New York City. Image: Miles Goscha/ Mashable

Instagram has also birthed a new generation of menswear bloggers, vastly different than their predecessors. Boasting hundreds of thousands of followers, this new breed of content creator is more than likely a handsome guy who looks good in a suit or whatever featured product is gifted to him, a stark contrast from the clothing nerd of five years ago. In many ways, it’s indicative of a dumbing down of what #menswear stood for, “get the look” versus “get the story.”

“A good segment of the audience just [wants to] see how to put something together,” says Ohlendorf.

Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images

Jeff Carvalho, executive editor at Highsnobiety and Selectism, says one way they’re trying to differentiate themselves from the glut of sites out there is by cultivating a unique perspective and original voice, something he originally avoided when he started at Selectism in 2007.

“We try to add a layer of opinion through editorial, through conversation on the site, that takes the story beyond the product that it is,” he says. It gives the site and the featured product a more premium feel, in the same vein a magazine feature would. Though Highsnobiety, along with Hypebeast, have quarterly print products, they are ancillary to their online platforms.

Meanwhile, Valet is seeing more traction from posts revolving around men’s lifestyle beyond clothes. Ohlendorf has ramped up the coverage of things like interior design, cooking and cocktails. For many men, clothes functioned as a gateway into better living in general, and this audience shift reflects that.

So where does that leave all the dudes that just want to nerd about about clothes online?

“Menswear right now feels like that last week of college where you’re super excited for the future, but you’re not really sure what’s going on,” says Moy. “You’re hanging out with your friends and not reminiscing, not talking about the future, but just trying to be in the moment.”
With two games in the books, the 2014 World Series is tied and heading back to San Francisco. Yet, judging by the ratings for Game 1, most of you aren't paying attention to the Royals and Giants battle.

Those numbers, per CNN, paint a picture of a dying sport. After all, the lowest Game 1 rating in history can't be a precursor to many viewers over the remainder of the series.

The ratings back up poll results earlier in the week. When prompted, over 53 percent of NJ.com voters said they wouldn't watch this year's World Series.

Despite the statistics -- including attracting less viewers than "NCIS" and "The Voice" -- baseball isn't dying. In fact, when looking at a much larger and broader sample than World Series ratings on a given night, a snapshot of a healthy sport emerges.

Why aren't you watching the World Series? Would you be more interested if high profile teams were in it? Do you believe baseball is actually dying?

Watch the video above and sound off below in the comments section with your thoughts on World Series ratings.

Joe Giglio may be reached at jgiglio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoeGiglioSports. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
CLOSE Rural counties in western Wisconsin have become difficult to predict politically. Richland County is one of 19 counties in the U.S. to vote for every winning president since 1980. Rick Wood and Craig Gilbert / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Dan Anderson, who runs Anderson’s Saw Shop outside Richland Center, Wis., describes himself as an independent who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton only because of health care. (Photo11: Craig Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

RICHLAND CENTER, Wis. — Just over a year ago this rural battleground region swung hard for Donald Trump in a clamor for political change.

But today that frustration with politics appears undiminished and is aimed in all directions — including Trump’s.

“We’re wasting so much time,” said Trump voter Robin DeFabbio, interviewed at Kelly’s Coffee House here.

She would like Trump's staff to take his Twitter account away.

► Monday: Analysis: Trump is betting tax cuts will make him popular

► Nov. 7: Trump has tweeted 2,461 times since the election

► Nov. 6: Trump has changed Washington more than Washington has changed him

“He’s like a very bad child that I’m glad I didn’t raise,” she said.

She laments a do-little Congress, two parties that can’t work together, ceaseless division, the media circus over Trump and a swamp that hasn't been drained.

“You just get disappointed on a bunch of levels, not just (with President Trump). Everything's in gridlock, nothing's moving.” Robin DeFabbio, Richland Center, Wis.

“You just get disappointed on a bunch of levels, not just (with Trump). Everything's in gridlock, nothing's moving,” she said. “You can’t get anywhere like this."

At taverns, churches, bowling alleys and American Legion halls, people here echo that discontent.

Hillary Clinton voters are disconsolate and Trump appalls them.

Trump voters who are happy with Trump are unhappy with Congress and Trump’s GOP critics. Trump voters who are critical of Trump — and they’re not too hard to find here — display everything from resignation to pique to exasperation with his behavior.

Voters of all stripes complain about the political culture, including the media, the parties, and the inability to have a respectful conversation about politics with political opponents.

“I am a political science major. I am starting to hate politics. Actually, not starting, I do hate politics: the vitriol and the vulgarity and the lack of willingness to talk to people,” said Kari Walker, co-owner with her husband of the Touchdown Tavern in Reedsburg, Wis.

Her county, Sauk, was decided by 109 votes. Just to the west is bellwether Richland, one of 19 counties in the United States and four in the state to vote for every winning president since 1980.

► Nov. 5: One year later, Trump voters blame president's tweets for his troubles

► Oct. 29: Trump's approval rating drops to historic low in new poll

They are part of a remarkably picturesque and politically purple patch of Wisconsin —known for geologic reasons as the Driftless Area — that has become a magnet for journalists, academics, political and civic groups trying to digest what happened a year ago and what it means for our politics going forward.

A few weeks ago, a Dutch news crew showed up at Jo’s Kountry Bar in Steuben, a Crawford County village with a population of 131 that voted for Barack Obama by a margin of 35 points and then for Trump by 38 — the biggest swing in percentage terms in Wisconsin.

This past summer, a New York-based group called Resetting the Table, which specializes in conflict resolution over Israel among American Jews, sat down with hundreds of voters in the Driftless Area to promote dialog across political lines.

One thing it found was "just this sense of frustration to the point of repugnance with the ... political class, shared on the left, shared on the center, shared on the right," said Eyal Rabinovitch, the group's co-founder.

Why are people watching southwestern Wisconsin? What makes its politics interesting to outsiders?

► Oct. 10: Trump downplays criticism he's steering U.S. into World War III

► Oct. 3: High court shows divisions in redistricting case could reshape U.S. politics

It’s not because of its political clout. The seven counties in this rustic corner of the state — Crawford, Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, Richland, Sauk and Vernon — are home to about 220,000 people.

It’s not that it’s a microcosm of America, or even Wisconsin. The region is far whiter — 97% — than either and has no cities of any real size. It is a much different battleground than the populous suburbs where Democrats scored victories Nov. 7 in Virginia and New Jersey and hope to make inroads in Congress next year.

“Every time I hear anybody say anything about ‘Trump shouldn’t be tweeting. … The thing that immediately comes into my mind is Hillary Clinton is not president, and the United States of America can never thank Trump enough.” Tom Allaback, Richland Center, Wis.

What this swingy slice of the heartland does offer is a window into the trends and tumult of the Trump era.

Blue-collar white voters, a demographic group that propelled Trump to the White House, are largely its population. Its economy is challenged, often cited as an ingredient in Trump’s election. And it contributed to the huge rural wave that overwhelmingly accounted for Trump’s victory in Wisconsin.

But the region is as interesting for the trends it defies as the ones it embodies.

Nationwide, rural white communities are overwhelmingly Republican. The Driftless Area that extends into Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota — “Driftless” because the glaciers missed it, leaving a landscape of rolling hills, looping streams and narrow valleys — contains the largest cluster of blue and purple counties in rural, white America.

It boasts the nation's greatest concentration of Obama-Trump counties — places that voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

In a very partisan age, neither party dominates the region. Like its serpentine roads and rivers, its voters wind this way and that.

In 2016, five of the seven southwestern counties voted for Republican Trump for president and Democrat Russ Feingold for U.S. Senate. Six of the seven voted for Obama twice before swinging to Trump.

Weak party loyalties help explain a history of big election swings.

► Sept. 20: Trump supporters don't mind him working with Democrats, poll says

► Aug. 23: Amid bipartisan concerns, debate over Trump's mental health takes off

Two of the past three presidential races have featured mammoth partisan shifts in the region — in a Democratic direction in 2008 and a Republican direction in 2016. Trump won the seven-county area by 3 points, four years after Obama won it by 18.

In interviews, it was striking how often voters here bashed both parties and dismissed the value of sticking with one party.

Tom Lukens of Viroqua, Wis., was a Clinton voter and says he now can't sleep when he watches TV news. (Photo11: Craig Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

“There should be zero 'party' in America,” said Mark Rooney as he watched a Universityi of Wisconsin Badgers football game at Touchdown Tavern.

“I’d be embarrassed to put a sign for either (party) in my yard,” said Dan Anderson, who repairs chain saws in Richland County. He's unsparing about Trump but wasn't happy with either candidate last year, voting for Hillary Clinton because of the single issue of health care.

Anderson said he entered the voting booth thinking, “I’m walking in to make a mistake.”

In more than 30 interviews over five days here, most voters and political observers — including many Trump supporters — said they viewed what happened this past fall as more of a vote against Clinton than for Trump. Clinton lost badly to Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders in this same region of the state.

Southwest Wisconsin defies one other stereotype about our polarized politics — that America is increasingly composed of separate red and blue communities.

In many places this is true. Metropolitan Milwaukee is a glaring example.

Most voters live in partisan enclaves decided by 30 points or more. Not a single city, town or village in the four-county Milwaukee area voted for both Obama and Trump.

► Aug. 20: Voters in three key states Trump won 'embarrassed' by his conduct

► Aug. 15: President Trump trying to reverse Obama's legacy through legal battles

Yet more than half the communities in southwest Wisconsin did so. While the region's small cities are bluer than its countryside, its urban-rural gap is far smaller than in most of America.

Here, making assumptions about a person's politics based on where they live, how they dress or what car they drive is a big mistake. That could very well be a Democrat sitting next to you at the American Legion Hall or a Republican at the downtown coffee house.

“Why can’t we have civilized conversations and not be hollered down?” Ken Ogi, Richland Center, Wis.

On a recent morning at Dan Anderson’s saw shop, five guys sporting beards and boots joked about how many guns and chainsaws they owned. None of them voted for Trump.

But while this area is less polarized in many ways than other places, it may be experiencing polarization in a more personal way because people are so integrated politically. Trump and Clinton voters are living side by side.

“You’re either going to be an enemy or find a way to get along. And (when) you’re friends, you find a way to get along,” said retired dentist Bruce Vermilyea, interviewed over meatballs, lefse (Norwegian flatbread) and whitefish at the annual lutefisk (a preserved fish dish) supper at Five Points Lutheran Church in Blue River, Wis.

However, not everyone is getting along.

“I wouldn’t keep a friend that voted for Trump. I have a neighbor that I haven’t been able to speak to since," said Tom Lukens of Viroqua, Wis., shopping at the Viroqua Public Market farmer's market in this Crawford County town.

► Aug. 14: Trouble in Trumpland: The president's core supporters begin to worry

► Aug. 2: Manufacturers split on Democrats' get-tough trade plan

By many accounts, even local politics are becoming more divisive. Larry Engel, the pastor at Five Points Lutheran, said the divisions surrounding Trump feel even sharper than those around Republican Gov. Scott Walker during the 2011 labor wars and recall fight, divisions that linger today.

“The civil discourse has been turned up a notch in terms of its negativity,” he said.

Many Clinton voters blame Trump for that.

► July 30: Secret donations are helping to boost President Trump's agenda

► July 26: Could Jeff Sessions still get his old job in the Senate back?

Some Trump voters at least partly agree, but they blame the media for wallowing in Trump's outbursts. And they complain that liberals and Democrats dismiss or demonize them for the choice they made.

It's, "how can you possibly think that way?" said Ken Ogi of Richland Center, who was at the lutefisk supper. “Why can’t we have civilized conversations and not be hollered down?”

The Trump voters interviewed for this story fell into roughly three groups.

• Trump enthusiasts embrace both his style and agenda, are happy with his presidency and bristle at all the criticism.

“I look at (Trump) as possibly being the savior of democracy for the United States,” said Dick Bartels, a Marine veteran who was guiding cars into the parking lot outside the lutefisk supper.

“Every time I hear anybody say anything about ‘Trump shouldn’t be tweeting … He put his foot in his mouth again, blah, blah, blah,’ the thing that immediately comes into my mind is Hillary Clinton is not president, and the United States of America can never thank Trump enough,” said Tom Allaback, interviewed outside an American Legion post in Richland Center.

• Committed Republicans wanted someone else to be nominated and continue to wince at Trump's style and rhetoric but support Trump for reasons of party, ideology and a desire to see conservative policies in place.

• The most conflicted Trump voters often were self-described independents. They had qualms when they voted for him but couldn’t support Clinton and were drawn to at least one part of the Trump package: his business background or outsider mantle or rejection of political correctness or vow to put America first.

These are the Trump voters who are most critical of him today. Some, like Obama-Trump voter Nell Justiliano of Spring Green, Wis., now have meager expectations of his presidency.

► July 25: GOP backlash to Trump attacks Jeff Sessions signals political danger

► July 20: Analysis: Trump isn't changing, and that's both good news and bad news

“I did vote for him. It was really hard," she said. "We have been stuck in a political rut on every level."

But “I’m so embarrassed by what a (expletive) show it is. Because it is a (expletive) show,” she said, citing the turnover in the administration, deriding Trump’s diplomatic and leadership skills and bemoaning his behavior.

Dick Bartels, guiding cars into a parking lot parking outside the annual lutefisk supper at Five Points Lutheran Church in Blue River, Wis., is a Donald Trump voter who said he used to vote Democratic. (Photo11: Craig Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

“You want change, then you just get really discouraged when it doesn’t happen,” she said.

Others are waiting and watching. Where these Trump voters land in 2018 or 2020 will hinge on events, the economy, the performance in power of Trump and the GOP Congress, and what alternatives Democrats offer.

While voters interviewed here did not clamor for tax cuts, they had a generalized but plaintive cry for less noise and more action.

People are "just losing their faith in the ability for (things) to happen" in Washington, Shannon Clark, who runs the electric power co-operative in Richland County, said of the customers he talks to.

“I voted for (Trump) because of the options that I had, because I really did want to see a business person in there. ... I knew what I was voting for,” said Ogi, a retired school administrator.

"But I’d spank his butt if he was my kid and he was a third-grader doing that. Just shut up!" he said. "The people coming at him aren’t any better. The press, our politicians have digressed to fifth- and sixth-graders. I’m disgusted with the attitude (in politics) and the way it’s being handled — on all sides.”

Robin DeFabbio, the Trump voter from Richland Center, doesn't like Trump's style but doesn't think we should be obsessing about it either.

► July 19: Trump directs panel to tackle voter 'fraud' during its first session

► July 16: Analysis: Can Trump turn around struggling presidency?

“No matter what his behavior is, he’s the president. Sorry guys! Suck it up,” she said.

“I’d like to see all the talk, rhetoric, the Twitter account, everything gone! I’d like to see us move forward,” she said, “I always have hope.”

Follow Craig Gilbert on Twitter: @WisVoter

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2AF2t9H
The flag decals that were ordered taken down by Chief Bronaugh. Photographs courtesy Maywood Fire Department.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014 || By Michael Romain

Today, four Maywood firefighters were sent home, pending disciplinary action, for failure to comply with a direct order, according to Chief Craig Bronaugh. A CBS Local report noted that more firefighters could be sent home tomorrow. The firefighters apparently refused to remove American flag decals from their lockers and helmets.

“A representative from Service Employees International Union Local 73, which represents the firefighters, met for an hour with Chief Bronaugh Tuesday afternoon, with the union hoping Chief Bronaugh would modify his order. Instead, he ordered the firefighters sent home immediately, pending disciplinary action,” according to the CBS report.

“Union spokesman Adam Rosen said he is ‘shocked’ that an agency of first responders would enforce such an order the week of Sept. 11.

“The four suspended firefighters said they were told that the order was issued because of racial discord [in] the department. The four, who include two white firefighters, a black firefighter, and a fourth firefighter who is a Cuban émigré, said no such problems exist,” wrote CBS, which also reported that the four firefighters trace the issue “to a decision by several firefighters to replace a tattered American flag last month in one of Maywood’s firehouses. The new flag mysteriously disappeared early Aug. 23. The order on decals was issued last week.”

Although the CBS report indicates that the department “has had no such order in the recent past,” an internal memo released by the Office of Chief Bronaugh noted that this kind of conflict has nonetheless appeared before:

Under no circumstances at anytime are there to be decals/stickers on Fire Department lockers or helmets. Any decals/stickers are to be removed immediately. No inquiry will be entertained regarding this matter.

TO BE READ AT ALL ROLL CALLS THRU SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

This was in response to an inquiry regarding an American Flag being put up in the fire station (replacing a torn and tattered flag that previously existed). That flag was stolen on the very next shift day. Firefighters were upset that the flag was stolen and in response placed American Flag decals on their personal lockers in the stations.

This is not the first time that a flag incident has occurred in the Maywood Fire Department. Approximately 10 years ago, all American Flag decals were removed from all of the department vehicles and all physical flags were removed from the back of the engines. These were removed by, then, Lieutenant Scott (he has since been promoted to Captain). He is also the one that recently took the flag down from the station and has not yet returned the flag to its owner.

An example of the decals that have been ordered to be removed are the American Flag, and ones that commemorate the FDNY 343 that passed on 9/11.

“No one was suspended, they were sent home. This is an issue about insubordination, plain and simple,” said Chief Bronaugh. “They’re trying to make this about the flag and the anniversary of September 11, but this has nothing to do with [either]. This has to do with maintaining the uniformity and the order of the lockers so that we can avoid racial issues.” VFP
Statues of children with Ronald McDonald stand at the entrance to the Oak Brook Public Library.

Telling her mother that she wanted to come to the aid of a library under attack, 11-year-old Sydney Sabbagha stood at the podium before the Oak Brook village board.

"I used to go to the library knowing there were people there to help me find a book. Now there is no one to help me," Sydney said solemnly. "It will never be the same without the people you fired."

Sydney nestled back into her seat, but that didn't stop 69-year-old criminal attorney Constantine "Connie" Xinos from boldly putting her in her place.

"Those who come up here with tears in their eyes talking about the library, put your money where your mouth is," Xinos shot back. He told Sydney and others who spoke against the layoffs of the three full-time staffers (including the head librarian and children's librarian) and two part-timers to stop "whining" and raise the money themselves.

"I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books," Xinos told them.

"Don't cry crocodile tears about people who are making $100,000 a year wiping tables and putting the books back on the shelves," Xinos smirked, apparently referencing the fired head librarian, who has advanced degrees and made $98,676 a year. He said Oak Brook had to "stop indulging people in their hobbies" and "their little, personal, private wants."

Sydney was upset and "her little friend was in tears" after Xinos spoke at the meeting last week, says mom Hope Sabbagha.

"I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night," a grinning Xinos says Wednesday, as he invites me for a nearly two-hour interview in his Mercedes-Benz in the gated Oak Brook community where he lives. "This is the real world and the lesson, you folks who brought your kids here, is if you want something, pay for it."

Xinos, who unsuccessfully sued to stop the building of the new library, which opened in 2002, sits on one side of the issue. He lost his election bid to be a village board member, but has been president of his home association since 1983 and worked to elect board members who agree with him about the library.

On the other side sits Barbara Benezra, the longtime president of the Friends of the Oak Brook Public Library, who considers the library "my third child."

"This is the heart of the village," Benezra says as she tours the library and surrounding gardens under a sign sporting a Cicero quotation reading, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

"We don't have a grocery store," Benezra says. "We have this."

While Benezra acknowledges the need for some budget cuts at the library, given the recession, she says, "There's always been a faction of this town that's been anti-library."

The librarians, who stereotypically remain hushed for this story, obviously feel a bit threatened. They have turned to the Teamsters for some labor help.

Teamster librarians in Oak Brook? Mercy.

"We get good contracts for all kinds of professionals," says Brian Rainville, executive director of Teamsters Joint Council 25, which oversees 100,000 Chicago-area Teamsters, from pharmacists to zoo keepers.

"They have given us petitions," Village Manager David Niemeyer says of the Teamsters. "Assuming they do become certified, we'll have to negotiate with them."

Other village employees are unionized and the village works out contracts with them.

"Everybody thinks Oak Brook is rich and has all kinds of resources, but we don't," Niemeyer says. "Oak Brook has very low taxes and that's a point of pride in this town."

Begun as a volunteer effort in 1961 with donated books, the library occupied a small space in village hall until it moved into an old school two years later. It stayed there until the village built the new library.

The library is a village department funded by the general fund, same as the police, fire department and public works. It has no taxing power. Its budget comes from the village, and much of that money comes from sales tax, as there is no property tax. And sales at the mall and other businesses are down.

"We're probably going through what a lot of towns are going through," Niemeyer says of the budget cuts. "None of these things are easy."

It's not complicated for Xinos.

"You may like the library, but when you call 9-1-1, you want a policeman or a fireman before someone to tell you where the books are in the library," says the man who has talked of privatizing, outsourcing or even closing the library.

"I understand that my philosophy is conservative," Xinos says, adding that government just needs to catch bad guys, put out fires, fix the streets and make sure buildings are sturdy.

He campaigned, successfully, against a plan to bring subsidized housing for seniors into town by declaring, "I don't want to live next to poor people. I don't want poor people in my town."

A poor kid who grew up in Berwyn and worked in his dad's cafeteria in Chicago, Xinos went to law school and served in the Marines. Xinos says he speaks for Oak Brook's view of the Teamsters when he says, "Nobody here likes those kind of people."

Xinos, who says he never had children in part because he wasn't sure he'd be able to support them, sprinkles the F-word throughout his conversations. He dismisses a recent library event involving dogs with a blunt three-word rant in which he bookends swear words around the word "that."

That attitude doesn't represent the silent majority in Oak Brook, who support the library, Benezra says.

"There's been no discussion on the village board about closing the library," Niemeyer notes. "There is great pride in our library. We have an outstanding library."

What the library will look like in the 2010 budget depends on Xinos, Benezra, Teamsters, librarians, the village board and the people of Oak Brook.

Library:
With input from the 7/20 victims’ families, the city of Aurora this morning collected the temporary memorials located at Sable Boulevard and Centrepoint Drive and at the Aurora Municipal Center fountain. On behalf of the Aurora community, many thanks to all those who visited the temporary memorial and left flowers, toys, words of comfort and other items reflecting sympathy and love.

A team of city staff and volunteers boxed and labeled all items to be stored. The Aurora History Museum supervised the removal to ensure the safe and secure preservation of these items. City crews took all organic items, such as wreaths and flowers, to be mulched and recycled for use in the city parks. Families will still have access to the items, at their convenience, at a secured location provided by one of the community partners.

The white crosses, which stood at the memorial site, will be delivered or stored, whichever is preferred by the family members. The Aurora History Museum is handling the archival of all items at the memorial, and under the supervision of Jennifer Kuehner, museum executive director, all items will be inventoried, categorized and stored. The public is welcome to view a display of condolences and banners in the lobby of Aurora Municipal Center, located at 15151 E. Alameda Parkway.
While team RWBY meandered through Vale, Weiss felt… jealous.

Jealousy was not a feeling that someone such as Weiss should feel, she knew that, it was… beneath her to feel that petty. That she shouldn't feel that way just because her partner spent less and less time with her. That she had been replaced.

I don't get it, Weiss watched Ruby lead Blake into an arcade, I thought we were partners, ergo close friends? It made sense to her. Your partner is the person you are closest to, but I don't feel close to Ruby at all anymore.

When their first semester had started, Ruby and her were more or less, well, inseparable. Not that Weiss hadn't tried to separate herself from Ruby; it got more than a bit too much for her sometimes having the younger teen constantly trying to interact with her. Looking back at it, as much as Weiss had found Ruby to be annoying it was still nice. It was nice to have someone who genuinely wanted to be your friend and not because of your name.

Towards the end of the last semester, it felt like that closeness was slowly receding as Ruby spent less and less time with Weiss and more with another one of their teammates; Blake.

It was little surprise to Weiss that Ruby knew about Blake's… heritage, given the amount of time the two had spent together. What did surprise Weiss was the fact that Blake had stayed with Ruby and Yang over the semester break. No, that's not quite right, it didn't surprise me, it also hurts. Her teammates, no, her friends, spent the break together. Without her.

Weiss felt alone.

At first Weiss had assumed she was feeling needy, that she was perhaps being a bit too harsh on Ruby when they studied and that was what was pushing her partner away. During the break, Weiss had made a promise to fix whatever… issue had come up, to reconnect with her partner.

Yet Weiss felt more alone than ever, her partner was off with Blake, almost entirely ignoring her. I suppose I have been replaced. Weiss let out a sigh. Did I screw up? Was it something I did?

Or perhaps Blake is just better than me?

No, that wasn't the case. Weiss knew the answer all too easily; Ruby had a crush on Blake. Ruby could never be considered subtle, so it was obvious why her partner was spending more time with Blake. It didn't change the fact that the declining absence of Ruby was affecting Weiss. Even with Ruby spending more and more time with Blake, Weiss had hoped that the younger teen would still make time for her. You'd at least think she'd want to spend some time with me, but no, n- "Ow!" Something or rather someone, flicked Weiss in the forehead. Considering that the she only knew one such person who would do such a thing, and she was in the company of said person, it narrowed the choices down. "What was that for Yang?!"

"You were staring at the arcade door for like, five minutes." Yang's usual cocky grin morphed into a more concerned look. "And you were sighing like the world was gonna end."

"No I wasn't!" A certain lack of black and red alerted Weiss to another issue. "Wait… Where did Ruby and Blake go?"

"They're inside, playing DDR last I checked, or at least, they were when I came out." Even as the question rose in Weiss' mind, Yang already had an answer for it; "You were lagging behind and I was curious, what's on your mind?"

"I… nothing. Now if you will excuse me-" Weiss made her way towards the door. Or would have, had Yang not have grabbed onto her arm.

"Weiss, I'm being serious." There wasn't a hint of the cockiness in Yang's voice, it was closer to the tone that she used when she spoke to Ruby. "What's on your mind?"

Weiss sighed, shoulders slumped in defeat. "A lot." Yang's grip loosened on her arm as Weiss turned around, her arms clutching her sides. "Just… a lot."

Yang nodded her head, much to Weiss' confusion. "Yup. Looks like we need to talk."

"Why are we at McVale's?"

"The better question is why you got a salad." Yang gestured towards a pre-made salad in front of Weiss.

"Because I don't want to die before I'm thirty?" Weiss raised an incredulous eyebrow. "Which you are probably going to if you eat that… that monstrosity."

"Aww, you gotta live a little, princess." Yang pouted before taking a bite out of said monstrosity. Weiss pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to not watch her partner's sister eat herself into an early grave, as Yang scarfed down more calories than Weiss probably had in two days in a matter of minutes. "So what's on your mind?"

"…" Weiss didn't exactly know how to answer that, I mean how do you? There was a lot on her mind, but the particular issue that Yang was asking about was… sensitive. If I say it out loud, I'm going to sound like a needy little girl. That was definitely an image that Weiss didn't want to give to anyone. So instead, she just sat there, picking at her salad, eating small bites of it.

"Come-on, what's bugging you?" Yang pestered her, breaking the silence. "There has got to be something."

The white haired girl sighed, I suppose I might as well be honest. "Ruby."

"In what way?" Weiss could feel the mood shift as Yang calmly set down her food and leaned forwards, elbows resting on the table, her fingers interlaced. She looked… menacing. No, that's not right. Yang was being serious.

"I don't think she wants to be friends with me anymore."

Yang's lilac eyes widened in what Weiss could only describe as surprise as she leaned back, the menacing atmosphere evaporating as soon as it came. "Don't be silly, Ruby is your friend. Why wouldn't she be?"

"I would not be so sure." Weiss set down the cheap plastic fork, her eyes drawn to it. "We haven't hung out like we used to –mind you, the dolt didn't give me much of a choice- in fact, I barely see her outside of meals and class. We, don't even study together anymore."

"That's not necessarily true. You two were hanging out until a while ago." Yang pointed out before sipping on a Dr. Piper. "Just because you don't study together doesn't me-"

"No, you don't understand." Weiss glanced up from the fork to find curious lilac eyes staring at her. "Ruby replaced me." It hurt, it physically pained Weiss to say it, to admit it.

Yang's head tilted, her long mass of blonde hair moving in sync with it. "Why'd you think that?"

"Perhaps because the dolt decided that I was too harsh on her? I don't know, why else would Ruby abandon me?" Weiss had resumed focusing on the cheap fork. "I thought we were close friends, then she stops hanging out with me and then she and Blake become inseparable, how else would you expl- explain…"

Yang started to laugh.

Not some kind of small chuckle or giggle, but a deep laugh, one that came from the gut. It wasn't some forced expression, or awkward thing, no, there was real mirth behind it.

It made Weiss furious.

"Well since my situation is so amusing to you, I believe I'll take my leave." Weiss stated coldly as she got up from her seat and headed for the exit. Leaving her salad and teammate behind, Weiss all but broke into a run as she left McVale's behind.

The one person that Weiss had hoped, had HOPED would help her reconnect with Ruby, mend their friendship had just laughed in her face at the problem. It hurt even more than being excluded over the semester break. Even with people who don't care about my name, I still can't make friends. Weiss could feel her eyes water as her thoughts progressed. I guess I am completely hopeless. The run slowed down to a walk before a standstill as Weiss found herself in the middle of a sidewalk. I am the loneliest of all, after all.

"Weiss?!" A blonde mass of hair weaved throughout the streets. "Hey Weiss, where'd you go?!" Weiss ignored the voice, her standstill slowly turning into a very, very slow walk as she started to make her way towards where Blake and Ruby presumably were, the arcade.

"Hey wait up!" Weiss paid the voice no heed as it got closer. Close enough that she could practically hear the footsteps of its owner. "Sorry 'bout that, I was goi-"

"I don't care Xiao Long." Weiss stated flatly as the footsteps followed her. "You made your thoughts on the matter abundantly clear. Please leave me alone."

The footsteps quickened, the blonde hair entering Weiss' vision as Yang jogged in front of her. "Weiss, just listen to me for a moment, oka-" The footsteps stopped as Yang stared at her. "Are… are you cryi-"

"Why wouldn't I be?" Yang winced at Weiss' tone, it was cold. Colder than you'd expect from someone who was crying, almost emotionless. "My closest friend, or at least the person who I am partnered with has all but replaced me! Her oaf of a sister literally laughed at my face when I thought I we were having a serious conversation!" Weiss started to tick them off on her hands. "And the person who replaced me will probably never see me as anything BUT a Schnee, so you tell me Xiao Long, why shouldn't I be crying when none of my teammates will be someone I could consider a friend?"

The response was immediate and unexpected; Yang didn't shy away, or yell back at her, no, instead Weiss felt herself suddenly being pulled in a hug from the taller girl. Not some kind of quick friendly hug, but a comforting one. A type of hug that Weiss had never had before. "I'm your friend."

"I…but, you were laughing at me!" Weiss tried struggling out of the wall of muscle that was holding her in place to no avail. "Let go of me!"

"No." The answer was calm and immediate. No indecision. "I laughed because… well, 'cause you are missing a key thing 'bout Rubes." Weiss could feel Yang take a deep breath before letting it out. "I'm not supposed to say this either, mind you, but Ruby has a huge crush on Blake."

Weiss had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. It was something that everyone, even the dunce of a human being, Jaune, could pick up on. "Everyone and their weapon knows that, your point?"

"So it doesn't mean you are being replaced!" Weiss wasn't convinced, as evident of her continued struggle to break free. "Ruby still thinks the world of you… she still considers you to be her friend, one of her best friends." The struggling lessened as Yang went on. "If you really are worried, you should talk to her, I promise she'll hang out more with you if you just ask. She just… happens to be spending more time with Blake now is all?"

Weiss mulled over the new information after Yang finally let go of her. Perhaps I am just being illogical about this; why not just talk to Ruby directly? It made sense. Weiss groaned, the oaf actually made sense for once. "Well. I feel silly for worrying about it now." Taking a step back from the blonde girl, she started to turn back to the direction of the arcade. "I suppose we should be heading back there no- eep!"

The white haired girl felt a familiar sensation as Yang pulled her back into a hug. "Don't forget, I'm your friend too. I always will be."

Suppressing her immediate inclination to push Yang away, Weiss instead hugged her back, her thin arms barely wrapping around the tall girl, a small smile stretching her lips.

"Thanks Yang."

AU: I'm guessing this wasn't what you were expecting at all.

Before you ask, I know the question will pop up; No, I am not planning on making this a freezerburn story as well. If it becomes one, that is not my intention to be completely honest.

This chapter stems from three things; 1. I wanted to address Weiss since… she would be feeling very left out, especially after their semester break. 2. I really haven't written any Weiss or Yang stuff –at least of any depth- so I wanted to get some practice in. 3. Gotta do some freezerburn stuff for ASouthernRussian (my editor for a lot of my stories).

This is the only chapter that I actually seriously edited because, like I said above, this was a exercise in writing characters I normally don't write. Even Yang I only ever write in the context of her relationship with Ruby instead of her acting outside of the big sister role.

In the end, this chapter didn't have the feeling I wanted it to have in the end, so I may come back and retroactively edit it… if I do, I'll mention it in later chapter's author's note.

Second-to-lastly, I don't plan on having these little interludes very often, maybe every ten or so chapters? Give or take?

Finally, how did I do? Like I said, this was an experiment in writing characters I usually never do, so I'm curious to how well/poorly I did with the characterization.

Thanks for reading everyone, and expect a actual Blake and Ruby chapter on Sunday! :D
Government plans to outsource official spying, forcing communication service providers like BT to retain personal communications data – records of all phonecalls, emails, texts and internet connections – have been severely criticised by the industry expected to do ministers dirty work for them.

In a submission to the Home Office as part of a public consultation, internet firms have candidly labelled the plans as "an unwarranted intrusion into people's privacy" and have suggested people were deceived about the extent of the government's ambitions to monitor the country's communications data. According to the Sunday Times, the London Internet Exchange which represents 330 firms including BT, Virgin, and Carphone Warehouse, says that the proposals are deceptive. "We view the description of the government's proposals as 'maintaining' the capability as disingenuous: the volume of data the government now proposes [we] should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall intrusion into then privacy of the citizenry."

This represents the unanimous view of the firms that are to replace the £12bn data silo planned before the crisis in public finances. The new policy announced in April by the unlamented former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, was presented as a concession to those concerned about intrusion, as well as a response to the new reality of the economic situation. The revised scheme, which has been urged by "Surveillance Central" – GCHQ in Cheltenham – will cost £2bn, still great chunk of taxpayers' money to be throwing around these days.

But the cost is not really the issue. The policy is one of the foundation stones of the surveillance state – a society in which data from people's movement, travel abroad, spending habits and communications are retained by government and its agencies – and is an indicator of the profound contempt and mistrust this government has for the public. It represents as great an intrusion as the national identity register, the central database planned with the ID card.

"These new proposals," says the industry submission, "suggest an intention to capture anything and everything, regardless of the communications [method] used. We have grave misgivings about the technical feasibility of such ambition."

"We are not aware of any existing equipment [an internet company] could purchase that would enable it to fulfil a legal obligation to acquire and retain such a wide range of data as it transits across their network … in some common cases it would be impossible in principle to obtain the information sought."

The internet providers make another crucial point. If this system goes ahead, it would represent a mass breach of the Human Rights Act which guarantees a right to privacy. Given the government's failure to respond to European judgments against the retention of innocent people's DNA we can hardy expect another huge breach of the public's rights to bother Home Office civil servants.

But we should be really worried. This scheme is among the greatest of the current threats to our free society and it is important that the Internet Exchange has raised concerns about privacy so clearly. As the ISPs point out, there is no guarantee that the methods proposed to store our communications data will be secure, for as soon as you start gathering information in large databases it becomes vulnerable to hackers, abuse by government agencies and of course incompetence.

We should remember that the essence of the government's proposal is this: ministers plan to seize our information using our money for their benefit. That's like paying someone, who has broken into your home, to read your private letters.
Two marathons a day

To ski to the South Pole in any meaningful sense, you’ve got to start at the edge of the continent, which is a distance of 730 miles. It’s also uphill – by the time you reach the pole you are 9,300ft up. Temperatures range from -50C to -60C, although I had days when it reached -70C. If you feel a tad chilly, you have to put an extra scarf on.

It’s a great place if you want to lose some weight because you burn up to 10,000 calories a day, which is the equivalent of running two marathons a day for two months. So you have to get fit.

I trained every day, including holidays. A typical working day for me was to get up at 4am and either drag some tyres up and down a hill for three hours or go for a 20-mile run. I’d also go for a mile and a half swim in a loch some days, but only in the winter – it was too warm in the summer.

Breakfast would be a massive bowl of porridge, handfuls of dried fruit and a chopped banana on top. I’d wolf that down then eat six boiled eggs and six raw eggs. Then I’d go to work. At noon, I’d do another two hours of training, usually dragging tyres up and down Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – my employer was very understanding.

Lunch would be a whole chicken followed by a pint of cream down in one. The best time of day would be 3pm when I’d eat a whole cake or a couple of packets of biscuits. Then I’d be in the gym for a couple of hours in the evening. It’s that sort of dedication that you need to do a trip like this.

Lunch would be a whole chicken followed by a pint of cream down in one.

There was one very important thing I needed on this trip and that was someone else to go on the expedition with me. It’s a big decision. One thing you consider is size – two well-built men in a tent is a bit cramped.

I got a tip-off in Glasgow about a woman called Fiona Taylor who could be right for the trip. Actually, she was perfect. She had that old-school grit – very determined and mentally tough.

She’d never done anything like this before but anyone can get fit enough to do this trip. It’s just a question of putting one foot in front of the other a wee bit longer than normal. I taught her everything I knew: how to ski, how to dress, what to eat and we became a really disciplined team. We practised everything. We did days and days of training together over weekends so everything became second nature and we never had to question ourselves. We just knew what to do. The main thing was that we got along with one another. We became friends and great team-mates. It was also important that she became good friends with Michelle – they got on really well.
(Updates Fox News comment in final paragraph)

NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) - Protesters gathered on Wednesday outside Fox News Channel to denounce what they claim is its racist campaign coverage, including a pundit who called Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama a terrorist.

The crowd of some 150 people wielded a petition with more than 600,000 signatures objecting to news coverage by Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp NWSa.N, organizers said.

Some demonstrators held signs that crossed out the network’s “Fair and Balanced” slogan and replaced it with the words “Fairly Racist!”

Led by activist groups MoveOn.org and ColorOfChange.org, protesters cited incidents on Fox including an on-screen graphic calling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” and a pundit who confused Obama with Osama bin Laden and joked they should both be assassinated.

Another anchor called a televised fist bump between Obama and his wife a “terrorist fist jab,” they said, and talk show host Bill O’Reilly discussed calling a “lynching party” to deal with Michelle Obama after criticizing her patriotism.

“Putting racism on national television and calling it news is never funny,” said Andre Banks of ColorOfChange.

Joining the protest was hip hop star Nas, who said the Fox coverage inspired a song “Sly Fox” on his new album.

“Fox poisons this country every time they air racist propaganda and try and call it news,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox said: “Fox News believes in all protesters exercising their right to free speech, including Nas, who has an album to promote.”
American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology released a statement about when and how to resume sex.

Two groups are urging doctors to inform patients that sex is possible after a heart attack. (Photo11: Getty Images) Story Highlights Groups: Intimacy is possible after heart attack

Sexual health is important, researcher says

Advice depends on patient's overall health

CHICAGO — Many heart specialists are hardly Dr. Ruth — sex is not something they relish bringing up with patients. But new guidance says they should, early and often, to let survivors know intimacy is often possible after a heart attack.

Discussions should involve everything from when and how to resume sex, to what position might be best for some conditions or not advised for others, according to a consensus statement released Monday by the American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology.

It's billed as the first scientific statement with detailed guidance on resuming sex after a heart attack, stroke or other cardiac condition and is based on a review of medical literature.

"Sexual health is an important part of the overall health of the individual," even for the oldest patients, said Elaine Steinke, a researcher and professor of nursing at Wichita State University in Kansas. Steinke was the lead author of the statement published in the heart association's Circulation journal and the European Heart Journal.

Co-author Tiny Jaarsma, a professor and heart failure researcher at Sweden's Linkoping University, said in an email that doctors and nurses "rarely discuss sex 'spontaneously', but often wait until the patient brings up questions around sex. Health care providers often are afraid to upset patients or might feel embarrassed themselves."

Fears and anxieties about resuming sex are often numerous: Will it cause another heart attack? Can I use Viagra? What if my defibrillator goes off during sex? And many are too shy to ask, so heart doctors, nurses and other health care workers should take the lead and initiate the discussion with men and women patients of all ages and their partners, according to the statement.

Many heart patients can safely resume sexual intercourse after first checking with their doctors, and the answers to many questions depend on each patient's overall health, the guidance says. Patients with mild, stable chest pain face a low risk for a sex-triggered heart problem, whereas patients with advanced heart failure should postpone sex until their condition is stabilized.

General precautions listed in the statement include:

— Before resuming sex, make sure you can engage in moderate physical activity, such as walking briskly up two flights of stairs, without chest pain, breathlessness or other symptoms.

— If moderate activity is too strenuous, avoid intercourse but not intimacy: hugging and kissing may be OK.

— Have sex in a comfortable, familiar place and avoid things that could add stress to the experience, including extramarital affairs.

— Tell your doctor about any symptoms during sex, including chest pain, dizziness or insomnia afterward.

— Some positions may not be safe. Heart bypass surgery patients should avoid being on top in the missionary position, and Steinke said having sex in a more "upright position" may be easier for some heart failure patients, whose symptoms may include shortness of breath.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer signs a copy of her book April 26, 2012, in New York. The sex therapist says doctors often lack training in discussing sex with patients, but that they should. She says partners are often as concerned as patients themselves. (Photo11: Richard Drew, AP)

Ruth Westheimer, the famed 85-year-old sex therapist known as "Dr. Ruth," commented on the study Monday through her publicist from Switzerland, where she was hiking.

When hospitals have invited her to speak, she always gives the same message: "Doctors need to ask their patients about sexual functioning," even if both sides are embarrassed by the topic.

"When it comes to sex and heart issues, in my experience it's as likely to be the partner of the heart patient who is afraid of having sex because it might cause a heart attack as the patient him or herself," Westheimer said. "What I suggest is that people write down their questions and send it to the doctor in advance of their appointment. That way they'll be sure the question gets asked and the doctor will have had time to get prepared to answer it."

Vijay Divakaran, a cardiologist with Scott & White Hospital in Round Rock, Texas, said the consensus statement is important and will change practice. Cardiologists don't get formal training in discussing sexual issues with their patients but the conversations get easier, he said

"Sometimes patients don't talk about it, they just Google it, and there's a lot of misconceptions" online, Divakaran said. "Once you start asking them, you would be surprised that it almost always is an issue."

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1e6Daer
Thousands of families are fleeing the rebel-held city of Idlib after the heaviest bombardment in months, coinciding with a separate increase in air strikes in Aleppo province.

The developments come as Russia faces charges that its air strikes have killed dozens of civilians across Idlib province, including in an area near a hospital.

Despite strenuous denials from Moscow, Turkey has called on the international community to rein in what it called Russia's growing military intervention in Syria.

The bombardment is part of a government offensive to take Idlib city, the provincial capital in Syria's northwest, held by al-Nusra Front and its allies since March last year.

Al-Nusra Front is not party to a Russian- and US-brokered ceasefire that went into force on February 27 between government forces and moderate rebels.

People and Power - Syria: Under Russia's Fist

Russian air strikes targeted the city overnight, killing 23 civilians, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Tuesday.

"The air strikes are the most intensive on Idlib since the beginning of the truce," SOHR's Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP news agency.

SOHR said dozens of civilians were also wounded in the raids on Idlib. However, the Russian defence ministry has denied that its aircraft carried out any strikes on the city.

"Russian aviation did not carry out any military operations, still less air strikes, in Idlib province," Igor Konashenkov, a military spokesperson, said in a statement.

Fighting in the north

At least 280,000 people have been killed and more than half of Syria's population have fled their homes since the conflict first erupted in 2011.

In recent days, fighting has especially intensified along the country's northern border where the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group is targeting a strip of rebel territory.

SOHR says thousands of civilians remain trapped there owing to the fighting.

It said rebel groups in Azaz, in Aleppo province, tried to launch a counteroffensive on Tuesday but failed when ISIL blocked the attack with a suicide bomber, killing six.

SOHR said ISIL swept towards the opposition strongholds of Marea and Azaz on Friday, forcing thousands of civilians to flee.

Meanwhile, thousands of civilians are trapped in Marea and Sheikh Issa after Kurdish authorities closed the main road towards the autonomous Kurdish canton of Afrin to the west, according to the UN relief agency.

"Due to the closure of the Marea-Afrin road, an estimated 7,000 civilians are effectively trapped in Marea and Sheikh Issa towns," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Monday.

About 2,000 people had already managed to leave Marea and Sheikh Issa before the road was closed on Sunday, OCHA said.

It said about 5,000 people in total have been displaced by fighting since Friday, and the situation remains "volatile and unpredictable".

Two roads blocked

Yacoub El Hillo, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Syria, has called on armed groups to "ensure the unhindered movement and protection of civilians trying to reach safety".

However, Kurdish authorities announced on Sunday the closure of the two roads from Afrin to Marea and Azaz in response to shelling of a majority-Kurdish district of the provincial capital, Aleppo city, by Syrian armed groups.

SOHR said the groups continued to shell the Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood on Tuesday.

They have been shelling Sheikh Maqsoud for months after an advance by Kurdish forces into rebel territory west of Marea, SOHR's Abdel Rahman said.

An estimated 130 civilians have died in the shelling since February, he said.

The UN says clashes have also trapped about 165,000 civilians between Azaz and the closed Turkish border.

Pablo Marco, the regional manager of Doctors Without Borders, said on Monday that tens of thousands - many of them already displaced from other areas - were caught less than 5km from the frontline with "nowhere to go".

Meanwhile, US-backed Syrian fighters advanced against ISIL in the last tract of territory the group holds near the Turkish border on Wednesday, SOHR said.

IN PICTURES: The orphans of Syria's war

SOHR said on Wednesday the Kurdish YPG fighters made up the majority of forces involved in the attack, contradicting US officials who said the operation would be mostly comprised of Syrian Arab fighters.

Turkey is opposed to any further expansion of Syrian Kurdish influence in northern Syria, where the YPG already controls an uninterrupted 400km.

ISIL lost 18 fighters in the fighting on Monday, taking its losses since the start of the offensive on May 24 to 79, he said.

Among those killed were 24 child fighters from ISIL's Cubs of the Caliphate recruitment programme.

The US has ignored protests from its NATO ally Turkey to back the SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters it regards as the most effective force on the ground against ISIL in Syria.

The Pentagon has deployed more than 200 American special forces personnel to work alongside it.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has heralded a "new era" in Japanese - South Korean relations after the two countries reached a landmark deal on the issue of wartime sex slaves.

Under Monday's deal, Japan will finance a 1bn yen aid ($8.7m) fund for the Korean women forced into Japanese military-run brothels during World War II, euphemistically referred to as "comfort women".

"Japan and South Korea will welcome a new era," Abe told reporters after speaking by phone with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye. "Both countries will cooperate together to open" it, he added.

The deal was reached in South Korea's capital Seoul at a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries.

"The comfort women issue... occurred with the involvement of the Japanese military... and the Japanese government acutely feels its responsibility," Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida said after a meeting with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-Se.

Kishida added that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed an "apology and repentance from the bottom of his heart" to the victims.

Yun Byung-se said the agreement was "final and irreversible," as long as Japan faithfully followed through with its promises.

Strained ties

The issue has long been a source of friction between Seoul and Tokyo, with South Korea previously accussing Japanese leaders of repeatedly failing to properly atone for wartime atrocities.

Tens of thousands of women from around Asia, many of them Korean, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.

In South Korea, there are 46 such surviving former sex slaves, mostly in their late 80s or early 90s.

Read more: Finding closure for Japan's wartime 'comfort women'

Many survivors of the wartime sexual slavery had urged Japan to issue an official apology, make reparations and include wartime atrocities in Japanese school textbooks.

The US sees North Korea as a key rival in the south east Asian region and hopes to benefit from the strengthening of ties between its two allies, South Korea and Japan.

The two Northeast Asian countries together host about 80,000 U.S. troops and are members of now-stalled regional talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions in return for aid.
Photo of the Mount Hood summit from the U.S. Forest Service

GOVT CAMP, Ore. – A climber died in the hospital after falling nearly 600 feet down steep terrain on Mt. hood on Sunday, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said.

The climber, 32-year-old John Thorton Jenkins, fell at about 11:30 a.m. while near the Hogsback climbing area.

He suffered severe injuries when he slid down the steep mountainside.

A Clackamas County Search & Rescue team worked with Mt. Hood Ski patrol and Portland Mountain Rescue to reach the man.

The Oregon Air National guard airlifted the man to a Portland hospital, where he later died of his injuries.

Officials will release the man’s name once family members have had time to notify relatives about the death.

*Editor's note - Initial information from deputies indicated that the man fell on Friday. They have since said it happened Sunday.
It’s Date Night with the Stoic Templum 2.1 !

Unfortunately, that’s a date between the tent and I… my girlfriend is in China for the week.

I knew I was going to need a two-person tent eventually. Love might be in the air, but it’s a cold, hard breakup between my beloved Big Ag Fly Creek 1 Platinum and I. I initially approached finding a 2-person tent as my only shelter, since I still have to budget around $300 for a tent and not much more. I wanted something big enough that it’d make for many romantic forest-bound evenings and group trips with friends or my brothers, but I needed it to be light enough that I could still strap it on the bike for an ultralight 200-mile overnight dash.

I failed. That tent doesn’t exist.

So, instead, I diversified my holdings. I bought the cheapest tent I could find (above the department store variety, which are a terrible investment) and bought a bivy bag for solo trips. I’ll tell you what I think of the Stoic in a minute.

My second shelter was a Borah Gear Snowyside Bivy.

The Borah Gear Snowyside Bivy was an equal bargain. This is a new offering from Borah Gear, a small ‘cottage’ company in the United States that makes ultralight tarps and bivy bags. Their Snowyside bivy is pretty customizeable, but it takes about 3 weeks to ship so they can actually sew it up for you. I added taped seams, a side zipper, and a full eVent floor instead of silnylon. What I got is a sub-2lb fully enclosed shelter from all weather when comfort is second to just sleeping dry and packing camp quick.

I’ll do a full review of the Borah Gear bivy later; I’ve only got one night in it, shown here at “The Top of the World” in Florida, MA, which is actually just a cell phone tower that happens to be near an overlook. I can do a lot of assuming with a tent because I’ve used ten just like it, but I can’t do the same with the bivy.

The Tent

The Stoic Templum 2.1 is dirt-cheap (I got mine for $95 with a coupon from its flagship site, Backcountry). During times when they’re rotating old stock on camping gear, like just after the holidays or just after winter/summer ends, you can almost count on finding things marked far below their full retail value, and this tent was a moment like that. At $200 full price, it’s not exactly pricy either, especially considering that the Big Agnes Copper Spur UL 2 , the luxurious ultralight equivalent, goes for $400, plus another $60 for the footprint and $30 for a gear loft, if you’re into those.

The first thing I did when I opened it was to toss aside all the optional stuff. The tent comes in a stuff sack, with a separate sack for stakes and another for poles. I stripped these off. Then, I set aside the gear loft and footprint, and took just the bare essentials—tent fly, tent body, poles, and stakes— onto my bathroom scale for an estimate. I expected 5 pounds, and got four and change. It ended up weighing 4lbs 6oz for me. This is consistent with the “trail weight” listed by Stoic, so I’ll trust it in lieu of a more accurate scale, but you don’t have to take my word for it.

Next, I set it up in my room to get an idea of the floorspace. Since this tent is rectangular, the length x width gives me a square footage of 30.2ft. A Big Agnes Copper Spur UL2 (sorry BA, you’re my comparison today) is 29 square feet, so there’s no skimping on space here. A length of 89 inches is plenty for my 6’1″ self.

First thing I did was replace the hook at the top:

As it was, the hook had a hard time getting over all three poles (or, adversely, I had a hard time using it right). At either rate, function was lacking, and I had a webbing loop there to work with. I took wire cutters and clipped right through the plastic hook.

I have to buy more guylines for stuff like this, but one of the silnylon straps they tied the tent up with during shipping worked perfectly. Any string at all can now be used to tie all three poles together with a really simple shoe-tying bow. Having the cross-pole above the two main poles ended up being really important.

Next, I checked out the zipper pulls.

Another cut corner to keep price down, but that’s fine; three feet of thin accessory cord will replace all six zipper pulls (two per door, plus the fly vestibules). It’ll be lighter, easier to grab, and won’t hold as much water, so it’s worth replacing.

The stitching was great; double stitched and bartacked everywhere it should be, with plenty of reinforcement at pull-points. It wasn’t immaculate like some considerably more expensive tents— you can see some reinforcement fabric that wasn’t cut quite right there at the pole grommet, but it was good enough. Function over form. The fabric itself was smooth and comparatively thick when up against Big Agnes fabrics, but it wasn’t unreasonable and the packed size of the tent was just as small as most other mid-sized tents I’ve used, including the Marmot Aura 2 and the Big Agnes Fly Creek UL 3 .

Packed size was also acceptable; about the size of a bowling ball. I’ll probably pack it with some clothes in this dry-bag so the tubular shape would fit better on a back rack when I take it touring.

The smaller ball there is the Snowyside Bivy, which is about the size of a small melon. It’s not actually that much smaller, but with no poles or setup, it’s much more convenient.

That isn’t to say the Stoic Templum wasn’t convenient; I had it up in the backyard in just a few minutes. Good thing, too, because it was pouring rain.

I put a tarp down to keep the tent from drowning in the 1-inch slush layer over my lawn. The weather here is just absolutely horrendous.

Once I had it all set up, it looked great! Very sturdy, very stable, and very simple- just the way I like it.

The Philosophy of a “cheap” tent is starting to hit me.

I know cost is a poor metric of measurement in quality or function, and I don’t want to purport that this Stoic Templum is somehow “better” than the tents that cost 3-4 times the price. It’s not.

However, it does make me wonder at the marketing that goes into free-standing tents as a modifier of price. Other than a slightly heavier set of poles, this tent is pretty nearly identical to a more expensive tent. You’re not paying for some brilliant engineering or impossibly rare materials; you’re paying for a DAC logo on your poles and the false security in having the “best” that your money can buy.

So, that’s why I’m kind of in two camps at the moment (no pun intended):

Option 1: Buy Cottage Gear. There are a ton of great manufacturers. Borah Gear, Mountain Laurel Designs, and Revelate Designs are some of my favorites, and there are many more. Here’s a list. This stuff is going to be absolutely minimalist, ultralight, custom fit to purpose, and the price will be un-inflated. Plus, you get to support American and Canadian businesses.

Option 2: Slash price by going with the lowest-common-denominator tent I’m comfortable with, and sacrifice some quality but maintain function. The Templum is functionally the same for me as a Big Agnes.

I used to have an Option 3. Option 3 was to go with the highest quality shelter manufactured by the big-box companies as a combination of quality and light weight, but after seeing this tent come so close for a fraction of the price, I no longer think that’s a good idea. I end up paying a lot for something that still can’t match the weight and packability of a cottage-made product, and I pay through the nose for the brand.

Consider me reformed?

Maybe not yet, but saving money is definitely starting to outweigh having the “best” of everything. I want a product that will last and last, and in lieu of that, I want it cheap enough to be replaced.

Remember that overlook I mentioned with the bivy bag? Here it is:

If you want to support what I’m doing with the blog, just follow any of the product links and order whatever you want off of Amazon. That’s it! I’ll get a little bonus. Beats the hell out of advertisements…
Prominent atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate the possibility of prosecuting the pope for crimes against humanity, their solicitor confirmed today.

The pair argue that Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September and put on trial for his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Last week a letter emerged from 1985 in which the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger urged that a paedophilic priest in America not be defrocked for the "good of the universal church".

The Vatican has already suggested the pope is immune from prosecution because he is a head of state. But Dawkins and Hitchens believe that because he is not the head of a state with full United Nations membership, he does not hold immunity and could be arrested when he steps on to British soil.

This is the advice they have been given by their lawyers – solicitor Mark Stephens and human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC.

"I'm convinced we can get over the threshold of immunity," said Stephens. "The Vatican is not recognised as a state in international law. People assume that it has existed for time immemorial but it was a construct of Mussolini, and when the Vatican first applied to become a member of the UN, the US said no. So as a sop they were given the status of permanent observers rather than full members."

But the Holy See insists it is a state like any other. Earlier this month, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, Vatican tribunal chief, said: "The pope is certainly a head of state and he has the same legal status as all heads of state."

Stephens said there are three lines of approach to put the pope in the dock. "One is that we apply for a warrant to the international criminal court. Alternatively, criminal proceedings could be brought here, either a public prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service or a private prosecution. That would require at least one victim to come forward who is either from this jurisdiction or was abused here. The third option is for individuals to lodge civil claims," said Stephens.

He said he had recently been approached by seven wealthy individuals who donated money to the Catholic church and were dismayed their money had not only been used to fund abuse but also buy the silence of victims. These people could potentially sue the pope, Stephens suggested.

Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, Dawkins described Ratzinger as a "leering old villain in a frock … whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Without admitting that he had consulted lawyers he added: "This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil – not ecclesiastical – court. That's what should happen. Sadly, we all know our faith-befuddled governments will be too craven to do it."

Pope Benedict will be in Britain from 16-19 September where he will beatify the theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman.
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) Von Miller is headed for a very different kind of offseason.

”For one, I already know that I’m not going to be Super Bowl MVP,” the Broncos star cracked.

No, but he could still win his first Defensive Player of the Year award – if voters look past Denver’s offensive-driven nosedive that will leave them out of the postseason party for the first time since 2010.

Even though he’s been stuck at 13+ sacks for three weeks, Miller has grown into a well-rounded linebacker : one who can stuff the run, cover tight ends and torment tackles as adroitly as he can knock the ball out of the quarterback’s hand.

Miller cringes at the term ”pass rusher” because it describes just one aspect of his job, which he says is to ”make plays, big plays, for my team.”

”That’s interesting that he would answer that question like that way because that tells you how much better a player he’s become,” coach Gary Kubiak said. ”Guys get a lot of accolades for sacks and numbers in this league, but really are you a complete player?”

In Miller’s case, absolutely.

Denver’s inept offense and poor run defense limited his chances down the stretch to have game-turning plays like he piled up earlier, including sack-strips of Andrew Luck and Blake Bortles that sealed victories and a sack of Cam Newton in the opener that was reminiscent of his spectacular Super Bowl.

Miller’s 73 tackles are a career high and more than double what he collected last season (35) before embarking on a big playoff run that culminated with probably the greatest defensive performance in Super Bowl history.

At midseason, Miller was just about the only player in the conversation for top defender in 2016. Going without a sack for the last three games has opened the door to others, including Khalil Mack of the Raiders (12-3), who visit the Broncos (8-7) on Sunday.

Oakland coach Jack Del Rio said Miller and Mack are similar in their disruptive capabilities but ”Von’s the only guy I’ve ever seen that can look like Gumby going around a corner and an inch off the ground and still be going at full speed.”

Miller also faces constant double- and even triple-teams that guys like Mack, Vic Beasley Jr. and Ryan Kerrigan don’t usually have to worry about.

Sunday will mark the first time in Miller’s six-year NFL career that the Broncos are playing for pride and not playoff positioning.

At this time last year, Miller was preparing for a stellar playoff run that would bring him fame and fortune, from a Super Bowl 50 MVP trophy to a record-breaking contract. His cross-country victory lap: a six-month jet-setting junket of television and dance studios, A-list parties and B-roll appearances.

”Honestly, I did miss my teammates. I love these guys in here. But it was so new and I was meeting new people and it was new experiences,” Miller said. ”And the end of the day, I was like, `Dang, I was supposed to … we had practice today.’ I’m on my Snap and I’m getting messages from my guys like, `Bro, we ready to work out today and you at Six Flags.\'”

He compared it to taking a sick day during school and thinking about what his buddies were doing all the time.

Miller combined his Super Bowl success and his franchise tag status to enjoy last year’s offseason as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: ”An offseason like that with the contracts, you really only get one of those,” Miller said. ”So, I wanted to take advantage of that.”

Miller is preparing for a very different kind of offseason now.

”I’m starting my offseason training on Wednesday,” Miller told The Associated Press. ”I just don’t want to take a break. Right now, I’m in great shape. So, why take a break and lose that? So, while I got January off, I’m just going to hit the workouts hard while I can where I just focus on working out and not appearances or endorsements. I’m heading to the Super Bowl. That’s a month away. I’ve got all of January to just grind it out.”

Come April, he’ll report to the Broncos’ offseason program with the rest of his teammates.

”I’ll be here with my guys,” he said. ”I won’t be so all over the place.”

He’ll save that for game days.

NOTES: C Matt Paradis, Denver’s 2016 Ed Block Courage Award winner, confirmed he’ll have surgery on both hips this offseason. … Kubiak, who had a second health scare in three seasons back in September, was asked about his desire to continue coaching Friday. ”Why, do I look bad?” he said with a laugh, then added: ”I love this league. I love the Broncos. I love to work. I’m all in on the Raiders right now. There will be a time for reflection and all of that stuff next week.”

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Follow Arnie Melendrez Stapleton on Twitter: http://twitter.com/arniestapleton

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For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL
In September Dubspot had the pleasure of hosting Deep Medi Musik recording artist Tunnidge for a live streaming workshop. In these Dubspot-produced video recap of Tunnidge’s appearance and workshop, the London producer offers a significant array of production advice, from EQing samples, to mixing and mastering suggestions, and even some tips on how get top DJs to play your tunes! Tunnidge goes in depth on his use of a PAZ Analyzer to clean up samples, Kontakt 5, and the frequency minefield of mixdowns.

Some of Tunnidge’s best advice can be heard clearly enough in his music, all of it made to a perfectionist’s ear, each element obsessed over, and sitting perfectly balanced within the mix.

Tunnidge’s latest 12” is “Control” b/w “Decay,” released on the Get Darker imprint, sounds like standing outside of a space ship construction zone, the muffled sound of a metal-cutting saw occasionally rising and falling. Tunnidge – “Decay” out now on GetDarker

An easy standout release from both the Tunnidge catalog and Deep Medi’s is 2008’s blistering “Geddeon,” which expertly positions a ruff ragga vocal with an ethereal female voice, creating an emotional palette ripe for a heavy drop that bubbles and bounces with a tight, thick bassline.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkA1DcuSkY Tunnidge – “Giddeon” out now Deep Medi Musik

In other decidedly gothic and relentless productions like “7 Breaths,” a release for Distance’s Chestplate imprint, Tunnidge unleashes a stomach-turning amount of bass weight that will have anyone near a sub, out of breath. Tunnidge – “7 Breaths” out now Chestplate

Purveyor of deep, dark, sub-driven beats, Tunnidge has quickly forged a reputation as a heavyweight of the Dubstep scene. Possessing a murky, cavernous sound as equally hypnotic as it is enlivening he has consistently produced quality progressive music since his first release. And what a first release: still rinsed by the biggest DJ’s in the scene, Geddeon/Face Melt remains a classic 12″ that will batter the best of sound systems and leave the dance floor well and truly slain.

What’s more, it’s testament to Tunnidge’s production prowess that this debut came on Mala’s Deep Medi Musik imprint, widely acknowledged as a seminal label and one known for its exemplar releases. Stripping the sound back to its key components of bass and beats, Tunnidge produces a purist’s sound: sub-bass that can be felt from head to toe, alongside a carefully-crafted snare that makes you flinch every time it rings out across the dance floor.

Indeed, such is the strength of his sonic identity that a Tunnidge tune is instantly recognisable, with characteristic snares, intelligent use of samples and unmistakeable control over bass line melodies. A perfect example of this, and a highlight of Tunnidge’s production repertoire, is Higher Forces’ (released on established underground label Boka Records), a tune fit for a cold, dank dungeon, with haunting echoic vocals and a relentless, mesmerising kick drum.

When in collaboration with producers of a similar stature and style the results have been blistering; The Lights/Ding Ding 12″ produced alongside Cyrus and released on their Origin Audio imprint – a new label set up to support producers still making challenging, sub-low beats – was a top seller in Blackmarket Records, one of the leading bass music shops in the UK, a week after its release. Collaborations with Distance have been fruitful too with the evil, ball and chain sounds of Blame currently receiving heavy play on Rinse FM and other stations dedicated to the best in UK bass music. [read more.]
A little over a week ago Law Enforcement in California launched statewide raids to combat Human Trafficking. The raids yielded hundreds of arrests and dozens of slaves being set free including children who were being sexually exploited.

From KTLA5:

More than 30 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and task forces, including the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force, participated in the third annual “Operation Reclaim and Rebuild” enforcement operation, according to a sheriff’s news release.

The statewide operation took place over the three-day period between last Thursday and Saturday.

In total, 474 arrests were made, including 142 males on solicitation charges, and 36 males on suspicion of pimping, according to figures provided by the Sheriff’s Department.

Additionally, 28 commercially and sexually exploited children and 27 adult victims were rescued.

“You are worthy of more. And we will work tirelessly with our partners … to provide you services and help you rebuild your life,” Sheriff Jim McDonnell said, addressing the victims during a news conference on Tuesday.

The minors who were recovered during the operation were being cared for by various children and family services agencies across the state, according to sheriff’s officials. The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking and the Saving Innocence organization were coordinating efforts to help victims in L.A. County.
The family of Egyptian business tycoon Salah Diab used a corporate network made of Egyptian and offshore companies to sign agreements and strike deals with the Egyptian government, according to the second wave of Panama Papers released worldwide on Monday.

Asawatmasriya joins international media platforms publishing this second wave of The Panama Papers which is an unprecedented investigation that reveals the offshore links of some of the globe’s most prominent figures. The second wave focuses on uncovering Africa offshore empires.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), together with the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media partners, spent a year sifting through 11.5 million leaked files to expose the offshore holdings of world political leaders, links to global scandals, and details of the hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities, sports stars and more.

The trove of documents is likely the biggest leak of inside information in history. It includes nearly 40 years of data from a little-known but powerful law firm based in Panama. That firm, Mossack Fonseca, has offices in more than 35 locations around the globe, and is one of the world’s top creators of shell companies, corporate structures that can be used to hide ownership of assets.

Leaked data obtained by ICIJ reveal agreements involving the petroleum sector in Egypt. One of the agreements between Pico International Petroleum a subsidiary of Egypt’s Pico Group, and the Egyptian government concerned millions in development costs for the lucrative Al-Amal Petroleum Field located in the Gulf of Suez.

Tawifk Diab. Photo from his official Facebook account

Several partners were part of this deal: the national oil company Egyptian General Petroleum Company (EGPC), Greystone and Pico International. Both Greystone and Pico Group are owned by the Diab family. Greystone is registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) while Pico is registered as an Egyptian company. The project involves the expansion and the development of an onshore processing plant.

Certificate of incorporation of Greystone Petroleum (Egypt) Limited.

The Egyptian government claimed to be unaware of the offshore activities involved in the agreement. When asked about these deals and the related documents, Tarek Al Hadidy, EGPC’s head said: “We have a concession agreement with them and they are committed to it. We don't know anything about the offshore activities of Pico International Petroleum & Greystone. My company [EGPC] is paying the taxes for Al-Amal field and if the other partner companies are involved in illegal activities, they should be investigated by the authorities, not by me.”

The issue of taxes is not as simple: the concession agreement of 2005 issued by law No. 159 allows for various tax exemptions at municipal and national levels and is exempt save for income taxes.

Pico International Petroleum is Egypt's largest locally owned oil and gas company. It works on developing smaller or more mature concessions that are a vital component of the country’s oil and gas sector. It is part of the Pico Group,which comprises seven independent sister companies, each enjoys managerial and financial autonomy.

Established in 1974, Pico Petroleum Services has grown to become a leading brand in the market segments it operates within, with offices in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Mexico. Pico is known primarily as a market leader in agriculture and the shareholders have been active in agriculture since the early 1930s.

Pico International Petroleum, directly or through one of its affiliates, owns interests in six offshore oil and gas assets: Zaafarana, Al-Amal, Gemsa, Geisum and Tawila West, West Tawila Marine, and South Ramadan Marine.

It had also interests in other countries including Romania and Mexico.

Due to local legislation in Egypt, interests in any oil and gas licenses are held by joint ventures (JVs) between the stateowned EGPC, holding 50% of the shares, and a private company holding the remaining 50%. In the JVs where Pico is involved, the company, and/or one of its subsidiaries, detains the majority of the private shares allocated to the contractor members.

It is unclear why an offshore ‘foreign partner’ was involved into an Egyptian deal when a local Diab company, Pico, was already there. What value did Greystone add, what income did it earn and what disbursements did it make? Were there any hidden owners present outside of the Diab family?

When Pico Group chair Sherif El Ezzawy was contacted for comment, he said: ““Regarding Pico Investment Seychelles and Greystone, I emphasise that both companies were lawfully incorporated following all laws and regulations. They were not, and are not, connected to any wrongdoing.”

He further explained: “Pico Investment Seychelles was founded in 2008 to invest in the Gulf area. We chose Seychelles because it offered attractive terms for foreign investors. After its establishment, we decided not to pursue the investment we were evaluating, and therefore had no use for the Seychelles company.”

Incorpration certificate of PICO investment limited.

El Ezzawy went on to say that the entity was inactive and throughout the period no transactions or transfers were done by Pico’s Seychelles company. Regarding Greystone, he claimed the entity was founded before it was acquired and, ‘inactivated as well in 2013.’

Having an offshore company is not a crime, meanwhile offshore companies are often accused of tax evasion and avoidance, the former illegal and the latter technically legal.

El Ezzawy said that offshore companies operating in Egypt are not exempt from taxes for their local activities, specifically in the oil sector. “Taxes are automatically and directly deducted and paid by the regulator on behalf of the partner. Such agreements are completely regulated through Production Sharing Contracts that are passed as a law through the Egyptian parliament.”

The documents uncovered by the Panama papers regarding this case do not show any wrongdoing by Diab’s family. However, they raise questions about whether the family benefits from any offshore tax strategies such as artificial management fees or for the use of bank accounts and whether their interests were fully disclosed.

Mossack Fonseca law firm sign is pictured in Panama City, April 4, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

The story started in June 2008, when Tawfik Diab, the only son of Egypt’s tycoon Salah Diab, established a company called Pico Investment Limited in Seychelles. Mossack Fonseca’s Seychelles branch was the registering agent logging the company as no: 050605. Minutes of the company registration show that Tawfik Diab was elected as the chairperson of the meeting, and his relative Mohamed A. Kamel Diab acted as the secretary.

Mossack Fonseca emails and contracts show that Pico Investment was authorized to open a bank account with JP Morgan Suisse SA in the Swiss canton of Geneva. Tawfik was in charge of completing the transactions on behalf of Pico investment in Seychelles and managing all business with JP Morgan Suisse. Leaked data show that a portion of the shares of Pico Investment were divided between Salah Diab and Kamel Diab – each received 200 shares. Meanwhile, Technoil Limited Inc and Petroleum Ventures International Inc (PVI) each owned 400 shares. In 2013, the company was shut down.

Ramon Fonseca, founding partner of law firm Mossack Fonseca, speaks during an interview with Reuters at his office in Panama City April 5, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

Diab’s family was also linked to another offshore company in the BVI, called Greystone Petroleum (Egypt) Limited. Corporate data for Greystone Petroleum (Egypt) Limited (no. 36154) that goes back to 2003 shows Salah Diab and Tawfik Diab as the directors. The company’s authorized capital of $10 million was divided into 100,000 shares and a per share value of $100 each. In February 2013, Mossack Fonseca decided to resign as a registered agent for Greystone Petroleum.

Greystone previously had a co-shareholder PVI, also a shareholder in Pico Seychelles. In 2013, PVI’s beneficial owner claimed in an email that his shares in Greystone had been sold to Tawfik in 2004. Greystone was described as a subsidiary of Petroleum Ventures. An internet search of the owner’s name results in senior positions across several Egyptian entities including petroleum and cement companies. A worried Pico employee sent an email, dated 2013, to Mossack Fonseca asking for advice on ignoring 'the BVI rule that majority shareholder consent is required’ and how they could ‘ascertain whether there is a legal/beneficial owner of assets attributable to PVI 599 shares in Greystone Egypt.’

Mossack Fonseca co-founder Jürgen Mossack.

So, what was the purpose of the hidden Swiss bank account administered from the Seychelles? Why hold millions of dollars worth of shares in an inactive offshore company? Experts we contacted said that companies are often created solely to host offshore banks accounts.

While the Panama Papers do not expose any wrongdoing, it would go a long way to rebuilding public confidence in state and private company partnerships of this kind, if the corporate structure, including ownership, was transparent and not obscured by banks in secrecy jurisdictions.

Business tycoon Salah Diab and his son Tawfik.

The article has benefitted from ANCIR's assistance
Beaver Island as we know it first appeared out of the ice eleven thousand years ago. Since then, its form has changed considerably because of the rise and fall of Lake Michigan, which has ranged over a differential of 375'. The Lake dropped to a very low level about 8,000 years ago, and stayed down for 4,000 years. During this time, this land was not an island at all but an appendage of the mainland. Then the Lake rose to 30' above its present level, submerging all of Beaver except the central plateau. Next, it dropped about ten feet, producing a slightly smaller version of our present Island. The edge of this configuration was layered with beach gravel. When a logging railroad was built in 1904, it was placed on this firm bed. We know that Native Americans passed by Beaver Island as long ago as 2,200 years. There is no proof that they lived here, but the oral tradition of the Odawas, who have resided here for over 300 years, is that there were small fishing villages in many of the bays when they arrived. Arrowheads, spear heads, and fragments of Woodland-period pottery indicate that at least they came ashore. Fire-cracked rocks mark their cooking fires along the bluff. In 1871 the archeologist Henry Gillman opened some of the mounds in the harbor, and was surprised at the "uncommonly skillful workmanship" of the artifacts he found. The Odawas (Ottawas) migrated westward in the ripples of Native American movement that retreated from contact with the whites, arriving on Beaver Island in the mid-1700s. At times they were recruited to help in skirmishes between the English and the French, but little was known about their lives until Father Baraga came from L'Arbre Croche in 1832 to convert the Indians living on the north shore to Catholicism. He baptized 22 Indians, but those living in the settlement near Whiskey Point remained pagan. A few years later, some of the 199 Indians living on Garden Island, 2 miles north (and the site of over 3,000 Indian graves), were converted by other missionaries.

White traders and trappers began to appear in the early 1800s. Trapping, fishing, and cutting wood for the passing steamers allowed men to earn a living at this frontier. By the 1840s, two trading posts were flourishing. Economic power shifted here from Mackinac Island because of Beaver's good fishing, ample forests, and vastly superior harbor. In 1850, 100 people lived in a growing community at Whiskey Point, unaware that the few Mormons already present would soon overwhelm them and force them to leave.

James Strang, who would create America's only kingdom on Beaver Island, was born in New York in 1813. He expected great things of himself. He established a law practice at the age of 23, but it failed to satisfy his ambition. When he met Joseph Smith in 1844, he converted to his new evangelical religion as a way of improving his position. Strang's debating skills impressed the Mormon leader, who assigned him to found a branch in Burlington, Wisconsin. While Strang was away, Smith was killed. Shortly thereafter Strang produced a letter naming him as Smith's chosen heir. He was challenged by Brigham Young, who was more solidly entrenched. Strang led those who accepted him to Nauvoo, Illinois, and then Voree, Wisconsin, before deciding that God wanted him to bring his flock to Beaver Island. Producing mysterious brass plates from the ground, and receiving directives from God, Strang formed a colony on Beaver Island in 1848. It grew year by year, and soon had the numbers to elect Strang to the state legislature. Trouble with the "gentiles" led to the "War of Whiskey Point", which the Mormons won by firing a canon at the unruly gang gathered at the trading post. By the early 1850s, most of the non-Mormons had left the Island. The ensuing degree of absolute power went to Strang's head, and rumors spread about Mormon attrocities. Strang had himself crowned king, and began taking additional wives. Attempts to oust him by legal means failed, and in 1856 he was assassinated by two disgruntled follow ers. His people were driven off the Island by an unruly mob from Mackinac Island, which was instigated by speculators eager to grab the land. During their 8-year occupancy, the Mormons cleared and cultivated the ground, built roads and houses, and changed the Island from a wilderness to a moderate outpost of civilization. But fate conspired to keep them from reaping the benefits of their toil.

Beaver Island was blessed to be near some of the best fishing grounds in the world. The Mormons had excluded the gentiles from partaking in this bounty, but once the Mormons were gone, Irish fishermen began to appear. They came from Gull Island, Mackinac Island, various port cities on the mainland, and County Donegal in Ireland. Once they settled in, they wrote to their families and friends about "America's Emerald Isle." Over the following three decades, the population grew in surges, taking on a decidedly Irish flavor. Ordinary conversations, as well as services in the Catholic Church, were conducted in Gaelic. Of the 881 residents in 1880, there were 141 Gallaghers, 123 Boyles, and 90 O'Donnells recorded in the census. Closely knit, isolated from the rest of the world during the winter, this community developed a unique identity. Because they controlled the nearby fishing grounds, the economy thrived. By the mid 1880s Beaver Island had become the largest supplier of fresh-water fish in the country. But the invention (1872) and proliferation of the steam tug posed a severe threat. Suddenly fishermen from mainland ports could cross to the grounds, lay five miles of nets, and cross back before dark. No sooner had the Island fishermen adjusted to the loss of their monopoly than a second blow befell them: a sudden drastic reduction in the supply of fish, starting in 1886. Due to overfishing, the harvest declined to half its previous rate by 1893. This problem affected the entire Great Lakes. Michigan started a hatcheries program. This helped, but not enough, so in 1897 a law closing the season during the fall spawning period was passed. The Beaver Island fisherman, notoriously independent, announced that this did not apply to them, so in 1898 a warden was dispatched. He leased a boat in Charlevoix and headed for the Island in the first no-fishing week. A fisherman who was out lifting his nets by the light of the moon saw the warden approach. He tried to flee, but the warden, firing on him with a "Winchester cannon," gave chase. Eventually the fisherman's boat was too damaged to continue, and he was caught and arrested and his equipment confiscated. This became known as "the Battle of the Beavers." Islanders' intractability was reduced, but streaks of it could still be observed for the next hundred years.

Beaver Island has had more than its share of charismatic personalities, such as Father Peter Gallagher and "Doctor" Protar. Father Gallagher became the Island priest in 1865. A man of the people, he quickly came to dominate Island life. He settled disputes, loaned money, arranged marriages, carried on with the bachelors, acquired vast holdings, owned the merchant ship Hattie Fisher, and became an avid hunter and fisherman. He won a pair of horses in a marksmanship contest, and challenged a man to a fistfight in the St. Ignatius chapel, forcing its closure by drawing blood. When the Bishop tried to have him removed, the Bishop's men were threatened by the priest's flock. He was always a figure of controversy, but was generally respected and loved until he died in 1898. Feodor Protar had almost the opposite temperament. Arriving five years before Father Gallagher's death, this newspaper editor and talented actor wanted to change his life in order to undertake a spiritual quest. He bought an old cabin on Sloptown Road, where he strove for self-sufficiency. He did everything he could for everyone he met, including performing medical services for those too poor or too distant for the doctor in St. James. Despite his objections, he was known as "Doctor Protar." Somewhat of a recluse, and a follower of the precepts of Tolstoy, this elderly immigrant came to be regarded as a saint. When he died in 1925, his admirers built a stone-and-iron tomb on Bonner's Bluff for their "heaven-sent friend."

Despite the Island's poor soil, farming played an important role because of the cost of shipping. Farms near Four Corners and on Sloptown Road, many in fields cleared by the Mormons, operated from the 1860s until the 1950s. In addition, excess crops from the Israelite farms on High Island in the 1910s and 20s were sold on the streets of St. James. Logging too has always played a role, with small groups providing cordwood, cedar ties, and tan bark, but in 1901 the Beaver Island Lumber Company went into business in a way that dwarfed all of the other operations before and since. They hired 125 men, bought and built a complex of docks, erected a mill, and built housing on Freesoil Avenue, some of which still stands. They ran a track to Donegal Bay and then south for over ten miles, and had three steam engines hauling carloads of logs to their mill. Ships picked up shaves, shingles, boards, and slabwood and took these products to Detroit and Chicago. The overloaded trains pushed sideways as they rounded the many curves, widening the tracks. Derailments were common. One time a train tipped over, crushing the engineer. Just as some of those who had built the Island's two lighthouses or worked at the Coast Guard station had stayed after their job was done, so too did some of the loggers when the Lumber Company closed its operation and picked up its tracks in 1916. At the turn of the century the population of the Island began to develop more variety. Father Zugelder, the German priest who replaced Father Gallagher, was well-accepted into the diversifying community.

Communities on Garden and High reached their zenith before WW II. Churches, schools, sawmills, docks, stores, and homes were built on each of these nearby islands. Native Americans lived and worked in cooperation with the whites. But rising economic pressures made this way of life increasingly more untenable, and both islands were abandoned. Their trails remain, kept open by the DNR, the Game Club, and an abundance of hikers who occasionally come upon an old car, a grove of apple trees, or the rotting remains of a cabin or barn.

The improvements being implemented in other communities in the early part of this century came late to Beaver Island. In 1905 the Island was connected to the mainland with a 200-ton telegraph cable. Regular winter mail service was not instituted until 1926; before that, it was dependent on dog- and horse-sled trips across the ice. A power plant was built in 1939, and Island homes finally could have electricity. Previously the Parish Hall, the Beaver Hotel, and the Coast Guard Station had installed their own small generators. Perhaps because of this backwardness, the Island was always a popular destination for those tourists who were willing to rough it in their search for a more pristine lifestyle. Local merchants promoted tourism as early as 1878. Fast-talking developers sold Island lots in the lobbies of Chicago hotels in the early 1900s. Tracts of beach on the Island's east side were turned into lots for vacation cottages in the 1920s and 30s. Despite this boost, the Island's economy was still dependent on commercial fishing. The harbor at St. James was ringed with docks, net sheds, ice houses, and boat-building sheds. When the lamprey eel began to decimate the trout and whitefish population in the 1940s, the Island was in trouble. It had been losing population anyway as the newer generations went off to make their mark in the world, particularly in Chicago, but now almost everyone left. The once-thriving community of well over 1,000 residents dwindled to less than 200, and people were afraid the school and medical center would be closed and they would all have to leave. But in the late 1970s a new wave of tourism reversed this trend. As the economy of Michigan improved, along with the pressure and tension of taking advantage of it, more and more people discovered Beaver Island, fell in love with it, and bought property or a home. Today, construction is the dominant industry, with carpenters as plentiful as fishermen once were. After years of insularity, during which ideas offered by newcomers were sneered at, the Island residents have become much more accepting of notions from outside. The newcomers have helped raise the standard of living, and made life more interesting, Yesterday's backwardness has given way to an enlightened infrastructure, with progressive planning commissions, an active Chamber of Commerce, Historical Society, Preservation Association, Property Owners' Association, volunteer fire department, and a well-trained emergency medical service. And the time-honored tradition of picking up news at the bar has been replaced, to a great extent, by searching the internet. Daily activities have come to closely resemble those of the mainland, with the primary difference being that they are enacted in a distant place that is proud of its unique and variegated natural endowment.
Political types aren't the only ones descending on Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan for a meeting with the president-elect and his transition team.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump met with Hollywood heavyweight Leonardo DiCaprio and Terry Tamminen, the chief executive officer of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which "is dedicated to the long-term health and well-being of all Earth’s inhabitants," according to the foundation's mission statement.

"Today, we presented the president-elect and his advisers with a framework -– which LDF developed in consultation with leading voices in the fields of economics and environmentalism -– that details how to unleash a major economic revival across the United States that is centered on investments in sustainable infrastructure," Tamminen said in a statement.

Tamminen said the meeting "focused on how [to] create millions of secure, American jobs in the construction and operation of commercial and residential clean, renewable energy generation."

The meeting -- which was not announced ahead of time by the transition team -- also included a discussion about the polarizing issue of climate change.

"Climate change is bigger than politics, and the disastrous effects on our planet and our civilization will continue regardless of what party holds majorities in Congress or occupies the White House," Tamminen said.

And is seems that the trio will continue their dialogue. "The president-elect expressed his desire for a follow-up meeting in January, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with the incoming administration as we work to stop the dangerous march of climate change, while putting millions of people to work at the same time," Tamminen said.

DiCaprio also met with Ivanka Trump and couple other Trump advisers while at Trump Tower, a source with knowledge of the meeting said.

On Wednesday afternoon, former NYPD detective and 2017 New York City mayoral candidate Bo Dietl tweeted a photo of DiCaprio and Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital and a member of Trump's transition team, as well as others, dining together.

Earlier this week, ABC News confirmed DiCaprio recently met with Ivanka Trump and gave her a copy of his documentary "Before the Flood."

The meeting occurred on the heels of Donald Trump's Monday meeting with former Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore.

The meeting also comes on the same day a senior Trump adviser said Trump has selected Oklahoma State Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is a strong critic of the EPA, and his nomination drew swift criticism from some prominent Democrats and environmental groups.
Photo: Maya Robinson and Photos by Corbis

Weezer’s new album Everything Will Be Alright in the End, out yesterday, is a course correction for the band after a series of recent missteps. How do we know this? Because since 2001’s Weezer (The Green Album), basically every Weezer album has been pitched as a course correction for the band after a series of recent missteps. (There’s one exception, and the identity of that album may surprise you!) Take a look:

All quotes, except where noted, by Rivers Cuomo.

The album: Weezer (The Green Album) (2001)

The previous missteps: Disappearing into self-indulgence on 1996’s Pinkerton, then disappearing entirely for five years.

The correction: Returning to the sound of The Blue Album, with the help of producer Ric Ocasek.

“[Pinkerton] is just a sick album, sick in a diseased sort of way … This [new] record is purely musical.” —Rolling Stone

“[Pinkerton] is a hideous record. It was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people and continues to happen on a grander and grander scale and just won’t go away.” —Entertainment Weekly

The album: Maladroit (2002)

The previous missteps: Overreacting to the (still-embarrassing) failure of Pinkerton by creating an album of emotionless sheen.

The correction: Embracing the heavy-metal sound that was apparently Cuomo’s first true passion.

“After you’ve made a record that’s pretty straight pop stuff, you kinda wanna bust loose on the guitar a little bit … I don’t know what the hell I was thinking [with the guitar solos on The Green Album]. I prefer shredding.” —Guitar World

“I grew up on metal, and I learned how to play the guitar by playing metal, and I was always in metal bands as a kid. So, really the aberration was the first two Weezer records. I was very consciously repressing my actual self.” —CDNOW.com

“The Green Album was mostly fake girl songs.” —Spin

“I don’t like Pinkerton. @#%$ it’s a @#%$ album! I wish people would leave it alone.” —Kerrang

The album: Make Believe (2005)

The previous missteps: Not trying hard enough, emotionally and professionally.

The correction: Writing more from the heart, and getting Rick Rubin to produce.

“On Maladroit … the songwriting on my part wasn’t great. … [Pinkerton] has the sound of someone who’s not really in touch with other people, and I don’t know if that’s good.” —L.A. Weekly

“On albums three and four, I wasn’t using my feelings to write the songs … I was like ‘Alright, I’ll shut myself down completely, I’ll be like a machine.’” —Alternative Press

“I’m a bit confused when I hear [Maladroit]. … I like some of the material on it, but the sound of it doesn’t do much for me.” —Brian Bell, to Alternative Press

“[Working with a producer for the first time] is one of the big differences in the quality of this album compared to the album before, on which we didn’t do much pre-production.” —Guitar.com

The album: Weezer (The Red Album) (2008)

The previous missteps: Falling into a rut, and also kind of hating each other.

The correction: Giving the band’s non-Cuomo members more of a voice.

“There was one overarching value that remained pretty consistent from the beginning [through] the end of this pretty long album-making process and that [was] the challenge to for each of us to recommit again and again to what makes us excited about music, to try to stick to that and not sell out, give in, or say ‘Let’s just do it Rivers’ way,’ or … ‘Let’s do what our fans want.’” —American Songwriter

“We just went ’We’ve gotta make some changes; we have to be a little fresh in our approach, because you can’t do this for 15 years without falling into … the same patterns over and over.” —Patrick Wilson, to American Songwriter

“[The bad vibes of Make Believe] seem so irrelevant now, like a different lifetime.” —Scott Shriner, who in 2005 called Weezer “a fucked-up band,” to Spin

The album: Raditude (2009)

The previous missteps: None! Everything is happy!

The course correction: In advance of what is almost universally regarded as the band’s worst album, Cuomo warned listeners to expect something they’d never heard before, which, in this case, meant collaborations with Lil Wayne and Dr. Luke.

“If [fans] want to hear a literal dictation of what an artist’s life is like in their songs, then they’re not going to like some of the lyrics on the record. But songs that are complete fantasies and have nothing to do with the literal facts of an artist’s life can be really fun, too.” —Pitchfork

The album: Hurley (2010)

The previous missteps: Losing themselves in empty escapism.

The course correction: Getting their rock sound back, again. (This was also around the time the band did a Pinkerton nostalgia tour and had to take back the mean things they said about it.)

“People [who didn’t like The Red Album and Raditude] will be very pleased with Hurley.” —Mother Jones

“There’s definitely going to be more raw rock energy on this one again.” —Connecticut Post

“I did have a conversation with Rivers about [Raditude]. And he said, to put my mind at ease, that this is just one album out of many more that we are going to make in our career.” —Bell, to The Waster

[The Red Album] was a 100% democratic experiment, but on a creative level we’re definitely not a democracy now.” —GuitarCenter.com

“Right around 2001, when we put out The Green Album, I said a lot of negative, inflammatory things about Pinkerton … But ever since I’ve been trying to make it clear that, of course, I think it’s a brilliant album. I love it.” —Exclaim

The album: Everything Will Be Alright in the End (2014)

The previous missteps: General shittiness.

The course correction: Returning to the sound of The Blue Album and Pinkerton, with the help of producer Ric Ocasek. They’ve come full circle!

“I thought I’d find a new audience, I forgot that disco sucks.” —lead single “Back to the Shack”

“[Raditude] was . . . an adjustment. I might have been upset.” —Shriner, to Rolling Stone

“[Hurley] was such a weird record. We weren’t exactly swinging for the fence.” —Wilson, to Rolling Stone

“This record sounds like it’s going to have the tight structure of Blue Album with a little bit more abandon like Pinkerton.” —Wilson, to Entertainment Weekly

“You can’t really take for granted this amazing connection that happens between us and an audience … You can’t really take that lightly and just say [as on Ratitude], ‘Well, maybe let’s do a hip-hop album next time.’” —Guitar World
Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder did not stay to see his team lose against the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday and did something that many would consider very disrespectful.

Bertrand Berry, a former Cardinals player and current member of the Arizona's postgame broadcast team with Alexan Balekian, reported Snyder left the game early in the fourth quarter (Balekian tweeted Berry's report), before leaving, emphatically spat on the ground inside the stadium as a visible act of disgust.

Berry was headed down early in the fourth quarter to begin work on the postgame show. He happened to be on the same elevator as Snyder and former Redskins quarterback Doug Williams.

The Washington owner was leaving the stadium, as he was unhappy with the ruling on the field that led to an Andre Roberts fumble not being overturned when it appeared he might have gotten his knee down before the ball came out.

Snyder was complaining about the call as the elevator went down and then, when he got off the elevator, which is a few feet from the stadium exit, he spat on the floor in disgust.

Berry said it was done "in a demonstrative way" as a means of disrespect, a way "to leave his mark" on the stadium on his way out.

At the time, Arizona only had a 20-13 lead on the Redskins.

Berry called out the behavior, saying the attitude of the owner shows in the attitude of the team. He called Snyder's behavior "one of the most disrespectful things you can do."

"How can you expect your players to go out there and fight to the end of the game" if the owner don't stay until the end, Berry asked on the air.

There is a conflicting report by Rob Carlin of Comcast Sports Net. He tweeted stating Snyder was in fact in the stadium after the game in the locker room.

This doesn't necessarily discredit Berry's report. There is no reason to believe Berry wasn't in the elevator with Snyder and Snyder might have stepped out for a few minutes before going down to the locker room. As for the spitting, Carlin doubts it, but there is no reason why Berry would fabricate the story.

It is just another embarrassment for an owner who is struggling with public support.
A man holds an envelope of marijuana that he purchased at a pharmacy in Montevideo in this file photo from July 19

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Montevideo (AFP)

Uruguay's unique new marijuana industry has run into a hurdle as international anti-money laundering rules are forcing banks to close the accounts of pharmacies legally selling the drug.

Uruguayan pharmacies started selling marijuana last month under a 2013 law that made the South American country the first in the world to legalize pot all the way from production to sale.

But lenders such as Uruguayan state bank Banco Republica (BROU) now say they must abandon such businesses.

Not doing so would "cause BROU and its clients to be financially isolated," its president Jorge Polgar was quoted as saying by El Observador newspaper.

That would "prevent it from carrying out any kind of operation with an international counterpart," he warned.

Another major bank, Santander of Spain, said it too would close any accounts held with it by Uruguayan pharmacies selling the drug.

"As a global bank with clients in various countries, we have to observe the various norms in force in those places," a Santander source told AFP.

- Blow to government -

Some pharmacies have warned they will have to stop selling marijuana because of the banking restrictions.

"The truth is we did not know... that this could happen," Economy Minister Danilo Astori was quoted as saying by La Republica newspaper.

"A way will have to be found and we are looking for one."

The marijuana law was launched by Uruguay's last president Jose Mujica.

He urged his successor and ally Tabare Vazquez to find a solution.

"If this gets blocked, then the whole parliament will be blocked," warned Mujica, now a senator, whose Broad Front party has a majority in the legislature.

Despite widespread public opposition, Mujica pushed through the law, saying it would stem violence and crime by undermining the illegal drugs trade.

"This is a blow to the government and to the Broad Front," said Adolfo Garce, a political scientist at Uruguay's University of the Republic.

"Having made so much progress, having planted and harvested the marijuana and delivered it to the pharmacies... not being able to sell it due to an unforeseen problem is a very hard blow."

Another of the architects of the law, Julio Calzada, said Uruguay will now have to talk with US banks to seek a way around the restrictions.

"There are alternatives," he said, "but not in Uruguay."

- Half population opposed -

A survey published this month indicated that half of Uruguayans were opposed to selling marijuana in pharmacies.

More than 10,000 users have signed up with the authorities to buy the drug legally, according to the Cannabis Control and Regulation Institute.

In all, 16 pharmacies have been authorized to sell marijuana under state controls, barely enough to cover a country of 3.5 million people.

No major pharmacy chain has agreed to sell the drug.

Many pharmacies have been unwilling to participate in the scheme because of concerns about security and doubts that the small market of registered users is worth the trouble.

- US laws -

Cannabis producers have experienced similar difficulties in the United States, where several states have legalized marijuana for medicinal or recreation use.

US federal anti-drug laws forbid banks from letting them hold accounts, obliging the producers to operate in cash.

Credit rating agency Standard and Poor's estimates that only 300 of 12,000 financial institutions in the United States do business with producers of the drug.

© 2017 AFP
Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, space station simulation in Spacebase DF-9.

It’s been a rough week for my little space station. We were boarded by a squad of Kill Bots who, as you might expect, tried to kill all non-bots. A massive fire in the life support chamber nearly knocked out the oxygen supply. Now, an alien parasite has appeared, and even though my security chief easily killed it, I’m left to wonder how the bug even got aboard. Perhaps it burrowed in through that hole in the hull? The one my security chief was just sucked out of to his death? That’s probably how.

In Spacebase DF-9, the early-access space station simulation from Double Fine Productions, your first task is to select which portion of the galaxy you’d like your spacemen to die horribly in. A spot near a Warpgate sounds ideal, because you’ll have more visitors, but visitors are often hostile. A spot with a lot of asteroids means you can do a lot of mining, but also means frequent meteor strikes. There are benefits to living in an area with a high frequency of derelict spaceships, but there is also a downside, as anyone who has seen a few sci-fi movies can tell you.

After a few hundred thousand years of travel, my pod arrives in my chosen sector and my three astronauts set to work building their new home. I’m not much of a designer, so I just build a giant room and throw some oxygen machines in the corner, figuring I’ll just line the walls with whatever else I need. I soon learn, however, that each room needs to be dedicated to a single purpose: beds can only go in residence rooms, oxygen recyclers can only go in life support rooms, and so forth. Even worse, my room is so large I’ve used almost all the materials on hand to build it. Right off the bat, my little astronauts have exhausted their supplies.

I quickly realize I’ve created a major problem for myself. I’ve been mining a nearby asteroid for building materials, but I need a refiner to convert the asteroid hunks into matter to build with. I don’t have enough matter to build the refiner itself, which means I’ll need to cannibalize something I’ve already built and use the resulting material for the refiner. However, the only thing I have on hand to deconstruct, apart from the walls and the floors, are my two oxygen recyclers. And so, a desperate plan is hatched: destroy my oxygen recyclers, use the material from those to build my refinery, then convert my space-rocks into matter and rebuild my oxygen recyclers… before my workers completely run out of air. With the clock ticking, I put the plan in motion. And it works!

Okay, it almost works. I get the refiner constructed, convert some asteroids, cordon off a tiny new room, and get the oxygen machines rebuilt. Unfortunately, before my workers can take a deep lungful of recirculated air, they all asphyxiate. Luckily, a passing spaceship discharges a handful of passengers to take up residence in my horrible spacebase of death. Welcome!

The new arrivals don’t seem too concerned as they enter the station, remove their space suits, and stroll right by the blue-faced corpses of my crew floating in the airlock. I guess when you’ve been in space for a while, you get pretty used to opening airlocks and finding bobbing corpses wearing expressions of agony and horror. Soon I’ve got six citizens, and my base begins expanding.

And exploding. Small asteroids smash into my base, setting my refinery on fire, as my astronauts attempt to stamp out the flames (while others, less concerned, continue their calisthenics). I instruct my builder to install a fire extinguisher, and we all wait while he first slowly welds it onto the wall, then quickly yanks it off the wall and uses it.

Soon, I’ve got a couple more things built. A bedroom with one bed for everyone to share. A small room for scientific research, in hopes that I’ll someday have enough residents that I can assign one to science duty. A food replicator, so my residents can eat (I’m thoughtful like that). Then we receive a notification: a derelict ship has appeared nearby. A dark shape is suddenly sitting there, quiet and mysterious, in the space next to us.

I dispatch my security team to investigate, right after I create a security team, which I do by telling one guy to stop mining asteroids and start being a one-man security team. Naturally, the moment my brand new security officer enters the airlock, a hostile alien raider opens fire and kills him. I quickly assign a new security chief and she heads over, where she lives up to the memory of my original chief by also dying instantly from lasers. I think the derelict is going to have to wait.

My crew, now down to just five, are all miserable, and I wonder if it’s because there’s only one bed on board so only one of them can sleep at a time. I instruct my builder to construct a room with enough beds for everyone. Rather than building the entire row of beds, he builds one and then promptly goes to sleep in it.

Desperate to restock my ship with fresh, less miserable crewmembers, I invite the occupants of a passing ship to board. They turn out to be raiders, and moments later they’re stalking through my base, gunning down my defenseless crew. Soon, the only one left alive is my builder, who is still sleeping on the one bed he built, while a row of unbuilt ghost beds stretch out beside him. They represent his to-do list, which I now strongly suspect will never get done.

He’s dead moments later, his corpse landing neatly on the same single bed he’d built. My entire crew is dead, but two more are already on their way from a passing ship, and the fresh arrivals manage to fight their way aboard, kill the raiders, and begin the huge task of repairing the damaged base. They’re dead minutes later after another meteor strike takes out life support.

After that, no more ships pass by. No one hails my base. Nothing else happens in my little neck of the universe. My base becomes just another derelict, empty, darkened, filled only with ghosts. Ghosts and their beds.

As the saying goes, if at first you kill all your astronauts with fire, lasers, and asphyxiation, try try again! This time, I build smarter and more conservatively, I only investigate derelict ships with an actual security team, and everything goes much more smoothly until a massive freighter shows up and forcefully docks with me. Long story short, I am once again left staring at a lovingly constructed base filled with dead bodies and no new visitors on the horizon.

So… third time’s the charm? Seems that way. Clearly my biggest challenge has been avoiding mass space-murder, so I put a lot of effort into a strong security detail, and put all my scientific research into weapons and armor. Another hostile ship docked with me: I killed the crew and just added their ship to my architecture. And, as of right now, my current base has over fifty occupants and enough oxygen to support almost twice that many. It has two restaurants, a massive garden, a back-up life support system, and a research wing. And plenty of beds.
By Christine Duhaime | January 2nd, 2017

The questions and answers I’ve been asked the most in 2016 about China:

Q: How much money has been removed from China in proceeds of corruption?

A: According to the Bank of China, way over US$120 Billion or CAD$160 Billion between the years 1995-2008. China appears to have quit sharing data officially after 2011 because it said at that time that the outflows of proceeds of corruption was severe enough to threaten its economy and its political stability.

However, a Chinese Commission later said this:

The amount more than doubled in 2010 to US$412 Billion (CAD$553 Billion);

In 2011, it was at US$600 Billion (CAD$806 Billion);

In 2012, it was at US$1 Trillion (CAD$1.3 Trillion); and

By 2013, it was at US$1.5 Trillion (CAD$2 Trillion).

China also has something called “grey” income, which means income earned (or acquired off the books – basically handed to someone in the proverbial suitcases) in China that is not reported on income tax reports, and that is held by its richest families. By 2012, the grey income was CAD$1.3 Trillion according to the China Society of Economic Reform. Some of the grey income inevitably ends up in other countries.

Money Laundering

So, over $2,000,000,000,000 is missing from China and because China says it’s proceeds of corruption, it’s a $2,000,000,000,000 money laundering problem.

Bigger than the economies of most countries

If you want a sense of how come China said in 2011 that the illegal removal of $2 Trillion from corruption payments threatens its economy, note that, according to Wikipedia, there are only a few countries in the world that have an economy of $2 Trillion or more and they are: US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, China, Italy, Brazil and Russia.

Another way of looking at it is that the proceeds of corruption that flew out of China and landed in the US, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands is more than the entire economies of each of over 100 countries including the economy of Spain, Mexico, South Korea, Australia, Turkey or Switzerland.

Q: How many Chinese foreign nationals are involved in moving proceeds of corruption out of China?

A: According to the Bank of China, about 16,000 to 18,000 officials with ties to the public sector were involved in moving proceeds of corruption illegally from China to other countries.

Q: What are the 4 top countries where Chinese foreign nationals move proceeds of corruption?

A: According to the Bank of China, US, Canada, Australia and Netherlands. Those four countries accounted for CAD$160 Billion in proceeds of corruption being moved out of China as of 2011, the last date that China was willing to publicly talk about the issue with specificity.

There is no reason to believe that the new figure of $2,000,000,000,000 in capital flight from China has shifted to other than those 4 top destinations in any material way.

Q: In Canada, where does the money end up and why?

A: Vancouver is the preferred destination, by far, because of perceived more relaxed anti-money laundering on-boarding compliance and more importantly, easier access to better schools and lifestyle for children of Chinese foreign nationals.

Q: How is the money moved?

A: According to the Bank of China, foreign nationals from China create fake business transactions with private companies that acquire bank accounts and the funds are transferred as ostensible business investments to the US, Canada, Australia, and Netherlands and they also buy real estate.

Q: Is there anything wrong with taking proceeds of corruption from China in Canada?

A: In law, yes.

Public officials who are paid significant proceeds of corruption are almost 100% of the time, politically exposed persons from China who use private banking services. Our PEP laws require that banks, when on-boarding them, apply enhanced due diligence procedures to:

Determine the identity of all nominal and beneficial owners with access to the banking account (hard and expensive to do properly);

Subject them to e nhanced scrutiny to detect financial transactions that may involve the proceeds of foreign corruption;

to detect financial transactions that may involve the proceeds of foreign corruption; Determine the source of funds being deposited into the banking account and the purpose and use of such account;

being deposited into the banking account the purpose and use of such account; Review the activity of the account to guard against money laundering; and

Report suspicious activity that may involve proceeds of foreign corruption.

Whether we are dealing with PEPs or not, banks in Canada must close an account where proceeds of corruption from China are parked in the bank account because, firstly, it is an offence to import the proceeds of corruption into Canada from China (and a predicate offfence to money laundering, which makes the proceeds a reportable money laundering offence) and secondly, it is also an offence to transfer, send, deliver, dispose or deal with proceeds of corruption from China with intent to convert it believing it, or part of it, was proceeds of corruption.

It is the Criminal Code of Canada, in conjunction with the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, that govern in respect of reporting and closing the bank account.

A: And in ethics, yes.

Exporting proceeds of corruption bankrupts countries and deprives the people who live there of wealth.

The most unfortunate example of how PEP laws are ignored when it comes to proceeds of corruption is Viktor Yanukovych, the former President of the Ukraine, who went from earning $2,000 per month to allegedly earning $200 million per month in five years, and is alleged to have parked over $12 billion in private bank accounts in the EU. That was more money than Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was making and he’s the richest person in the world. Not one financial institution managing Mr. Yanukovych’s private bank accounts thought it was odd that he was earning more than Bill Gates running an impoverished country or took steps to confirm that his incredible newly earned wealth was not proceeds of corruption. They didn’t apply enhanced scrutiny – they applied no scrutiny.

Our thoughts here on why an extradition treaty with China will help Canada return the treasury of China back to its people.
In the last week or two I have seen many references in the media, which show a dramatic shift in positive trends regarding Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Today I saw that Hellman's Mayonnaise is the latest brand going non-GMO, and that Chipotle is the first national food chain that is going non-GMO. One of the largest baby formula makers, Similac, recently said that they would start offering a non-gmo version of their formula. Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are removing all artificial ingredients from their products, with the CEO of Pizza Hut saying that he is making the changes in response to customer demands.

Big business invests a great deal in making their desires known to our government. In order to create change we as citizens must use whatever means available to inform our representatives in government of our own desires for health and wellness.

Governments Are Starting to Get on Board

Vermont is the first state to require the labeling of genetically-modified food. Even though the majority of Vermonters want the labeling, big business is now taking the issue to court. If Vermont wins the case then many states will follow suit. Maine and Connecticut also have the same law, but will only implement them if Vermont wins the case.

Ben and Jerry's have also gone non-GMO and the founders of the company are campaigning in Washington, D.C. to encourage our government to support the cause of labeling GMO foods.

Neil Young just wrote a song called "Rock Starbucks." A line on the song is "Yeah, I want a cup of coffee, but I don't want a GMO." He is on a campaign to boycott Starbucks until they cut their ties with Monsanto and to go GMO-free.

Many Countries and Regions Ban GMOs and Glyphosate

More and more countries are going either GMO free or glyphosate (a herbicide that has been recently reported to have cancer causing toxins) free. Shri Lanka and the Netherlands are the latest two countries to ban glyphosate along with Mexico, Russia, South Africa, France, Chile, and Brazil.

There is a growing list of countries that are banning the sale of GMOs altogether.

Almost every day I get a new Facebook post stating that another region in some country around the world is banning GMOs, which shows public outcry is growing against GMO crops.

As I am writing this article I just saw two posts on my Facebook feed. One stating that a judge upheld Jackson County Oregon's ban on growing GMO crops; and another saying Hungary just announced that they are the first EU country to ban GMOs. The Deputy state secretary said that he is convinced that it is the only way to ensure that families have access to safe foods.

These changes are a direct result of citizens demanding healthier food. Hopefully, the results will snowball and gather rapid momentum so everyone on the planet can enjoy healthier food. We are however, racing against time. It is urgent to stop the spread of GMOs, as well as all the pesticides that are poisoning the earth.

We the people have the power, and must be bold in maximizing that power. We have to reclaim our democracy, but in order to do so we have to vote with our pocket book.

People we are on a roll. Let's win this race now!
Attend the leading Bitcoin & Blockchain event series in Canada and meet like-minded people in one of the most exciting industries in the world. The next event will be held at the MaRS auditorium on February 6th and is titled: 'Power of Decentralization'. Be sure to RSVP well in advance as we're expecting to sell out. We've got yet another amazing line up of speakers!

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AGENDA:

6:00pm (15 minutes):

Networking

6:15pm (5 minutes):

Brief Intro: Bitcoin & Blockchain

SUNNY RAY (http://www.sunny-ray.com), Unocoin (http://unocoin.com) Co-founder & President

6:20pm (10 minutes):

Cryptiv (https://cryptiv.com/): Enterprise Blockchain Wallet Systems

MAT CYBULA (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matcybula), Cryptiv CEO & Co-founder

Mat's talk will be about the various blockchains being used today and how companies must approach security in a world of blockchain.

6:30pm (10 minutes):

Ernst & Young (http://www.ey.com): Implications for Bitcoin & Blockchain

RAHUL RAINA, HBSc MBA MSc | Senior Consultant | IT Advisory | Financial Services Office | Performance Improvement | EY LLP

Rahul is a Senior Consultant focussed on disruptive technologies, including Big Data, and Blockchain at EY Canada. In his previous role, he served as the R&D Advisor for Rubix by Deloitte. He has also previously worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, IBM Canada, and Bell Canada.

Rahul holds HBSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, MBA from the Schulich School of Business, and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Oxford. He is one of the few Canadians to pursue academic research at a graduate level on Cryptocurrencies from both business and technical perspectives at Schulich School of Business, and the University of Oxford, respectively.

Ultimately, the key question that Rahul is trying to answer for the past 5 years is the following: how do we increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies?

6:40pm (10 minutes):

BlockGeeks (http://blockgeeks.com/): Share & Grow Knowledge Around Blockchain Technology

AMEER ROSIC (http://www.ameerrosic.com/), Co-founder, Blockgeeks. A vast amount of knowledge that could be valuable to many people is currently only available to a few — either locked in people’s heads, or only accessible to select groups.

6:50pm (10 minutes):

RUBIX (http://rubixbydeloitte.com/): Blockchain Implementations - Method in the Madness ILIANA ORIS VALIENTE (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilianaorisvaliente), CPA, CA, CBP | Co-Founder, Rubix by Deloitte | Blockchain Strategist

7:00pm (30 minutes):

Power of Decentralization

TOUFI SALIBA (https://www.linkedin.com/in/touficsaliba), Co-authored fully-decentralized Blockchain protocol, cofounded ToDa Foundation, 6 blockchain companies, had 3 exits in the past, expecting 2 in near future. Loves algorithm, Cryptography, Decentralized Computing, Machine Learning, Game Theory and AI in general.

7:30pm (30 minutes):

Bitcoin’s price fluctuations: Bubbles & Facts

TONE VAYS (https://twitter.com/Tone_LLT?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor), Consultant/Researcher/Trader http://LibertyLifeTrail.com

Tone has been working on Wall Street for almost 10 years starting as a Risk Analyst at Bear Stearns and later becoming a VP at JP Morgan Chase in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. His expertise is in Economic Trends, Trading and Risk Analysis. Ever since getting involved in the Crypto Currency ecosystem in early 2013, he has been very active in spreading the relevance and importance of this technology as it helps promote economic freedom. He was formerly Head of Research at BraveNewCoin (http://bravenewcoin.com/authors/tone-vays/) after previously writing about trading and economics at CoinTelegraph (https://cointelegraph.com/authors/tone_vays). Tone maintains a personal website LibertyLifeTrail where you can find his latest research on Bitcoin, Blockchain, sound economics and privacy. Tone holds a Masters Degree in Financial Engineering from Florida State University along with Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics and Geology.

8:00pm (30 minutes):

Bitcoin Core Developer: Decentralized Consensus

PETER TODD (https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc), Applied Cryptography Consultant (what the cool kids call 'blockchain tech')

Learn about how he first got into bitcoin, if he thinks bitcoin is becoming too centralized, his thoughts on scalability and more.

8:30pm (30 minutes):

Networking

-------

Bitcoin, the first application of blockchain technology, is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. It uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls it and everyone can take part. Through many of its unique properties, Bitcoin allows exciting uses that could not be covered by any previous payment system.

Speaking & Sponsorship Opportunities:

If you're interested in learning more about sponsoring our events, please check out our sponsorship presentation (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ls5KiH_T6dWemUNU0dwmrhHvHKatAiVllhQiym_isJI/pub?start=true&loop=true&delayms=3000) and information package (http://sunny-ray.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/FinTechCanadaBlockchainTechEventsNovember20-3.pdf). If you're interested in speaking or sponsoring one of our blockchain events, please email [masked].

- Team FinTech Canada
Republicans and Democrats don’t entirely see eye-to-eye on threats posed by Islamic militants, Iran’s nuclear program, and other dangers. But those differences pale compared with Americans’ massive partisan divide over how they view the threat from climate change, new polling shows.

Sixty-eight percent of Democrats see climate change as a “major threat” to the U.S., compared with just 25 percent of Republicans, according to Pew Research Center data released Thursday. That 43-point spread is the largest division in views over any threat that Pew asked about in the poll, which was conducted earlier this month.

The data also show that Democrats consider the threat of climate change to be on par with that of the radical group ISIS. Sixty-five percent of Democrats see the group as a major threat to the U.S., compared with 78 percent of Republicans.

Similarly, 67 percent of Democrats see Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida as a major threat, compared with 80 percent of Republicans.

According to the Pew poll: “As in prior surveys on international threats, most Republicans say that global climate change is either a minor threat (32%) or not a threat (40%) to the U.S. Among Republicans and GOP leaners, most (62%) who agree with the Tea Party say that global climate change is ‘not a threat.’ Non-Tea Party Republicans are divided: 39% think global climate change is a minor threat, 33% say it is a major threat, and 25% say it is not a threat.”

The margin of error for party-specific answers in the poll, which was given to 1,501 American adults, is plus or minus 5.2 percentage points for Democrats, 5.8 points for Republicans, and 7.4 points for the smaller tea-party sample.
The speculative Chinese commodity bubble has begun to reach the mainstream as Citi's warning to "hold on to your hats" today at the surge in trading volumes across Rebar, Iron Ore, Coke, and Copper literally exploded with the former now the most actively trade commodity in the world. The frenzy has become so insane that the head of the largest metals exchange in the world exclaimed at a conference in Singapore today that "I don't think most people who trade it know what it is." We suspect he is 100% correct and judging by the following chart, we know exactly how it will end.

As Bloomberg reports, the head of the world’s largest metals exchange said while volumes in China’s commodity futures markets have become phenomenal, it’s possible some traders don’t even know what it is they are buying or selling.

“Why should steel rebar be one of the world’s most actively-traded futures contracts?” Garry Jones, chief executive officer of the London Metal Exchange, said at a conference in Singapore on Wednesday. “I don’t think most people who trade it know what it is.” Trading of commodity futures in China from steel reinforcement bars -- a benchmark product used in construction -- to iron ore, coking coal and cotton has ballooned this month on an unprecedented surge in retail investor interest. The jump in volumes has stunned global markets, according to Morgan Stanley, while eliciting concern from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Exchanges in Asia’s top economy including in Shanghai have announced a series of measures this month to cool the frenzy, and said more steps may follow. “If you look at the client base of most Chinese exchanges, it’s heavily retail-focused,” Jones said on a panel discussion addressing commodities and risk management in China. The exchanges there “have very high retail participation. They have a very high velocity of trading,” he said.

Now where have we seen this pattern of massive speculative volume rushing in from retail investors chasing a trend?

The speculative activities will be vulnerable to a sharp reversal, once the upward price momentum wanes, according to BMI Research, a unit of Fitch Group, drawing parallels with a rally, followed by a slump, in Chinese equities last year.

And that did not end well for price action before in 2015...

or 2009...

And just as expected above...once the volume reaches a crescendo it crashes and The Party's Over

As reports from China suggest both major margin increases at the main exchanges and crackdowns on real production: Tangshan city is banning all coke, steel & cement productions for 24 hours starting this noon.
When Ellen DeGeneres recently had Christina Aguilera on as a guest, she decided to ask the singer about one of the most disturbing pictures of her that has ever been taken.

This one:

“There’s a picture of you — was it you staring at Hillary or you staring at Hillary?” DeGeneres asked…

“She was staring at my bosoms,” Aguilera replied.

The audience lost it over the image.

(NOTE: You’ll probably want to skip ahead to the 2:00 mark.)

“It’s amazing, it’s awesome!” Aguilera added. “She supports the girls.”

Aguilera then goes on to talk about how she just had a fundraiser for Hillary at her personal home in Beverly Hills.

Ew. Just all kinds of ew. And the elite want that woman to be our next president.

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THE FOUR LAWS THAT HILLARY CLINTON BROKE (BUT SHE WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE CHARGED FOR)

WHAT THE FRONT PAGE OF THE PAPER WILL LOOK LIKE IF HILLARY BECOMES PRESIDENT

WHY DOES HILLARY CLINTON ALWAYS CACKLE WITH GLEE AT VIOLENCE, HORROR, AND DEATH?

HILARIOUS SUPERCUT OF HILLARY “REINTRODUCING HERSELF” PROVES HOW MUCH LIBERAL MEDIA LOVES HER

HILLARY’S OFFICIAL INTERNET TROLL TEAM HAS SPENT MILLIONS TO “CORRECT” PEOPLE WHO “ATTACK” HER ONLINE

“SHE’S A F*CKING LIAR”: CAITLYN JENNER DESTROYS HILLARY CLINTON ON TV, CAUSES HEADS TO EXPLODE

IF HILLARY ISN’T INDICTED, THE RULE OF LAW AND THE REPUBLIC ARE DEAD

WATCH HILLARY CACKLE WITH GLEE AFTER “UNDER GOD” IS REMOVED FROM THE PLEDGE AT HER RALLY

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If epistemic individualism is an adaptation for collective deliberation, there must be some mechanism whereby the products of collective deliberation come to be accepted. Under many conditions at least, epistemic diversity must be ‘transient’ (Zollman 2010), and that, in turn, requires that we are apt to defer to others.

Deference is in fact ubiquitous.10 Global warming ‘skeptics’ do not come to their beliefs unaided. Instead, they defer to others (Kahan 2015; Keller 2015). Conversely, liberals exhibit much higher levels of trust in science (Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016). As a consequence, conservatives and liberals are disposed toward biased assimilation of evidence supporting and opposing their views (Corner et al. 2012). In part, biased assimilation is caused by asymmetrical deference: accepting views from some sources and not others.

Asymmetrical deference may be partially explained by reference to message content (Keller 2015). Because responding to AGW very likely requires limitations on free markets, it is highly unpalatable to strong supporters of markets. While ‘solution aversion’ (Campbell and Kay 2014) may explain some of the observed variance, conservative distrust of environmentalism (and support for unfettered markets) appears to arise from, rather than cause, the partisan split. Conservationism has historically been a strong current within conservative thought, and up until recently there was no partisan divide on the environment, either within congress or on the part of the general public (McCright et al. 2014).

While message content certainly influences the disposition to defer (Harris 2012), sensitivity to properties of the testifier sometimes trumps content. Israelis and Palestinians evaluated a peace proposal significantly more or less favorably depending upon whether it was presented as coming from Palestinian negotiators or Israelis (Maoz et al. 2002). Similarly, conservative and liberal attitudes to proposals for welfare policies were much more strongly influenced by whether the proposals were said to be supported by Democrats or Republicans than by the content of the proposals (Cohen 2003). In fact, sensitivity to properties of testifiers is able to trump content even when the content of the testimony is disagreeable to hearers. Corrections of false claims are effective when they come from sources that share the ideology of the hearer (Nyhan and Reifler 2013) and also when they come from sources that can be expected to find the claim they affirm contrary to their own ideological interests (Berinsky 2017). Thus, corrections of false claims about Obamacare, for instance, are effective for both conservatives and liberals when they come from conservatives; the former because they share the ideology of the source, and the latter because they know that the source is likely to find the claim unpalatable. These data are powerful evidence that content-based explanations are insufficient on their own to explain deference.

This sensitivity to testimony source emerges early in childhood (Clément 2010; Sperber et al. 2010). From a very young age, children show a preference for informants who show signs of being benevolent and competent; scrutiny of informers intensifies around the age of four (Mascaro and Sperber 2009). I suggest that this filter plays a significant role in explaining the different patterns of deference exhibited by conservatives and liberals. The disposition to defer to others with whom we share a political or religious outlook is continuous with the disposition to use benevolence as a cue to reliability; we are disposed to see those with whom we share a political outlook and/or a religious affiliation as those who are benevolent toward us and our interests (or, perhaps, the disposition to use benevolence as a cue to reliability is just a special case of a disposition to defer to those with whom we share values). The use of political and religious affiliation as a proxy for benevolence is adaptive, inasmuch as sharing our values is being disposed to promote the things we value and to oppose the things we disvalue. The use of competence as a proxy for reliability protects us against fools; the use of benevolence as a proxy protects us against exploitation (see Hahn et al. 2016 for a model of how update on testimony is normatively rational as a function of perceived reliability and benevolence of sources).

Both sides utilitze these proxies to filter testimony. Thus, conservative Americans come to their anti-consensus views on these topics in precisely the same way in which their liberal counterparts come to their views: by deferring to those they rightly take to be more knowledgeable than, as well as benevolent toward, them. But because the topic has come to be politicized, this disposition to defer ensures that they do not defer to (or their chains of deference will not bottom out in) groups of scientists who espouse a view contrary to theirs. Since opposition to AGW has come to function as a marker of group allegiance, affirming the ‘wrong’ view constitutes a signal of a lack of benevolence and thereby of reliability. That is, since the left has come to be identified strongly with a particular view on AGW, affirming that view is signalling support of a political set of values and thereby a lack of benevolence to conservatives.

Whereas for liberals chains of deference trace back to the relevant scientific experts, and therefore to properly constituted collective deliberation, conservatives’ chains of deference end in ‘merchants of doubt’ (Oreskes and Conway 2010), or maverick scientists. Conservatives do not defer to scientists, or to their think-tank intermediaries or more local representatives, because while these sources exhibit cues of competence they fail to pass tests for benevolence. Liberals are epistemically luckier: they are disposed to defer to the most competent individuals and institutions, because these individuals and institutions pass tests for benevolence as well as for competence. Liberals defer to sufficiently large groups of sufficiently expert deliberators to ensure that their beliefs have a high degree of warrant; conservatives defer to a much smaller group of genuine experts and their chains of deference trace back as much or more to non-experts.11 These facts (which are outside the purview of the individuals at the end of each chain) entail that one set of beliefs is very much better warranted than the other. Biased assimilation may thus be individually rational, whether it leads toward better or worse warranted beliefs.12

It should be emphasised that there is nothing about the mechanism that undermines the warrant of conservatives’ beliefs about climate change or evolution that entails liberal invulnerability to it. Liberal trust in science is currently very much higher than that of conservatives, reflecting a loss of trust in science by conservatives since the 1970s (Gauchat 2012). Parallel historical processes could undermine liberal trust in science. Such an erosion would leave liberals vulnerable to individually rational but unreliable epistemic deference.13 At the present time, however, dissent from the scientific consensus seems more often to be seen from those who strongly endorse free market ideology (there are, however, two important issues on which dissent is bipartisan: GMOs and vaccination; Lewandowsky et al. 2013b). Interestingly, the negative correlation between endorsement of free market ideology and rejection of climate change is significantly stronger than the negative correlation between the first and rejection of other well-established facts, such as the fact that smoking causes lung cancer and that HIV causes AIDS (Lewandowsky et al. 2013a). That suggests that content-based mechanisms play an independent role in epistemic deference. Whether the conservative suspicion toward science generalizes to other domains of expertise is currently unknown.

It is a further, interesting, question how issues come to be politicised such that espousing the warranted view constitutes a signal of unreliability. One live possibility is that the merchants of doubt, driven by specific commercial interests, undertook a successful strategy of politicising climate science such that it would come to serve as a marker of political affiliation and thereby a cue for benevolence or its lack. A deliberate campaign aimed at identifying AGW with the political and social left may have brought about a situation in which espousing an attitude on the topic constitutes evincing a strong signal of political affiliation and thereby of possessing or lacking reliability. This hypothesis is empirically tractable, though to my knowledge the detailed historical work required to support it remains to be done.
Donald Trump could transform his tens of millions of political followers into a ready-made audience for a new anti-establishment television network called Trump TV if he loses the presidential election.

According to reports his son-in-law and close adviser Jared Kushner, who owns the New York Observer, made an initial informal approach to financiers.

As Mr Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by up to 11 percentage points in polls the question of what he would do if he loses has only been addressed briefly by the billionaire himself. Mr Trump recently said he would like to "take a long vacation".

But analysts have suggested his next venture could potentially be one of his most influential and lucrative.

A Trump TV network would allow him to maintain a major public profile, push his political agenda, and continue to attack the political and media establishment.
At least 730 young children among people shot, burned or beaten to death in Rakhine state between August and September

More than 6,700 Rohingya Muslims, including at least 730 children under the age of five, were killed in the first month of a crackdown that started in August in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.

The figures released on Thursday by the humanitarian agency are believed to be a conservative estimate and far exceed Myanmar’s official death toll of 400.

“The numbers of deaths are likely to be an underestimation, as we have not surveyed all refugee settlements in Bangladesh and because the surveys don’t account for the families who never made it out of Myanmar,” said Dr Sidney Wong, MSF’s medical director.

The majority of the people killed (69%) were shot, while others were burned and beaten to death. “We heard reports of entire families who perished after they were locked inside their homes, while they were set alight,” said Wong.

Q&A Who are the Rohingya? Show Hide The Rohingya are Muslims who live in majority-Buddhist Myanmar. They are often described as "the world's most persecuted minority". Nearly all of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya live in the western coastal state of Rakhine. The government does not recognise them as citizens, effectively rendering them stateless. Extremist nationalist movements insist the group are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although the Rohingya say they are native to Rakhine state.

Rights groups accuse Burmese authorities of ethnic cleansing, systematically forcing Rohingya from the country through violence and persecution, a charge the government has denied. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

More than 640,000 Rohingya people have fled Rakhine since August. Soldiers, police and local militias burned hundreds of Rohingya villages to the ground, and they are also accused of gang-raping women and children, as well as slaughtering civilians indiscriminately.

Western countries have condemned the violence as ethnic cleansing, an allegation Myanmar strongly denies. Officials in the country have laid the blame on “extremist terrorists” belonging to a new Rohingya militant group. A Myanmar government spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.

Massacre at Tula Toli: Rohingya recall horror of Myanmar army attack Read more

Some of the worst violence is believed to have occurred in Tula Toli, in a village in Maungdaw township, where survivors say residents were rounded up on riverbanks and shot as they tried to flee. The Guardian has seen videos taken by villagers showing the corpses of children washed up on shores.

Survivors believe thousands may have died in that village alone.

The high death toll tallies with reports from numerous journalists and human rights groups.

“The latest report adds to a long list of harrowing accounts that Human Rights Watch has collected from Rohingya refugees who fled the campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in northern Rakhine state,” said Rich Weir, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

“The numbers should shock the conscience of the international community and stir them to action. Those responsible must be held to account and sanctions must be imposed on those who are behind these atrocities,” he said.

Aung San Suu Kyi has Freedom of Dublin award revoked Read more

Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to send Rohingya people back to Rakhine, in a deal that has been criticised by human rights groups as premature and lacking safeguards for the persecuted minority.

“Currently, people are still fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh and those who do manage to cross the border still report being subject to violence in recent weeks,” said MSF’s Wong. “With very few independent aid groups able to access Maungdaw district in Rakhine, we fear for the fate of Rohingya people who are still there.”

Myanmar insists the reports of mass murder and rape are fabrications invented by the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people now living in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Two Reuters journalists investigating the events were arrested this week. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were detained while carrying maps and documents relating to the region, after meeting police officers for dinner in Myanmar’s commercial capital of Yangon.

The US embassy called the detentions “highly irregular”. The Myanmar military has filed charges against the journalists under the Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum prison term of 14 years.
Earlier this week I scotch-taped an iPhone 6 Plus to a Galaxy Note 5 and headed into Times Square to test out the cameras, head-to-head. The results are below, lined up as best I could get them. Both have excellent cameras, and though I suppose I'm tempted to give a slight edge to the iPhone, it's not an easy call. Samsung's is tuned to handle low-light a little more aggressively, while the iPhone tends to make its shutter as fast as it can while still bringing in enough light to get a usable image. In bright light, both cameras are great though, with Samsung's Note 5 tending just a little more yellow.

In all cases below, Samsung's Galaxy Note 5 is on the left, the iPhone is on the right. For those looking to get nitpicky, know that I cropped the images slightly so they'd line up better in the image sliders below — that will mean some of these are not at the same zoom level, but they're generally pretty close. Both were shot on full-auto. I used Apple's Photos app and resized them with EasyBatchPhoto. For those not looking to get nitpicky, here's the bottom line: both cameras are stupendous, fast, and could legitimately be called the best on the smartphone market (as of this writing, at least).

I was also accosted by Spider-Man, who demanded I take a selfie with him instead of simply taking his photo. No Spider-Man. Bad Spider-Man. Just because you can do whatever a spider can doesn't mean that you should.
Media Statement For Immediate Release: Thursday, March 31, 2016

Contact: Media Relations,

(404) 639-3286

CDC is investigating how one of its laboratory workers who was recently diagnosed with Salmonella infection may have acquired their infection due to work they performed in a BSL-2 laboratory (a level of lab work involving pathogens that are common and treatable causes of illness). Salmonella is not a select agent. Preliminary laboratory tests indicate that the worker was infected with a strain of Salmonella which matched the strain being worked on in the lab. The worker is well and back at CDC and, based on what we know now, no other staff were exposed. The worker had hands-on training by experienced microbiologists and completed all required safety training. The worker was following standard protocols to perform a basic procedure on a frozen sample in an effort to culture or grow the bacteria. The agency is investigating to see if additional safeguards are needed to prevent exposures when performing this procedure in the future

CDC estimates there are 1.2 million cases of Salmonella infection each year in the United States. Salmonella infections are usually acquired by eating contaminated food. People with this kind of infection typically have diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps that go away without specific treatment within 4-7 days.

Laboratory science is critical to protect America’s health. However this work carries risks. CDC has implemented numerous steps over the past few years to enhance its laboratory safety program, including standing up the Office of the Associate Director for Laboratory Science and Safety, reviewing laboratory safety protocols, and establishing the Laboratory Leadership Service fellowship program. The agency has implemented rigorous steps to minimize these risks and to quickly investigate these incidents when they do occur including this recent incident.

For the latest reports and updates on laboratory safety at CDC go to: http://www.cdc.gov/about/lab-safety/index.html.

###

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Gov. Mary Fallin on Thursday asked Oklahoma’s Health Care Authority to cut its contracts with two Planned Parenthood affiliates, citing high rates of billing errors. The request by Ms. Fallin, a Republican, comes as Republican governors of several states have moved to cut funding for Planned Parenthood after an anti-abortion group released videos that it said showed Planned Parenthood officials negotiating prices for fetal tissues from abortions. Planned Parenthood has said that the videos were heavily edited and has said it does not profit from fetal tissue donation. Nico Gomez, the chief executive of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, said his office would not take any action until it completed an audit. In 2015, Oklahoma paid the two Planned Parenthood affiliates $100,145 for 19,546 claims. A review showed no improper use of Medicaid funds, but showed a billing error rate of 20.3 percent rate at one and 14.2 percent at the other, the governor’s office said. Officials with Iowa-based Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, which operates a clinic in Tulsa, called the move "premature and incredibly disappointing." Ms. Fallin said ending the contracts with the two affiliates, which operate in six locations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, would not interfere with a woman’s ability to have a choice of health care.
Wednesday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Republican presidential candidate and former Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) criticized President Barack Obama on the Iran nuclear deal.

Perry said, “It’s of great concern. I saw a very very naive man who does not know how the world works who not put the dots together. And stood in front of the American people and saying I really don’t care if congress likes this or not. I’m going to do it. ”

Perry explained in his view Obama “will never get a majority” in Congress to support his deal. However, he said he might be able to convince enough Democrats to “not override his veto.”

He added, “Trusting a country that has this long long history of trustworthiness and naively standing up int front of the American people and saying this is the only thing I care about is this very narrow issue of whether or not they are going to get a nuclear capability. I think probably the reason he’s tried to paint it down to that very narrow issue is because he knows he could never get agreement when it came to stopping Iran from being a major exporter of terrorism in the region. He could never get an agreement to allow for true examination of their nuclear capabilities. Again this thing was troubling on so many fronts.”

In the second video Perry continued by saying, “Perry: "I don’t want to be over the top, but this is a president that is not dealing with reality"”>”I don’t want to be over the top, but this is a president that is not dealing with reality.”

Watch (Part 2):

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Coding Contest Byte: The Square Root Trick

Cosmin Negruseri

20 iulie 2012 20 iulie 2012

We're starting a series of articles describing tricks useful in programming contests. Please keep the comments in English.

Being flexible and easy to code, the square root trick is pretty popular in the Romanian programming contests community. It even has a name: "jmenul lu Batog" which means Batog's trick :). Bogdan Batog introduced it to a few high school students more than ten years ago and the trick entered romanian coding contest folklore.

The idea is that we can use bucketing or a two level tree as some people call it to improve naive data structures or algorithms. The square root part appears when we minimize the function n/x + x , we'll see more about that later on.

Let’s check out a few problems that explain how the trick works.

Range Sum

Given A, an n elements array, implement a data structure for point updates and range sum queries:

- update(i, x): A[i] := x,

- query(lo, hi) returns A[lo] + A[lo+1] + .. + A[hi].

The naive solution uses an array. It takes O(1) time for an update and O(hi - lo) = O(n) for the range sum.

A more efficient solution splits the array into length k slices and stores the slice sums in an array S .

The update takes constant time, because we have to update the value for A and the value for the corresponding S .

The query is interesting. The elements of the first and last slice (partially contained in the queried range) have to be traversed one by one, but for slices completely contained in our range we can use the values in S directly and get a performance boost.

Here is an update example:

In update(6, 5) we have to change A[6] to 5 which results in changing the value of S[1] to keep S up to date.

query(2, 14)

query(2, 14) = A[2] + A[3]+ (A[4] + A[5] + A[6] + A[7]) + (A[8] + A[9] + A[10] + A[11]) + A[12] + A[13] + A[14] = A[2] + A[3] + S[1] + S[2] + A[12] + A[13] + A[14] = 0 + 7 + 11 + 9 + 5 + 2 + 0 = 34

def update(S, A, i, k, x): S[i/k] = S[i/k] - A[i] + x A[i] = x def query(S, A, lo, hi, k): s = 0 i = lo while (i + 1) % k != 0 and i <= hi: s += A[i] i += 1 while i + k <= hi: s += S[i/k] i += k while i <= hi: s += A[i] i += 1 return s

Inwe getHere's how the code looks:

Each query takes on average k/2 + n/k + k/2 = k + n/k time. This is minimized for k = sqrt(n) . So we get a O(sqrt(n)) time complexity query.

This trick also works for other associative operations, like: min, gcd, product etc.

Nearest neighbour

Given a set S of n points and a query point p , find the point in S closest to p .

For uniformly distributed points, a good strategy is to represent the space as a grid and maintain a list of inner points for each cell. For a given query point, we can check the cell the point falls into and its neighbouring cells. For a sqrt(n) * sqrt(n) grid we’ll have one point per cell, on average. On average, finding the point in S closest to p , requires traversing a constant number of cells.

Longest common subsequence

Given two strings A (n characters) and B (m characters), find their longest common subsequence. (eg. The longest common sub sequence for abcabc and abcbcca is abcbc.)

There is a standard dynamic programming solution which uses an array best[i][j] to mean the longest common sub sequence for A[0:i] and B[0:j] , computed as below:

if A[i] == B[j]: best[i][j] = 1 + best[i - 1][j - 1] else: best[i][j] = max(best[i-1][j], best[i][j-1])

This algorithm takes O(nm) time and only O(n) space, since to compute a row you just need the previous row.

If you must return the actual sub sequence this doesn't work. You can keep an array of parent pointers, so that for each state (i, j) you know the previous state in the solution. The longest sub sequence corresponds to a path from (n-1, m-1) to (0, 0) on the parent matrix. This solution takes O(nm) space.

Let's try to use less memory. We solve the problem once and save every kth row from the best matrix and from the parent matrix.

We can start from the last saved row to compute the solution path from row [n/k] * k to row n - 1 . Then we go downwards to compute the part of the solution between the row ik and the row (i+1)k . Computing part of the path between row ik and row (i+1)k takes O(km) space and O(km) time. Computing the whole path takes O(n/k (km)) = O(nm) time and O(km) space. Saving the first pass rows takes O([n/k]m) memory. Again, we minimize total memory usage by using k = sqrt(n) . This solution takes O(sqrt(n)m) memory.

Caveats

There are more efficient solutions for the previous problems, but those are a bit more involved. The square root trick has a good balance between added complexity and algorithm speedup.

Additional problems

(Josephus Problem) n people numbered from 1 to n sit in a circle and play a game. Starting from the first person and every kth person is eliminated. Write an algorithm that prints out the order in which people are eliminated. (Level Ancestor) You are given an tree of size n . ancestor(node, levelsUp) finds the node’s ancestor that is levelsUp steps up. For example, ancestor(node, 1) returns the father and ancestor(node, 2) returns the grandfather. Implement ancestor(node, levelsUp) efficiently. ( O(sqrt(n)) per query) (Range Median) You are given an array of size n . Implement a data structure to perform update operations a[i] = k and range median operations efficiently. The range median query, median(l, r) returns the median element of the sorted subsequence a[l..r] . O(log(n)) per update and O(sqrt(n)log(n)) O(sqrt(n)log(n)log(U)) per query

Hope you've enjoyed it!

Try using the trick to solve Range Median and the other problems in the comments section.

Categorii:
Tim Hudak is promising to get the government "out of business's hair" by abolishing the College of Trades and shaving away regulations on workers.

Standing in a salon east of Toronto, the Progressive Conservative Leader said he would immediately get rid of the body, which regulates over 100 different occupations from hairdressers to bakers.

"We don't need an expensive government bureaucracy to tell people where to get their hair cut," he said Tuesday. "Government's job is not to keep bureaucrats busy. It's to focus on what's important like health care and education."

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The College of Trades' defenders say the organization is necessary to enforce standards in the skilled trades and protect consumers from subpar tradespeople.

But Mr. Hudak contends it is simply a useless layer of red tape that is unfairly limiting the number of people who can get into the trades.

He pointed to a written exam hairdressers must take to get a licence, as well as a fee salons must pay, as unnecessary measures.

"It's getting in the way of people here in this room with a new tax that will toss them out of work," he said.

Hairstylist Kailan Ambrose, 30, who attended Mr. Hudak's event, said she has been working as a hairdresser for seven years but could now lose her licence after failing the written test six times.

"It's breathtaking, it's very hard, it's a struggle," said Ms. Ambrose, the married mother of a three-year-old. "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

Mr. Hudak is running on a platform of cutting the size of government, which includes eliminating 100,000 public sector jobs and doing away with one-third of all regulations on business.

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The Liberals, for their part, unveiled a new promise in their platform Sunday to appoint a special advisor to review the College of Trades' application process and how the new regulations are enforced. They will hold off on certification of new trades while the review is happening.

Campaigning in Sault Ste. Marie at a Catholic school on Tuesday, Ms. Wynne attacked Mr. Hudak for being too much like former PC premier Mike Harris. Mr. Harris appeared on television Monday to say he had a "pretty good" record as the province's leader and that the Liberals are only dredging up his history to avoid talking about their own scandals.

"I really hope Mike Harris keeps talking because Mike Harris reminds all of us of what it was like during those years when he was premier," Ms. Wynne said, pointing to labour disputes with education workers during his reign.

"The discord in the education system, 26 million learning days lost because of the strikes and because of the conflict that was in every school … if people liked Mike Harris then they're really going to love Tim Hudak."

Ms. Wynne spent the morning promoting a pledge to spend $150-million over three years to buy laptops, tablets, cameras and other technology for schools, as she wrapped up a four-day jaunt through the north.

Mr. Hudak, who has not yet visited Northern Ontario during the campaign, again faced questions about his decision to skip the Northern leaders' debate the previous day.

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"I wish it had worked out. I don't think there's been a leader who's spent more time in Northern Ontario [than me]," he said, referencing his time as Northern Development Minister a decade ago. "I want to make sure that every part of the province of Ontario – the 905, the 416, the 613, Northern Ontario – is firing on all cylinders."
Brazilian hackers have gamed the government logging permitting processs, enabling the wanton theft of Amazon resources.

Associated PressBrazilian authorities are investigating a hacking ring controlled by logging companies that allowed harvesters to plunder rain forest resources protected under government quotas.

The authorities — who have arrested more than 30 people implicated in the scandal and are said to be eying 200 more — allege hackers from logging and charcoal concerns have unlawfully accessed government logging databases. The intrusions allowed them to obtain extra "transport permits" to remove resources from the Amazon. Permits are tied to a set amount of volume.

Environmental group Greenpeace estimates 1.7 million cubic meters of illegal timber has been harvested because of the hacks. The group says that's enough wood to fill 780 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Federal authorities are also suing timber companies to recoup an estimated $883 million in purloined resources, Greenpeace said.

"Almost half of the companies involved in this scam have other lawsuits pending for environmental crimes or the use of slave labor," federal prosecutor Daniel Avelino said in a statement.

Andre Muggiati, a Greenpeace official in Brazil, said that "by hacking into the permit system, these companies have made their timber shipments appear legal and compliant with the forest management plans."

See Also:
Knoji reviews products and up-and-coming brands we think you'll love. In certain cases, we may receive a commission from brands mentioned in our guides. Learn more.

When the Scientific Revolution began to disprove past ideals and new ideas were shown to the masses, many Europeans experienced trepidation. Despite the advances in science and the efforts of the scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century to demonstrate that the world and universe were governed by discernible laws, the Scientific Revolution had little impact on the everyday lives and thoughts of the mass of European citizens.

Despite the breakthroughs made in astronomy and physics, most Europeans retained a belief in astrology, mystical processes, ghosts, and magic. German princes often relied on court astrologers as their closest advisers. Indeed, even Johannes Kepler sought to confirm the power of astrology with the results of his work, though he proved unable to do so.

Advances in medical theory that proved that there were serious misconceptions about the human body, however many Europeans widely adhered to previous beliefs set forth by Galen. Galen's theory that the human body contained four major fluids--blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm - and that if one of the four fluids were present in too little or too great an amount, predictable illness would result. The most widely experienced materialization of this theory was the use of leeches in the act of bloodletting,

Galen's hypothesis that the body had two blood systems and diseases could be cured by looking deeper into the four humors in the body proved to be grossly erroneous, however the Galen principles were still strictly adhered to in medical schools.

Europeans had often turned to the church for guidance, and so it seems, the church was able to tell people what to belief. When the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution overturned the tenets of traditional belief systems were only gradually accepted by the general population, and were often rejected by those who found their traditional beliefs easier to comprehend. To put it plainly, Europeans did not want to complicate their lives by thinking outside the realm of what they had been taught in the church. The common people had traditions of thinking and a belief system that that made their living situation stable and their quality of life was almost commonplace. The Scientific Revolution would single-handed prove that their goals or traditions were no longer valid, and this was not something they took lightly.

When Europeans experienced the events of the Scientific Revolution they looked upon it as a changing world, although not always open to the origins of the scientific changes. The Revolution became part of society without many even noticing, however for those that did, it was a time of enlightenment.

Galileo

Galileo Galilei was an Italian that changed the way people saw the Earth and outer space. He discovered that we orbited the sun and not the other way around. He also discovered several moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. He might be one of the most important astronomers in the 17th century. Because of his findings, he was in danger because of the Spanish Inquisition because of the book he wrote arguing against the Copernican theory hypothetically.

Galileo learned of new devices in the Netherlands and improved their ability to see distant bodies in space, the telescope.

There was a huge discourse between Martin Luther and the Lutheran Church and the Catholic Church at the time, and Galileo was placed under house arrest for his publishing of his book.

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler is another important astronomer and scientist of the 17th century. Kepler believed that the planets orbited the sun also, and was widely criticized at first. He also discovered and believed that the orbits of the planets were not a perfect circle. He discovered that Mars did not orbit as Copernicus had thought, but in a retrograde motion. The fact that planets travel on elliptical paths is known as Kepler's First Law.

This was known as the Martian problem that no one at the time could account for. Kepler was the first to discover that not all planets orbited the sun in the same way, circular or elliptical. Kepler discovered that not all planets moved around the sun at the same speed, this was known as Kepler’s second law.

A decade later, Kepler would discover his third law. This law recognized the relationship between planets, the different times it takes planets to orbit the sun.

Kepler also calculated the birth year of Christ, another amazing discovery of Johannes Kepler.

Today, amateur radio operators, astronomers and satellite watchers all use what is known as Keplerian Data to figure out the exact track of satellites.

More Kepler Discoveries

Johannes kepler went beyond astronomy and math with his discoveries, he also discovered many other valuable tools that we all use today. He was the first to determine that refraction drives vision in the eye, and that using two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses for both near and farsightedness, and explained how a telescope worked. He described images and magnification, and understood the properties of reflection. All in all, these scientists were very amazing during the 17th century.
The recent rash of ContentID claims across YouTube has threatened to strike down a fair number of the site’s channels. For creators who hope to make a decent living off of online video, contesting these claims is a must, but that step requires a dive into the confusing field of copyright law.

Luckily, there are lawyers willing to help. New Media Rights is a non-profit organization that, among other duties, provides legal services for online content creators besieged by copyright claims. Obviously, this field requires a thorough knowledge of YouTube copyright law, so we asked to New Media Rights attorney Teri Karobonik for some tips on navigating ContentID.

Tubefilter: Are there steps YouTube creators can take in order to ‘safeguard’ their videos from invalid ContentID claims? If so, what are they?

Teri Karobonik: It’s hard to entirely prevent a ContentID claim. However, we recommend that creators use only use as much copyrighted content as they absolutely need to make their point. Also, in the wake of the drastic rise in ContentID claims, which involved ContentID matches to in-game music, creators incorporating video game footage in their videos should mute background music in game.

When in doubt, get a license or used openly licensed content (like Creative Commons). We have a great guide on finding openly licensed content.

TF: How can YouTube musicians protect cover songs from ContentID claims?

TK: Cover songs, without the proper licenses, actually violate copyright law and can result in ContentID claims and DMCA takedowns. Some services (like Loudr) have recently popped up to help cover writers get the proper licenses for their cover songs. If you have a written license, it will be much easier to get the situation resolved if your video gets monetized or taken down.

TF: How can YouTube creators tell what is considered fair use and what is not? That is, where is the “line” between fair use and copyright infringement?

TK: Fair use is complex, and even for experienced lawyers, it’s very hard to tell where the ‘line’ is between fair use and copyright infringement. Unfortunately, most of the easy ‘fair use rules’ are myths; it’s not true that it’s OK to only use 20 seconds of a work, nor is journalistic use always allowed. It’s never a good idea to rely on legal myths when you’re creating your videos.

Fair use relies on a complex four-factor balancing test to determine if reuse is OK. If you’re unsure if your use qualifies as fair use, we strongly recommend you speak to an attorney (like the ones at New Media Rights) who can help you navigate the factors.

(Ed. note: Here is Teri’s complete explanation of the four factors that determine fair use:)

Factor 1 The first factor examines if your work is commercial or non-commercial and also if it is transformative. Works that are non-commercial are more likely to be fair use than commercial works, but if you have ads on your YouTube channel or website that is enough to be considered commercial use. Commercial use can be fair use, it’s just less likely. The first factor also looks at transformativeness, which is the degree to which you transform the copyrighted work you’re using. There are many ways to transform video, but a good rule of thumb is that the transformed work should serve a different purpose than the original work. For example, let’s say you take a bunch of short clips from a long running TV show and mashed them up into a new story that showed how the much beloved main character is actually remarkably racist. That would likely be transformative use. Factor 2 The second factor examines whether a work is published or unpublished and also looks at whether the work is factual or creative. Unpublished works are typically given more protection, so any time material is leaked, it is less likely to be fair use. As for the second part, facts are not eligible for copyright protection. Therefore, the reuse of factual works is more likely to be fair use than the reuse of creative works. Factor 3 The third factor checks how much of the work you used and what part of the work you used. In general, the less you use the better; however, there are times where using a small amount of work is less likely to be fair use. If you use the key moment of a work (like re-posting the minute of American Idol where they announce the winner), do not transform it, and post it by itself it is far less likely to be fair use. Factor 4 The fourth factor looks determines if your video is a market replacement for the video. For example, if you re-posted a music video on your channel your re-post is a direct replacement for the original, it is less likely to be fair use.

TF: Do you think there are positives to the ContentID system? If so, what are they?

TK: The general idea behind ContentID is good; the main problem is in the execution. If ContentID was nothing more than an easy way for creators to be compensated and negotiate actual licenses when their work is reused improperly, that might be OK. But ContentID simply doesn’t work like that.

TF: If you could change the ContentID system, how would you revise it?

TK: If I could revise ContentID, I would make two changes. First, I would make ContentID effectively account for fair use. Currently, ContentID has a very difficult time separating out fair use from infringing use of a copyrighted work.

The vast majority of the ContentID cases we see at New Media Rights involve works that should not have been flagged because they constitute fair use. While we sympathize that it is challenging to develop a computer algorithm that can tag fair use, we are particularly worried that content owners can financially benefit from and otherwise control creative work of those who utilize legal uses of copyrighted content. Forcing works to be monetized is particularly troublesome for artists who are directly criticizing or parodying the original work.

Secondly, I’d make the appeals process easier. The average user and the average large content holders do not understand the appeals process because it isn’t terribly straight forward.

Even if the user understands it, the process can quite intimidating. For example, the simple concept of requiring users to enter a telephone number in order to appeal a claim scares some users out of filing an appeal. In addition, the appeals process for fair use asks users to address each of the fair use factors in detail, something that can only properly be done by an experienced attorney, and discourages users from appealing wrongful takedowns.

For more information on New Media Rights, check out their website. If you like what they do, don’t forget that New Media Rights is a non-profit and any donations are appreciated. And if you have any questions for Teri Karobonik and the New Media Rights team, please get in touch and we may be able to have them answered for you in a future column.
The IRS announced on January 28th, that individual filers who use form 8863 for Education Credits (Hope Credit, Lifetime Learning Credit and other Education Credits) have to wait until at least ‘Mid February’ before filing. The IRS notice, along with a listing of other forms that can’t be filed until late February or early March can be found at this link. Be sure to check it out to see when you can file your return.

Looks like tomorrow is going to be a big day for e-filing returns so expect some delays. Also, the IRS announced earlier there would be delays in processing returns – see my previous blog post for details.

If you need some assistance this tax season, don’t hesitate to contact me – information is below.

Cheers!

Thomas C. Hodge, CPA

President

The Hodge Group

3040 N. Menard Avenue

Chicago, IL 60634

773.237.6369

http://www.thehodgegroup.com

Best Tax Preparers Website

Friend us on FaceBook here.

Connect on LinkedIn here.

Follow our Blog here.
CLINTON, Tenn., Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Police in Tennessee said a man charged with domestic assault was upset about a picture of an unknown man on his girlfriend's Facebook -- a photo of Mitt Romney.

Crystal Gray, 38, of Clinton, told Anderson County sheriff's deputies her boyfriend, Lowell Turpin, 40, confronted her July 22 when he saw a picture of an unknown man on her Facebook page, The Smoking Gun reported Wednesday.

The sheriff's report said Gray explained the photo was of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but she told deputies Turpin remained angry and confronted her for communicating with friends on Facebook.

The Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel reported Turpin allegedly threw Gray's laptop against a wall and punched her in the face.

Deputies said Gray gave them multiple contradictory accounts of the incident.

Turpin was charged with domestic assault and jailed in lieu of $1,000 bond.
Fear and Loathing Set Review & Playtesting Guide

Introduction:

I am going to experiment with a new method of reviewing new sets. Rather than only giving a 1 to 5 rating of cards that none of us have played yet (which gives a higher impression of accuracy than is appropriate for an unplayed card), I am also going to rate each card’s uncertainty.

Uncertainty measures how hard it is to ‘guesstimate’ the card’s playability. How much you would have to test the card, in order to get an accurate idea about its actual power level and usefulness. It is a measurement of uncertainty. In general, cards that are not similar to existing cards require more testing in order to determine if they are good. Cards whose effect is very swingy and unpredictable, and could end up either very strong or weak, situationally, require more testing in order to determine a value. The more similar a card is to existing cards, the easier it is to predict its power level. Thus, these cards would have a lower playtest requirement. Something very unique would require more playtesting, especially if it looked to potentially be strong.

Finally, I’ll give a verdict on whether the card is worth testing, in my opinion, or whether you should save your time by ignoring it and testing more worthy cards. Of course, if a certain card really appeals to you personally, then you should try it, regardless of what I think. After all, someone has to try out all these cards. If the rest of us miss something, someone out there will play it and if the card really was great, it would catch on. If you ever see a card that you ignored start to get a lot of buzz, then it becomes worth checking out. But since your playtest time is limited, and especially if your goal is to make competitive decks, it’s better to avoid some cards with low potential.

Runner cards:

Maybe I should start with the corp cards. The runner cards are mostly bad. Oh well.

Quest Completed:

Uncertainty: Moderate.

Expected Power: 1/5

Similar cards: Notoriety.

If you initially read this card as requiring a run on R&D, HQ, OR Archives, you are not alone. Most of the players I know did that, and thought it was great, until we looked at it again. But actually, it’s just Notoriety that lets you access something instead of getting a point.

This card probably isn’t very good (it’s probably harder to hit all 3 centrals than one remote), but you might consider it in the future if you’re having a huge problem with Caprice Nisei guarded 5/3 agendas in a big remote. (And Ash, and Red Herrings, and Strongbox, and Ruhr Valley, and …)

Verdict: Don’t waste your time, unless this card really intrigues you. It’s probably worse than Notoriety, and I’m not seeing lots of Notoriety decks. The point of Notoriety is that you can make points appear when they are not appearing. If you use this card to steal an agenda, that’s great, but you probably could’ve just stolen the agenda by going through the remote.

Hemorrhage:

Uncertainty: Very High.

Expected Power: 3.5/5?

Similar Cards: Datasucker, Imp, Desperado.

Despite the click to use, the fact that the corp chooses what to discard, and the high influence cost, I think this card is still fairly strong. It rewards running, like Desperado and Datasucker, which is one of the strongest mechanics in the game.

Hemorrhage allows pressuring HQ even without running it. Simply running any server allows you to force discards from the opponent. The HQ pressure adds up fast. The corp will feel pressured to spend time drawing cards, and then they will lose a lot of those cards to archives. Since they can’t lose agendas without having them stolen or being force to use Jackson, they will begin to have agendas clogging their hand.

Still, it’s not clear to me that Hemorrhage is worth it, I consider this a card that could be anything from terrible to amazing, and without testing we won’t really know. I think that if this was a criminal card, it would probably be amazing, but at 4 influence and in the current weakest runner faction, it’s a lot less threatening. I think that this card has the greatest potential to be panned by most reviewers, but actually be strong.

I played several games so far against this card, and it exceeded my initial expectations.

Verdict: Definitely requires testing. In my games playing as corp against this so far, it was pressuring me greatly, however I was able to win the games, mostly because I was NBN and could rush through the agendas so they didn’t end up totally clogging my hand. This card could be terrible or great, and you should go play it to find out. However, its influence cost means it is mostly restricted to Anarch right now. (I think thats probably the correct decision, Anarch needs help and Criminal would utilize this card too well).

Tallie Perrault:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power : 3/5 (Meta dependent)

Similar Cards: Activist Support. +Handsize cards.

What does Tallie do? Essentially, if the Corp plays Subliminal Messaging, she gives them a Bad Publicity but tags you. If the corp plays a damaging event like Scorched Earth or Neural EMP, she gives them a Bad Publicity but tags you, and also allows you to trash her afterwards in order to draw a card, possibly saving you from a followup Neural EMP!

She triggers off of certain other cards as well, like Closed Accounts, at which point you will be broke and have an extra tag (maybe a permanent one, if it was just a Breaking News that let hem Closed you). But here, the Bad Publicity will probably be pretty relevant. Big Brother and Freelancer also count, however, the corp does have the option of trashing her first for these three cards, because if they are playing them, that means you are tagged.

Mostly I expect Subliminal Messaging to be the primary source of Tallie triggers, and a bit of Closed Accounts, Neural EMP, and Scorched Earth. Let’s look at how this works:

You play Tallie, spending a card, a click, and $2. The corp now has the following options:

Never play subliminal Messaging again. Given that you spent at least ‘4’ worth of resources putting her out, this might be reasonable for the corp.

Play the Subliminal, taking a Bad Publicity and tagging you. They might do this at a time when the tag would be very BAD for you, such as when they want to play Closed Accounts, or kill you with Scorched Earth! The runner might not even choose to activate Tallie!

As a result, I feel that Tallie shouldn’t be played outside of a Tag-me archetype. You could use her in a Reina or Whizzard tagme denial deck with Siphon, Vamp, Plascrete, Joshua B, Data Leak Reversal, etc. She helps counter those Subliminal Messagings that can help the corp get money.

In Tag-me Anarch, it’s probably a reasonable inclusion. The new NBN agenda that is worth 3 points to the corp if you are tagged is yet another blow to tagme decks, and Anarch is weaker than Criminal right now. Criminals are the main runners who go tagme, and the probably won’t be willing to spend the 3 influence for this card.

Her second use, one that might occur outside of a tagme deck, is as a handsize buffer to prevent death by damage over the course of multiple cards (Scorches/Neurals).

For example, after running Jinteki, you are reduced to 1 card. On the Jinteki player’s turn, they play Neural EMP. You use Tallie to give a bad pub, then trash her to draw. Now a second Neural EMP doesn’t kill you. She also might save you from double Scorch in a situation where you have 3 cards and a Plascrete. First scorch you prevent with Plascrete and use her to draw a 4th card. Now the second wont kill you.

Verdict: Maybe try it in Tagme Anarch, if you really like that deck, and everyone in your meta starts running Subliminal Messaging. Alternately, use it to help you not die to Neural EMPs.

Executive Wiretaps:

Uncertainty: Low

Expected Power: 1/5

Similar Cards: Expert Schedule Analyzer

It’s a 1-use of Expert Schedule Analyzer. If running HQ would have cost you more than $3, or if your MU was full, then this is better, if you only wanted to do it once.

I feel that spending a significant amount of money to reveal the corp’s hand is not something the runner needs to do. Even if you see lots of agendas, you still have to run to go get them. Gabe will already have been running a lot on HQ and doesn’t need this at all.

Aside: Oh FFG why did you pick this name? In original Netrunner, Executive Wiretaps was a Maker’s Eye for HQ, which was a strong card. This card is coming back in Honor and Profit, under the name ‘Legwork’. Now just watch me play Legwork in the future and call it Executive Wiretaps, and be all confusing! (I do think that the upcoming Maker’s Eye for HQ is going to be a strong card).

Verdict: Don’t waste your time with this card.

Blackguard:

Uncertainty: High

Expected Power: 2.5/5

Similar cards: None.

Blackguard is an entirely new strategy. One that I hope will not be too strong, because it removes decisions from the corp. Blackguard will require a lot of testing in order to know if it’s good or not, as it is so unique, so if it’s your thing, go nuts!

Testing Blackguard in Silhouette, when she comes out, will be one approach, but I am not sure if it’s the only one. After all, Criminal already has a great console, Desperado! I would suggest a second alternative: Shaper with Motivation and Eureka and Snitch. Combine that with Torch, Omega, Femme Fatale, etc, and use Eureka to cheat out big programs and the Blackguard. When Oracle May comes out, this strategy will probably become more viable.

My expectation is that this ends up being a fun deck, but not a top tier, tournament deck, but we need to test it to see! There is some chance that it actually becomes a tourney viable deck, with Motivation, Eureka, Oracle May, etc. It might not even happen in Criminal!

Verdict: If Blackguard sounds fun to you, go test the hell out of it! If not, try to play against someone who likes it at some point, to gain experience. It’s probably important to play with and/or against this card. But if you don’t want to be the one trying out the Blackguard deck, don’t worry, tons of people are going to try it, and give us their thoughts.

Cybersolutions Mem Chip:

Uncertainty: Low

Expected Power: 3/5

Similar Cards: Akamatsu Mem Chip, Dyson Mem Chip, Dinosaurus, etc.

Hey look, it’s possibly the best Shaper Console in the game!

The big mem chip is pretty straightforward. You only play this if you are a shaper who very badly needs 2 more memory. The cost is nice for Modding as Kate, at least.

If this card is exactly what you need, it does the job. And if it’s not exactly what you need, you aren’t thinking about putting it in your deck. Other factions probably choose Dyson over it, given the influence cost. I’d be a lot more interested in this as a Neutral card. If that was the case, I’d try it out in Andromeda, and be able to fit in Sneakdoors or things like that! But it’s not.

Verdict: Most decks won’t want it, but your Sahasrara shaper might. Not much mystery to this card, simply a thing that should exist to open up more options. Do you want to make Sahasrara shaper with tons of programs? Add this. Otherwise? Don’t.

Alpha and Omega:

Uncertainty: High

Expected Power: 2 for Alpha, 3.5 for Omega

Similar cards: Crypsis, Atman, Knight

These breakers seem like a reasonable way to pressure all servers early on, at moderate efficiency. They are more efficient than Crypsis by $1 and a Click per ice. But less efficient than a Targeted Atman, or a dedicated breaker.

Both breakers will get you through a 1-ice server. Having both only helps for 2 ice servers, but then a 3 ice server can still sink you, if you rely only on them. In my opinion, Omega is better than Alpha. Omega is going to be getting you through a certain ice, forever. With Alpha, if you have an ice on a server that is a problem for you, and you are using Alpha to break, the corp can nullify that by placing another ice outside it. (They don’t even need to rez the new ice, just place it!). With Omega however, it always keeps getting you through that certain ice. If the corp places another ice in front of it, they have to actually rez that ice in order to stop you! With an Alpha, they DON’T.

Playing both cards together is a bit wasteful. You already had the ability to get through all 1 ice servers. The second only gets you through 2 ice servers. I would rather supplement an early Omega with actual breakers, later in the game when the corp builds larger servers.

The names Alpha and Omega are probably going to make people play them together, but honestly I think the best strategy would be to only use Omega, and supplement with other things.

These cards would probably be stronger if it wasn’t for Wraparound coming out. Wraparound will be a commonly played ice, and it crushes these breakers, costing $7 for them to get through.

Crypsis is a more expensive yet more reliable version, able to actually get you into a 2 ice server by itself, if needed. Knight is a better targeted breaker to handle a certain problem ice, and its movable.

In general, I feel there are better options, however I do feel that Omega could be strong in a dedicated ice destruction deck. Keep them at 1 ice per server with parasites, and Omega away, and then pressure hard. This strategy might be a superior version of the ‘Chaos Theory turbo-rig’ strategy. With one breaker you can pressure all early servers.

Verdict: Worth testing Omega, in an ice-destruction, early pressure strategy. Playing both feels like a trap to me. However, this is probably worse than Atman, worse than Crypsis, and worse than Knight. If one of these is good, it’s probably Omega being good in Kit. My decent rating is mostly based on the idea that Omega in Kit is probably strong.

Blackmail:

Uncertainty: Moderate (more a meta-call than something that needs testing).

Expected Power: 3 (Meta dependent). At any point in time its either dead or crazy good, and it’s very hard to tell how much time it will be what.

Similar cards: Inside Job, Stimhack.

Blackmail is a great way to punish Bad Publicity, however the runner doesn’t have good ways to force the corp to get it, so this card is unreliable and meta-dependent on what corp strategies you play against.

If all my opponents started playing Bad Publicity decks, I would put this in my deck, at least as a 1-of. If they don’t.

If you play this, you might want to try to turn it on with things like Tallie Perrault, but those aren’t actually reliable either.

Verdict: It’s a meta card. Play it only if everyone is obsessed with GRNDL or other Bad Publicity giving cards.

Corp Cards:

Time for some goodies!

Blue Level Clearance:

Uncertainty: Moderate/High

Expected Power: 3.5/5.

Similar cards: Green Level Clearance, Mauve Level Clearance, Rainbow Level Clearance.

Net result: Spend 2 clicks. Gain +1 card and $3. Move through your deck more quickly. This is similar to clicking to use Jackson Howard to draw 2, and then playing a Beanstalk. (Or playing Anonymous Tip, then Beanstalk). This is like clicking for $2, and then clicking for $1 and a card (like 1 use of Opus and 1 use of Pro Contacts, as Corp!)

Blue level is a useful card, but less splashable than Green Level, which probably means it won’t see nearly as much play. It also is worse on turn 1. On the first turn, Green Level is excellent and helps you find a second ice and afford them, to defend HQ and R&D. Blue level doesn’t. Green Level is an easy and common splash in Weyland and NBN, Blue Level isn’t. However, compared to Green Level, Blue Level does net you an extra $1 and a card, for a click, which is a useful trade.

Overall, I would probably test this in various corp decks. I expect that in most non-HB decks it will be more problematic than Green Level, especially due to influence cost, however, it’s slightly increased efficiency might end up being worth it. My guess is that it’s a bit worse than Green Level, mostly due to lack of turn 1 usefulness, but it’s probably still playable, mostly in HB.

Verdict: Shove it in your decks and try it out, especially HB. It’s a potentially very useful card, so you should experience playing it yourself. I feel that the influence cost is probably too tough for other corps to play it much.

Strongbox:

Uncertainty: Low

Expected Power: 1.5/5

Similar Cards: Red Herrings.

Strongbox’ low trash cost and higher rez cost make it pretty weak, imo. It’s usually worse than Red Herrings, unless combined with an Hourglass, or some combination of Bioroids, Jinteki RP, Ruhr Valley, etc. However, the fact that it mostly combos with OTHER weak cards is not a good thing. When two individually weak cards combo together, the result is generally not very strong.

I’d personally avoid this one, if your goal is to find good serious decks, unless you find the idea very fun.

Verdict: Let that guy in your group who is obsessed with Jinteki make the Jinteki RP strongbox deck, and then play against him. (Hmm, some of you are that guy…are those H&P spoilers great or what!)

Toshiyuki Sakai:

Uncertainty: Low

Expected Power: 0/5

Amazing DOUBLE MINDGAMES Power: 5/5

Similar Cards: Traps.

Toshiyuki doesn’t really do anything except allow you to win a DOUBLE mind game, and if you do, achieve the same result as winning a single mindgame. Woo mindgames!

You place (and possibly advance) him. This is mindgame #1. Does the runner run him? If they don’t, you have lost the first mindgame, and he is a waste of space, just like a not-run Snare, Edge of World, or Junebug. He will then sit there and rot, not getting to do anything.

Let’s say the runner DOES run him. Now, we get to initiate mindgame #2. You swap him with a trap or agenda. Does the runner jack out or continue? If they continue into your agenda, you lose the mindgame (unless it’s a fatal Fetal AI). If they continue into your trap, you achieve a result that is identical to simply placing the trap in the first place, no Toshiyuki required! The only time that Toshiyuki really does something unique is if you replace with an agenda, and the runner jacks out. Then you get to score your agenda.

However, most Jinteki decks would rather smash you with a big trap than score an agenda. I’d rather hit you with a double advanced Cerebral Overwriter, than push through a couple points, in many Jinteki decks.

What is the upside of Toshi? You get to pick the trap later on, after you see which one would be most damaging. Or alternately, you get to try to shove an agenda through, thinking they will jack out. However, is this worth having to win another mindgame for, and use up a deck slot on?

In the end, Toshiyuki doesn’t do much other than require you to win a mindgame TWICE, in order to achieve the result of winning one mindgame. This might be fun, but isn’t competitive.

Verdict: Play it in a fun mindgames deck, if that’s your thing. The main thing he does is make the mindgame harder for you to win, because he makes it so you have to win twice in a row to get your effect, instead of once. If successful, you get your pick of effects.

Yagura:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power: 3.5/5

Similar Cards: Enigma

I like Yagura. As an R&D defender, it’s pretty similar to a cheap Enigma. I’d rather force out a Yog with a $1 ice than a $3 ice! And if they play a Gordian or something, and want to break it, it costs $2 to break a $1 ice!

I think Jinteki will clearly play this. Replace a couple Enigmas with it, and put it on R&D.

Testing is mostly required to determine if it’s worth splashing in other corps. The 2 influence cost is a bit high for a small ice, which will limit its play. Also, when Inazuma comes out later, I expect that will be the more desirable Jinteki codegate for other corps to splash.

As to this being defeated by Yog. Yes, a $1 ice is crushed by a $5 breaker that is often a 1-of in people’s decks, so they have to tutor for it. That’s not the worst thing. That’s better than playing an Enigma, paying $3, and having them get a Yog. I would not play lots of these AND lots of Enigmas in a deck. Rather, I see Yagura as a way to replace Enigma, and then spend $2 less to force them to find a Yog. (And if they get a Gordian Blade, then a Yagura on R&D actually costs $2 to break, while an Enigma last click can be only $1). I would NOT play a bunch of Yaguras and a bunch of Enigmas in my deck. If I am playing Yagura, I am probably playing a couple of it, and then no other Yoggable code gates.

Verdict: Put it in Jinteki for sure. Try it in your other corps and see if it’s worth the influence. The only real question here to me isn’t ‘is it good’, but rather ‘is it worth 2 influence outside of Jinteki’. Also, is it best as a 1-of? 2-of? You don’t really want to draw more than 1.

Restoring Face:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power: 2.5/5

Similar Cards: Veterans Program, Elizabeth Mills.

A situational but potentially useful card, you would add this to decks that generate bad publicity but don’t actually want to have it. I would primarily consider this for Weyland and Jinteki.

This is the best card I have seen for removing bad publicity, if that is what you want to do. You can throw away various 0 cost cards like Jackson Howard, Bernie Mai, or an Akitaro after using him for discounts, and remove the bad publicity you gained from rezzing Grim or from something else.

Still, I doubt it will get played much. Decks usually either avoid bad publicity, or try to make it not matter.

Verdict: I’d try it out in a bad publicity deck with enough targets for it, if that’s what you’re playing. Most bad publicity decks either try to kill the runner’s breakers, or they try to set up situations where If the runner runs, they die, so that the effect of the bad publicity is minimized. These decks don’t need to worry as much about removing it. Still, if you do need to remove it, this is an effective way.

Market Research:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power: 4/5

Similar cards: Private Security Force

Market Research is another interesting way to add tagme punishment to NBN, and it doesn’t even eat up card slots! It’s like a PSF that needs the tag to be in place when scored, but not later on. It’s another useful Psychographics target, alongside Beale.

Overall, this card makes playing tagme against NBN even worse. It even opens up the possibility of playing NBN with tagging cards and essentially no deck slots spent on tag punishment, as you can get an effective tag punishing agenda.

Any Midseason deck should probably play this alongside its Astros and Beales.

I do think that in many, but not all NBN decks, this will become outclassed in the next set by NAPD Contract, which I think is the best 4+ difficulty agenda ever. However, for now, it’s generally better than a Character Assassination in the majority of NBN decks.

Verdict: Definitely fits into certain NBN decks. Once NAPD contract comes out, it fits into less NBN decks, but still some.

Wraparound:

Uncertainty: Low

Expected Power: 4.5/5

Similar cards: Ice Wall

Wraparound might be the best ice since core set. At the very least its comparable to Popup Window and Eli. It saves NBN decks influence from having to splash Ice Wall. For Jinteki or HB, Wraparound should be seriously considered as an Ice Wall replacement, if you don’t need an advancement target.

Wraparound makes all AI breakers other than Knight worse than they were, and makes Corroder (or another fracter) that much more important. It crushes a fracterless Katman deck that simply planned to Parasite your Ice Walls. It crushes an Anarch deck that relies on Crypsis or Darwin, and has only that single Corroder. It’s even better than Swordsman and stomping AI breakers.

All of this for only $1 more than the cost of an Ice Wall.

Wraparound also opens up a playstyle focused very heavily on killing the opponent’s corroder, and then simply not letting them access your servers.

Power Shutdowns and Archived Memories combine to slaughter low cost programs and kill that Corroder. Grim kills the Corroder and gives a Bad Publicity that hopefully now doesn’t matter, if they cannot get through your Wraparounds. Wraparound is very good in rush decks that play the “Gear Check” strategy. That is: make a server and rush. Can your opponent pass the “Gear Check” of getting Corroder and whatever else they need fast enough? If not, they lose. If so, try to kill it, and keep rushing while they hunt for a backup.

Wraparound is the king of the ‘kill your corroder’ strategy. It doesn’t allow backup breakers or parasites to allow the runner to survive their Corroderless state. And even if that’s not your strategy, Wraparound frees up NBN influence that was spent on Ice Walls, replacing it with an ice that is superior against AI breakers and Parasites.

Verdict: Doesn’t even really need testing, its simply automatic in NBN. It’s worth trying in most other corps as well.

GRNDL: Power Unleashed:

Uncertainty: High

Expected Power: 3/5

As an ID, GRNDL deserves a lot of testing. Its niche will probably be in decks that punish running heavily, with things like Sea Source/Scorch, Punitive Counterstrike, Midseason Replacements, etc.

Your main defense is not ice, it’s the threat of death if the runner runs you. Your starting $10 pool helps to make the Sea Scorch plan or the Punitive Counterstrike plan work early on, and intimidate the runner.

My expectation is that GRNDL is scarier early on at threatening a kill if you run, than BABW, but overall is less solid due to the lower influence and the Bad Publicity. However, there is some chance that a low ice, high economy and threat GRNDL deck can simply bully the runner so hard into not running, with the threat of dying, that they don’t really NEED ice. “Sure, R&D is open. Go ahead and take a 3 point Agenda. If you do, you are dead because I have $20 already”.

Verdict: You have two choices: either play it a lot, or wait until we get a bunch of OCTGN data. Then, if the win rate is low, you can start ignoring it, and if it’s high, you should probably start playtesting it.

Vulcan Coverup:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power: 3/5

Similar Cards: Posted Bounty.

Treat this as a Posted Bounty which, instead of giving the tag, fills in for one of the Scorches. Similar to how Posted Bounty + 2xScorch was a win against a Plascreteless runner, Vulcan + Sea Source + Scorch is a win. Also, Vulcan + Sea Source + 2x Scorch kills a single Plascrete guarded runner, and that’s easier to find than the triple Scorch that a Posted Bounty required.

There is another difference as well. Scoring a Vulcan hurts the runner, even if you don’t follow up, whereas Posted Bounty’s power is only used when you are going to kill. However, if the runner steals Vulcan, then they get the Bad Publicity! As a result, Vulcan is higher variance than Posted Bounty. More upside (2 free damage regardless when you score), more downside.

Verdict: If your deck used Posted Bounty, and has enough other good ways to give tags, try replacing the Posted Bounties with these, and see how it goes.

GRNDL Refinery:

Uncertainty: Moderate

Expected Power: 3.5/5

Similar cards: Melange Mining Corp, Thomas Haas.

GRNDL Refinery can be a bad Mélange, except in decks where you want to do a lot of “Install Advance Advance”. In those decks, the refinery adds another option to ‘is it a 5/3 or a trap’, and can either force runs or generate money similarly to melange.

Here is an analogy: Refinery is to 5/3 ‘slow advance’ decks, as Melange is to 3/2 fast advance or never advance decks.

After a play of IAA, AA Use, GRNDL refinery is similar to a Melange, except that its now gone, and the runner doesn’t have to come kill it. Advancing it less than this is simply worse than a Melange.

The primary use of this card might come in the future, when the H&P set gives us the Jinteki ID Tennin Institute. You can stick this in play, and then leave it there, and pile counters on it when the runner doesn’t run. Then, you can do Advance, Advance, Use, and take a lot of money.

Verdict: It’s a Melange in a lot of the decks we play, but there are probably some decks that will consider it. You should try it out in decks that advance traps or agendas a lot. It’s too bad that the strategy of advancing things and saying GO isn’t more viable than it is. However, this is a slightly buffed reprint of a card that I did use as a 1-of in some original Netrunner decks, so it has the potential to get some play.

Edit: Raised my rating a bit after some initial results, it looks reasonable as a Melange replacement in Weyland.

Subliminal Messaging:

Uncertainty: Moderate/High.

Expected Power: 4/5

Similar Cards: None.

I’m pretty excited for this card. Free money without spending any clicks is really strong. The drawback is that in some cases, it might actually make your runner opponent play BETTER, by running more instead of being too passive!

This card is amazing in decks that heavily punish running, such as many Jinteki decks, and any deck that sits around with Sea Source and Scorched earth, hoping the runner will waste their money on a run. However, if you cannot stop or punish the runner, it might become weak.

The best use of this card might be in a deck with Celebrity Gift. Once you manage to return them to your hand from Archives, you have a huge hand, and can Gift without revealing everything to the runner! It essentially negates a lot of the drawback of the Gift. I see this as a staple card in Jinteki, and it should see play in some other decks as well. I, for one, will be testing out TWIY with this and Celebrity Gift.

But even if normal decks, that don’t punish running, as long as you aren’t getting completely crushed, it is likely that the runner has some turns when they don’t want to run. Any time this happens, you get a free credit. If this happens at least ONCE, then Subliminal has given you $2 without a click, making it at least as good as a Beanstalk. Once it happens TWICE, the Subliminal is worth $3 without spending a click. That’s basically a Hedge Fund!

So far I have been playing 3 Subliminal Messaging in any deck I make, to try it. And so far it is quite interesting. It definitely seems best in Jinteki, who both makes the runner not want to run, and runs Celebrity Gift. I have had some good success with it in an NBN deck with Celebrity Gift, that focuses heavily on locking down centrals to try and get this to recur.

Does Subliminal Messaging get worse as you add more of them?

A tiny bit worse. If you have 2-3 of them, and the runner doesn’t run you for a turn, you get them all back. And then you get a free $ each turn for the next 2-3 turns. If the runner fails to run for multiple consecutive turns, then the extras are “wasted”. However, its much more common in my experience for the runner to miss one turn of running, than several turns in a row, in which case the extra subliminals are just as valuable. If you have successfully locked the runner out for a long period of time later in the game once you have several subliminals, then you are probably already winning that game! I don’t think that they get much weaker at all as you add multiples. On the other hand, if you have a Celebrity Gift, then returning multiple of them at once is amazing, and allows your Celebrity Gift to still hide several cards!

Verdict: This definitely needs testing, it’s a unique and potentially powerful effect. Money just magically appears! And you don’t have to do anything! In my experience so far it is a solid replacement for cards such as Beanstalk or Green Level that you might have had to pay influence for previously. And if your deck is reallygood at making the runner not want to run you, then in that deck they even can become better than Hedge Funds! Go test this card. Its certainly not for EVERY deck, but I think it is good for MANY decks.

Conclusion:

Overall this set has a number of cards I like, especially on the corp side.

On the runner side, Hemorrhage and Omega look semi-promising, but probably aren’t true power cards. Blackguard is probably a good fun-deck card, and Blackmail is a decent meta card.

On the corp side, Wraparound gives NBN decks 3 influence back (replacing Ice Wall), Subliminal Messaging is really good for any deck that can make the runner not want to run, and Market Research helps NBN decks gain more tag punishment, without sacrificing deck slots. GRNDL is an interesting ID (probably worse overall than BABW but worth testing – it is much more threatening turn 1 at least). Blue Level Clearance and Yagura are likely playable in-faction.
The results of recent controlled trials documenting the protective effect of male circumcision on HIV infection in young adults pose significant challenges to a country like Israel. Circumcision is performed in close to 100% of new born males, mostly as a religious act in Judaism and Islam. Christian Israelis follow societal norms suggesting that circumcision contributes to better hygiene and cleanliness. Complications in infant circumcision in Israel are rare, despite the surgery being preformed most often by nonmedical circumcisers (a "Mohel") on the eighth day of birth. Reported complication rates are between 0.34% and 2%, with bleeding and infections being the most common. In the last 10 years and due to massive migration of Eastern Europeans into Israel, impressive experience was gained in Israel with adults seeking male circumcision for various reasons including: religious, societal pressure, sexual and economical. Over 21,800 adult male circumcisions have been monitored between 1998 and 2006 alone. Complication rates (mostly bleeding) were 1.75% on an average. This review matches the new data emerging from the African controlled trials with previous observational studies and the Jewish and Israeli experience. We present three challenges to policy makers in Israel: (a) the need to intensify education and information sharing on male circumcision and HIV/AIDS among healthcare workers; (b) developing an information campaign for non-circumcised migrants and adequate service to scale up on potential demand; (c) developing intensified educational campaigns for circumcised males so that they do not abandon other protective interventions (e.g. condoms) when needed for HIV prevention.
Mark Schlabach discusses what transpired at Ole Miss that led to Hugh Freeze stepping down and how "bizarre" the timing is. (1:31)

STARKVILLE, Miss. -- The man who helped take down Ole Miss football coach Hugh Freeze is a lifelong Mississippi State fan who attended his first Bulldogs game 37 years ago and has the university's logo tattooed on his left hand.

But he insists he never set out to bring down the Rebels and their coach.

It just kind of happened that way.

When Steve Robertson was sifting through Freeze's phone records on July 5 as part of his research for an upcoming book he's writing, he discovered phone calls he expected to see. There were mostly calls to recruits and assistant coaches.

But when Robertson saw a phone number with a 313 area code, he was stunned by what he discovered in a Google search. A call made on Jan. 19, 2016, lasting one minute, was made to a number connected with several advertisements for female escorts. Robertson then asked his wife to read him the telephone number again to make sure it was correct. The escort service ads came up again.

Robertson called Thomas Mars, an attorney who is representing former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt in his defamation lawsuit against Ole Miss. Mars had been introduced to Robertson through a third party he found while doing online research into Nutt's case. They've since developed a close working relationship, talking on the phone several times a day and sharing what they found in their investigations.

"He asked me to fill in some blanks," Robertson said.

When Robertson told Mars to enter the phone number in Google, Mars was silent for nearly a minute before yelling an expletive in excitement.

Ole Miss had unwittingly provided information that would lead to Freeze's resignation.

To understand what has transpired in the last couple of years in Oxford, Mississippi, it helps to know the nature of the rivalry between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. While this seems like the kind of scandal that could only happen in college football, it's really the kind of scandal that could only happen in a state like Mississippi.

"It's very Mississippi," Bruse Loyd, a Houston-based attorney, told ESPN last month. "It's very William Faulkner."

Loyd, who represents former Ole Miss staffer Barney Farrar, and who said he played junior college football with Mississippi State president Mark Keenum, all but predicted Freeze's ouster a month ago. "There's just so much drama and it involves a lot of tragedy," Loyd said. "It's going to get worse and there's going to be a lot more that's coming."

In 2014, Mississippi State was ranked No. 1 in the AP poll and Ole Miss was No. 3 after eight weeks of the season. Ever since, the usual high level of vitriol in the rivalry seems to have been taken to another level.

As one SEC power broker puts it: "It makes Ohio State-Michigan and Auburn-Alabama look like Sunday school." Robertson puts it another way: "It's the two runt puppies in the SEC West fighting for the hind teat. When you finally get locked on that hind teat, you do whatever you have to do to stay there, even if the other guy has to starve."

Steve Robertson, left, helped reveal the phone number which led to Hugh Freeze's resignation. Steve Robertson

Robertson would know. In fact, if you're looking for answers as to how Ole Miss finds itself in its current predicament, he's the best person to talk to. He explained how he became so intertwined with the case over lunch at a burger joint in Starkville on Sunday afternoon.

It's a story of how what began as a run-of-the-mill college football scandal -- bottom-dwelling team hires upstart coach, five-star recruits arrive, and ensuing success leads to whispers, then accusations, and eventually serious charges by the NCAA -- mushroomed into much more.

It initially appeared that the Rebels might have been in the clear with only a slap on the wrist had it not been for a bizarre sequence of events with All-America offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil last year. On April 28, 2016, the first night of the NFL draft, someone hacked Tunsil's social media accounts and published a video of him smoking a substance from a gas mask, as well as text messages in which he asked Ole Miss coaches for money to pay rent and his mother's utility bills.

That set in motion the chain of events that brought Robertson and Mars together and culminated in Freeze's hasty resignation last Thursday.

Once Mars was made aware of the phone number linked to the escort service, he alerted Ole Miss general counsel Lee Tyner via a July 13 email.

"For the benefit of everyone on your end, and particularly Coach Freeze, I'd suggest you and [assistant general counsel Rob Jolly] do a deeper dive on the last set of phone records you gave me," Mars wrote. "If you examine them carefully enough, you'll find a phone call Coach Freeze made that would be highly embarrassing for all of you and extremely difficult to explain. While that call is arguably relevant to the NCAA investigation, we decided to take the high road and not make reference to it in the complaint."

Mars said Nutt didn't want him to release the phone records to the media.

"Houston had no interest in this information being used to embarrass Hugh Freeze, and he made that very clear to me," Mars said. "He wasn't interested in taking a pound of flesh from Hugh Freeze. He only wanted to clear his name."

After receiving Mars' email, Ole Miss officials initially searched only for the phone number in question. They told Mars they didn't find the number in any more of Freeze's phone records. But Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork decided to do a more extensive search of Freeze's phone records going back to shortly after he was hired in December 2011. A review was conducted by Freeze's attorney, a university attorney and an athletic department staff member of more than 39,000 phone calls. Bjork told ESPN last week that they found a pattern of calls that was "troubling."

Ole Miss Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter, left, and athletic director Ross Bjork announced Hugh Freeze's resignation on Thursday. Bruce Newman/Oxford Eagle/AP

Robertson, who has covered Mississippi State sports since 2001, said he and Mars stumbled upon the number when they were looking for another call -- a conversation between Freeze and a sportswriter. The call with the sportswriter happened on Jan. 20, 2016, but Mars requested records for the day before and the day after, so the university didn't know exactly what he was looking for.

The phone call to the escort service was one of 84 calls over a three-day period included in the records, after Freeze had redacted three personal calls. He failed to redact the call to the 313 area code.

Mars, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, was a former general counsel and chief administrator for Walmart, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is one of his clients. Mars lived in the same neighborhood as Nutt when he was coaching at Arkansas, and Bill Clinton's pastor called him in February and asked him to help Nutt in his case against Ole Miss. At the start of his legal career, Mars worked under Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.

Robertson had been butting heads with Ole Miss officials for the past several months, since they denied his open records request for an unredacted version of the notice of allegations the Rebels received from the NCAA in January 2016. Robertson wanted the names of the Ole Miss boosters who are accused of providing improper benefits to recruits, and university officials wouldn't release them.

When Mars advised Tyner about the call Freeze made to the escort service, he told him that he'd shared the phone records with Robertson.

"Steve is obsessed," Mars said Tyner told him.

Editor's Picks Ole Miss' Freeze quits; escort-service calls cited Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze has resigned, effective immediately, the school said Thursday. Matt Luke, co-offensive coordinator and offensive line coach, has been installed as the interim coach.

Whom should Ole Miss hire to replace Hugh Freeze? Ole Miss will have plenty of time to conduct its search for a permanent head coach, but our search firm breaks down what a new coach will be walking into, offers up a list of candidates and makes a final recommendation. 1 Related

"Had anybody in this state done their job, I wouldn't have had to do it," Robertson said. "It got to the point where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired of it. I was willing to pass the baton to someone, but no one was willing to take it."

Robertson filed a complaint with the Mississippi Ethics Commission, which ruled in his favor earlier this month. One of the unnamed boosters -- identified in court records as John Doe -- filed a lawsuit in state court in Jackson in an attempt to block the release of his name.

"I don't care if it goes to the Mississippi Supreme Court," Robertson said. "I'm in this all the way. The law is on my side."

Mars was preparing to sue Ole Miss and the Ole Miss Athletics Foundation for violating the terms of Nutt's severance agreement, which paid him a lump sum of $4.35 million when he was fired in 2011. Among other things, Ole Miss officials are "not to make any statement relative to Nutt's tenure as an employee [of Ole Miss] that may damage or harm Nutt's reputation as a football coach."

Mars claims Ole Miss officials violated that agreement by allegedly defaming Nutt and blaming him for most of the Rebels' NCAA troubles in off-the-record conversations with sports reporters, including from ESPN. Along with Robertson's help, Mars also enlisted the services of Fred Burton, a longtime counterterrorism agent with the U.S. Department of State. Burton, whom Mars has known since the second grade, was involved in several high-profile investigations, including the capture of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. When asked about what Burton did to help in the Nutt case, Mars declined to provide specifics.

The fact that a self-described Mississippi State fan helped expose the wrongdoing of a popular Ole Miss coach will only add more bad blood to an in-state rivalry that has been boiling with venom for months.

"If it weren't for Steve Robertson, I don't believe this case would have transpired the way it did over the past week," Mars said.

Robertson has already received multiple death threats. He shared one with ESPN in which someone wrote on a message board that "he will be lucky if he can ever speak again" and "he won't be around much longer."

Even before Robertson helped expose Freeze's alleged misdeeds, Ole Miss and Mississippi State fans had been pointing fingers at each other. Many MSU fans accused the Rebels of cheating in recruiting during their rise to national prominence under Freeze, while some Ole Miss fans believe the Bulldogs helped orchestrate many of the more serious allegations of rules violations. And, of course, they're battling for many of the same high school players in a sparsely populated state.

"It's a family feud every day of every year," said ESPN college football analyst Tommy Tuberville, a former Ole Miss coach. "Recruiting is so much more involved and there's a lot more on the line. Auburn and Alabama is more of a rivalry game between the players, coaches and fans. But probably 80 percent of the guys signed by Ole Miss every year were recruited by Mississippi State. It's that cutthroat."

Hugh Freeze announced his resignation last week after five years as Ole Miss' head coach. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

Two Mississippi State players -- linebacker Leo Lewis and defensive lineman Kobe Jones -- told NCAA investigators that the Rebels provided them with improper benefits. The players made the charges after they were granted partial immunity by the NCAA. Among other benefits, Jones and Lewis said they received free merchandise from Rebel Rags, a popular Ole Miss clothing and memorabilia store, according to legal filings.

Charles Merkel, an attorney who represents Rebel Rags, sued Jones, Lewis and Lindsey Miller, Tunsil's ex-stepfather, who told the NCAA that he also received free merchandise from the store. Merkel sued the trio for making false statements and said he has hundreds of pages of sales records and credit card receipts that prove they're lying. Merkel has requested to depose them under oath to prove it.

It doesn't take long to figure out which side Robertson is rooting for. He grew up in Columbia, Mississippi, near the Louisiana border. (He boasts that he and Walter Payton are the only good things to come from there.) Robertson attended his first Mississippi State game on Nov. 1, 1980, when he watched the Bulldogs upset No. 1 Alabama 6-3 in Jackson, Mississippi. (Bumper stickers were made to commemorate the win that read: "I Was There When We Beat The Bear.")

A self-described recovering alcoholic and addict, Robertson said he has been sober for 25 years. In 1992, he was convicted of burglary and false pretense and was sentenced to probation. He said Ole Miss fans have publicized his past problems in an attempt to damage his credibility.

"I've got to serve a life sentence for something I did when I was 19," Robertson said. "I wasn't one of those people who saw the light; I had to feel the heat."

A 45-year-old father of four kids, Robertson also hosts a popular podcast and wrote a book about the Ole Miss scandal, "Flim Flam," which is scheduled to be published next month (the books are being handled by an out-of-state printer to avoid copies being leaked).

Robertson is not-so-affectionately known as "Rose Bowl" by Ole Miss fans. In 2001, Mississippi State was ranked in the preseason top 20 under coach Jackie Sherrill, and Robertson predicted it would win the SEC and play in the BCS championship game in Pasadena, California. The Bulldogs finished 3-8. He has been jokingly referring to himself as "Rose Bowl" ever since. When the Rebels self-imposed a one-year postseason ban in February, he started selling "Rose Bowl Was Right" T-shirts. He advertised them on Facebook again when Freeze resigned on Thursday.

Robertson will continue to keep a close eye on what's transpiring in Oxford. The Rebels might appear before the NCAA Committee on Infractions later this summer in Indianapolis, where they'll attempt to argue that the coach they just forced to resign followed the rules. Freeze is charged with failure to monitor his staff, and Ole Miss is charged with lack of institutional control, the most serious NCAA violation a member institution can face.

It's unknown what kind of impact Freeze's resignation will have on the case, but Robertson can't believe it has gotten this far.

"If they had just apologized to Houston Nutt, I don't even know who Thomas Mars is and I never have the phone records," Robertson said. "I never find that call."
Tens of thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians have come to the UK to work since restrictions were lifted Peter Nicholls/The Times

Net migration has reached a record 336,000 as figures published yesterday showed that Romanians are now the third biggest group coming to the UK.

Officials said the latest increase was driven by a “statistically significant” rise in the overall number of immigrants, with many of them arriving to take up jobs. The surge was partly because of a 61 per cent rise in the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK for more than a year in the 12 months to June.

Romania entered the top five nations sending migrants to the UK for the first time this year, behind India and China, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Net migration is defined as the difference between the number of…
But that, as Detective Hamm can tell you, is easier said than done.

The number of black graduates from the Police Academy has dropped to 9 percent this month from 19 percent in 2005, police officials say. Officials have pointed to several factors, including the shrinking black population in New York City; the department’s stop-and-frisk strategy, which increased distrust in minority communities; and administrative hiccups that left some applicants hanging for years without a call from the department after taking the test.

The department’s efforts haven’t always been consistent, either. One day after Mr. de Blasio promised that the city would be recruiting black officers “energetically,” police officials acknowledged that 18 of the 20 officers assigned to the department’s recruitment unit had been reassigned to help crack down on gun violence.

Police officials said those officers would return to recruitment in the fall. William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, said the city’s hiring efforts were already delivering results.

About 16 percent of the recruits entering the academy this month are expected to be black, “a very significant increase,” Mr. Bratton said. He was speaking at a news briefing and praised the Guardians, whose members have been speaking at colleges and community meetings around the city.

Detective Hamm, a former elementary-school teacher, said he understood the hesitancy he often encountered. He grew up in the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers, a public housing project in Harlem, and remembers the deaths of Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart at the hands of the police, cases that seared the city in the 1980s.
Got a question for Philologos? Ask him directly at philologos@mosaicmagazine.com.

My previous column dealt with linguistic evidence for Israelite sailors’ having reached India from Palestine in the time of King Solomon. About it, Anson Laytner writes:

In Solomon’s day there was no Palestine, so the trip would have been impossible! Seriously, though, if Mosaic’s own team misuses terminology, what about the rest of us? Perhaps it is time for you to write something on the geographical names Judah, Israel, Judaea, Palestine, etc.

Seriously, this is a subject that I have written on—and more than once during my years as a Jewish-language columnist. And yet, although I dislike having to repeat myself, perhaps Anson Laytner is right that it deserves to be written about again. Few place names these days arouse quite as much passion as does “Palestine,” nearly all of it directed against Israel. To any Jew who was old enough to read at the time the state of Israel was created, this can only seem grimly ironic, because “Palestine” was once a Jewish word, too. I can’t watch a news clip of anti-Israel demonstrators chanting “Palestine will be free/ From the river to the sea!” without remembering the blue-and-white Jewish National Fund collection box that stood in the kitchen of my parents’ New York apartment in 1947-48, when I was a boy of eight or nine. On it, across a map of the Jewish homeland, was written in flowing letters: “Fight for a Free Palestine!”

There was nothing exceptional about this. English and French “Palestine,” German Palästina, Polish Palestyna, Russian Палестина: this was the standard word in European languages, used by Jews no less than by others, for the country whose greater part was renamed Israel after 1948. It had been the standard word since the early 19th century, when it gradually replaced the term “the Holy Land” that had been in use in the Christian world in medieval and early modern times. When, in 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, it proclaimed, “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Jews, unless they were anti-Zionist, were exultant over this wording. It was the Arabs who weren’t.

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It is true that in speaking or writing Jewish languages like Yiddish, Hebrew, or Ladino, 19th- and early-20th-century Jews did not generally use “Palestine.” Their own term, current since early rabbinic times, was “Erets-Yisra’el,” the Land of Israel.

It is also true that when, after putting down the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, the Romans officially renamed their administrative province of Judea, which included much of the Land of Israel, as Syria Palaestina, their motives were anti-Jewish. Palaestina was the Pleshet of the Hebrew Bible, the land of the Plishtim or Philistines, the archenemies of the biblical Israelites. By giving the name “Palestinian Syria” to the country that had been unsuccessfully fought for by the Jewish people in two bitter rebellions, the Romans were seeking to deny the Jewish connection to it. Moreover, whereas biblical Pleshet had signified the Philistines’ stronghold of the country’s coastal plain, the name was now extended to the traditionally Israelite hill country that the Philistines had never occupied.

And yet many people have names for their countries that are not used by the rest of the world, and some have names for them that are no more historically accurate than was Syria Palaestina. Although Germans call their native land Deutschland, they are not offended when Americans call it Germany and French call it Allemagne, and they unthinkingly use these names when speaking English or French; nor do the inhabitants of Holland protest the absurdity of being called “Dutch” in English when, in their own language (called by them Nederlands or Hollands), Duits means “German.” And while the whole world says “America” just as Americans do, who, Americans included, stops to reflect that this name comes from that of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, to whom the discovery of the American continent was erroneously attributed in 1507 by the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller? (Mr. Laytner, I suppose, would retort that America couldn’t have been discovered before 1507, there having been no place by this name prior to that date!)

Of course, no Germans are laying claim to Holland because its inhabitants are called Dutch, and no one is demanding the abolition of the USA because it was named for the wrong person, whereas quite a few people favor the dismantlement of Israel because it is on “Palestinian” land. The Palestinian Arab hijacking of the words Palestine and Palestinian goes back to 1948, and Jewish zeal for the new state of Israel, it must be said, bears its share of the blame for this. Inasmuch as the Arabs, following their 1948 defeat that resulted in Palestine’s being divided into two unequal parts, insisted that it was still one country and would return to being one country under Arab rule, it was only natural for many Israelis and Jews to say the opposite—that is, that Palestine no longer existed, its place having been taken by Israel and the Jordanian-controlled “West Bank” of the Jordan.

This went on until 1967, when Israel conquered the “West Bank,” too, and all of Palestine fell under its rule. However, since, apart from eastern Jerusalem, it did not annex the West Bank, the word “Israel” continued to refer, even for Israelis, to the pre-1967 state of Israel alone; what was conquered, depending on one’s political point of view, either remained “the West Bank” or came to be called “the territories,” “the occupied [or administered] territories,” or “Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.” (After Israel’s 2005 evacuation of the Gaza Strip, the last became just “Judea and Samaria.”) If one wished to refer to Israel and the occupied territories together, one could do so in Hebrew as Erets-Yisra’el, but what, if determined to shun the word “Palestine,” could one say in English or other languages?

And there, Mr. Laytner, is the rub. As a discrete geographical area, bounded on the west by the sea, on the east by the Jordan Valley, on the north by the mountains of Lebanon, and on the south by the Sinai desert, Palestine exists and existed in Solomon’s time, too. What then, if not “Palestine,” are we to call this area in English? “Erets-Israel”? I wish you luck if you think you can sell that. “The Holy Land?” The world isn’t about to go back to the 18th century. “Canaan?” That’s going back to the 18th century BCE. “Cisjordan?” Yes, the French sometimes say “Cisjordanie,” but French isn’t English.

I can’t think of any other ideas. And that being the case, we have two choices: either we pretend that the land “from the river to the sea” is not, geographically, one country—or else we assert that it is and call it Palestine. This doesn’t prejudge the question of whom this country, politically, should belong to. One can legitimately claim all of it for the Jewish people. But in order to do so, one needs a word for it, and “Palestine” is the only one there is.

Got a question for Philologos? Ask him directly at philologos@mosaicmagazine.com.
President-elect Donald Trump seems to be setting a trend that when he doesn’t like the news about him he cries that it’s fake news. It certainly happened with the Russian hack story and #GoldenShowerGate.

A new CNN/ORC poll shows that Trump set a record for the lowest poll numbers (40 percent) for a president on Inauguration Day. According to the poll, only 14 percent of Democrats think that Trump will do well as president and only 4 percent think he’s handled the transition well.

In an Associated Press poll of young people, 52 percent of whites, 72 percent of Latinos, 66 percent of Asians and 70 percent of African-Americans think Trump will create more divisions.

Another shocking statistic released this week revealed that 74 percent of Americans want to see Trump’s tax returns.

Trump’s response was to cry foul.

The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017

Twitter unleashed a hilarious string of mockery for the incoming leader:

@owillis @realDonaldTrump President Obama won popular vote by 10 MILLION You'll never be half the man or President he is You're despised — Linda (@GoldieAZ) January 17, 2017

.@realDonaldTrump hillary got more votes than you. you will have to take that with you forever. — Oliver Willis (@owillis) January 17, 2017

.@realDonaldTrump When you need a little help to win the election pic.twitter.com/SoWwnZy3WE — Jordan Uhl (@JordanUhl) January 17, 2017

Net favorables of world leaders in @CNN poll

Trudeau: +29

Merkel: +13

Trump: -9

Putin: -59

(lol. white people don't like you too) https://t.co/O0zdyElNbH — AAmom (@AVD911) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump and @HouseGOP are under fire🔥,and already proving they can't handle this much power(Senate& Exec Office). pic.twitter.com/YXiSWEA5KO — Lil' Kim Ms. G.O.A.T (@killerbee805) January 17, 2017

Seeing Trump supporters not believe the ORC poll because "fake news." pic.twitter.com/ToZHTJegT9 — Emilia🇺🇸 (@emnercessiann) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump and they'll all begin with the word "lowest" unless it is followed by the words "death rate." (2/2) — Danesh (@DaneshWasTaken) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump Polls aren't rigged. You are truly despised. — RJ Palacio (@RJPalacio) January 17, 2017

It's so easy to play this game every time @realDonaldTrump tweets something. https://t.co/uvkfvZMmnN — John Bowman (@johnbowman) January 17, 2017

.@realDonaldTrump Every morning an angry billionaire cries on twitter about his pathetic existence: pic.twitter.com/4HRyXkyXoQ — Zoey Bartlet-Young (@Zoey_Bartlet) January 17, 2017

.@realDonaldTrump It'll be ok. Just lighten up. Why are you always so angry in the morning? pic.twitter.com/IwpqlAIz4Z — Jordan Uhl (@JordanUhl) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump You mean the popular election that you lost by 3 million votes to Hillary on? — Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump Your entire image and financial wealth is rigged. Release those tax returns, Don, I dare you. — Mike P Williams (@Mike_P_Williams) January 17, 2017

You can't just say everything that opposes you is rigged, @realDonaldTrump. You used that card earlier. – Founder, @TheOfficialPORP — David G. McAfee (@DavidGMcAfee) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump and it might not be a good idea to throw the word 'rigged' about, you know, as it just reminds of Russian interference. — Matt Haig (@matthaig1) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump People are already growing sick of you. — The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump Everyone is lying that doesn't agree with Donald Trump or boost Donald Trump'a Ego. — Trey Pearson (@treypearson) January 17, 2017

@EmmaKennedy "I don't like to hear that so it's fake news!" pic.twitter.com/h4KQQgGVle — Jordan Uhl (@JordanUhl) January 17, 2017

@realDonaldTrump Dude, real talk: you're our POTUS now. I accept it, but I need you to stop whining and start working. Be presidential FFS. — TJ Fixman (@TJFixman) January 17, 2017
RAMALLAH (Reuters) - The body of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be exhumed on Tuesday, eight years after his death, in an investigation to establish if he was murdered, a Palestinian official said on Saturday.

Plastic sheets cover the mausoleum of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah November 24, 2012. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

A French court opened a murder inquiry in August into Arafat’s death in Paris after a Swiss institute said it had discovered high levels of radioactive polonium on his clothing, which was supplied by his widow, Suha.

Tawfiq al-Tirawi, in charge of the Palestinian committee overseeing the investigation, told reporters in Ramallah on Saturday “it is a painful necessity” to exhume the body of Arafat, who came to symbolize the Palestinian quest for statehood throughout decades of war and peace with Israel.

Tirawi said the Palestinians had “evidence which suggests Arafat was assassinated by Israelis”. Israel denies any involvement.

The exhumation and renewed allegations of Israeli involvement could stir further tension between the Palestinians and Israel, which are observing a truce after a week of fierce fighting in Gaza.

Any positive results for polonium could rekindle Palestinian hostility toward Israel and suspicions that a local collaborator may have poisoned him under directions from the Jewish state.

Allegations of foul play have long surrounded Arafat’s demise. He died in a Paris hospital in November 2004, a month after being flown, seriously ill, from his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

French doctors who treated him in his final days said they could not establish the cause of death, and no autopsy was performed in deference to his widow’s request at the time, when Arafat died at 75.

Eight years is considered a limit to detect any traces of the deadly radioactive substance, according to the Swiss Institute of Radiation Physics.

Tirawi said Arafat’s body would be exhumed from its limestone mausoleum in Ramallah, away from the public or media presence, and separate samples will be taken by the French and Swiss forensic teams, as well as a Russian team of experts, who the Palestinians invited to help with the examination.

After the investigation “the body of leader Abu Ammar will be returned (reburied) in a military ceremony that is befitting him as a leader of the Palestinian people”, Tirawi said, using Arafat’s non de guerre.

Tirawi said results could take up to several months to be announced.
Jennifer Tress begins a presentation at George Mason University with a photograph of her 13-year-old self. She has written a book titled "You're Not Pretty Enough: You Can’t Make Up Real Life." (Katherine Frey/THE WASHINGTON POST)

Jennifer Tress can’t change who is on the cover of Cosmo.

She can’t stop college guys from sharing links from BroBible and Hot or Not.

But she can sit in your university’s common room and tell you how her husband cheated on her because, he said, she wasn’t “pretty enough.”

And she will tell you how years after their divorce his painful words led her to become what she calls “an accidental body-image activist.” Tress, a consultant for the federal government by day, is bringing her multimedia salons on self-esteem to 100 colleges over the next few months.

You’re not pretty enough. It’s not a nice thing to say, or hear, as Tress knows. It’s almost the reverse message of the soundtrack to soothe low self-esteem that college students are used to: One Direction crooning “You’re insecure / Don’t know what for / You’re turning heads when you walk through the door,” or Bruno Mars promising “You’re amazing / Just the way you are.”

To Tress, these fluffy anthems of self-acceptance are useful but not as powerful as confronting your shortcomings with honesty. That’s what she offers in her meetings with college students — a chance to talk about societal expectations of beauty, why they’re hurtful and also tough to ignore, and what to focus on instead.

Tress’s college tour coincides with the publication of her book of comic stories,“You’re Not Pretty Enough: You Can’t Make Up Real Life.” The book has a retro-looking photograph of her 13-year-old self on the cover, sporting alarmingly bushy eyebrows and a frizzy mullet.

Now 42, Tress regularly has her eyebrows waxed. She has thick, frizz-free brown hair that flows over her shoulders, clear skin and a pleasant smile. She’s, well, pretty.

“I have been 20, even 40 pounds heavier than this. I like to eat. I like to drink,” she offers while setting up for one of her salons last month at George Mason University in Arlington. “When people hear what I’m doing, they say, ‘I don’t know, Jen, you are pretty, so should you do this?’ ” She relates this anecdote with the breezy confidence of a woman who once had a bad spell, has come out of it and is using her newfound confidence to inspire others.

She says she didn’t see “a space that was trying to connect to this really common feeling. So I created one.”

She has also launched a video project on YouTube that she hopes will do for young people with body and beauty image issues what Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project does to help prevent suicide among LGBT youths.

In some ways, her quest can feel a little naive, even futile, in a world where beauty is an empirically advantageous trait. Good-looking people are paid better, have an easier time getting loans and even get milder prison sentences, according to recent studies by Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas labor economist and the father of pulchronomics, or the economic study of beauty. Hamermesh says that even though beauty bias undermines equal opportunity laws, there’s not much we can do to change that inherent discrimination.

But that reality is why Tress’s self-

esteem salons can feel like salve on a burn. The blistered skin may turn into a scar that will always be there, but the temporary relief is soothing nonetheless.

Young women today don’t feel bad just about the face looking back at them in the mirror but also about how they look on Instagram and how many likes their new Facebook profile picture gets.

If Generation X dreaded the awkward yearbook shot and the mortifying middle school “glamour shot,” today’s generation has a dozen more platforms to hate themselves on.

They’re celebrities in their own mini-worlds — or with their 340 followers — and their bad hair days or drunken dance moves are recorded online, possibly forever.

In a 2012 survey that Tress conducted with 450 area college students, most women reported that they wondered if they weren’t attractive enough anywhere from every three minutes to once a day.

“It’s not like you can rip up a Facebook photo, so we constantly have to be, like, ‘Please untag me! Please!’ ” shouted Lindsey Wahowiak, 28, who lives in Columbia Heights and came to the recent talk at George Mason. “I really have to wonder why I care. So what if my face looks fat in a few photos? Sometimes, my face looks like that.”

These are the types of comments that Tress talks through with the people who arrive at her salons. About 30 joined her on a recent summer evening in a conference room at George Mason, laughing nervously while entering the room marked with a “You’re not pretty enough” sign. Tress led the crowd through exercises to combat negative “self-talk” and encouraged the audience to realize how common feelings of self-loathing can be.

There are a few men who come to her sessions, some with eating disorders and others who never felt they were good-looking by mainstream standards.

“It’s not easy being a Korean American in Mississippi,” said Chuck Na, one of two men who attended the George Mason event. “I was bullied a lot and just felt like being Asian-looking was this weird thing.”

The “YNPE movement,” as Tress calls it, started after she got involved in the live storytelling scene in Washington. While she is now happily married to a D.C. police officer who helps her set up most of her salons, she knows the anecdote about her ex-husband is a story she has become known for, a humiliating crowd-pleaser. It resonated with people, and they would yell out at shows, “Hey, you’re the not-pretty-enough girl,” she said.

Soon, she created the Web site yourenotprettyenough.com, thinking it was an inside joke for people who knew the story.

But she noticed that the Web site started getting a startling amount of traffic from people Googling variations of the phrase. Around the same time, she heard that tweens and teenage girls were uploading videos of themselves to YouTube and asking the question, “Am I ugly?”

“It really hurt me,” she said of seeing these raw videos. “And it just sparked something in me to do something about it.” And the self-esteem salon was born.

Aside from leading classic confidence-building discussions, she gets the crowd pumped up by playing music — “So Fly,” by Elle Varner, is a favorite — and comedy videos.

But the bulk of the events involves Tress giving salon participants a few minutes of relief — and maybe some tools to use once they leave.

“It’s tough out there, and sometimes you have to prepare to be horrified,” said Elizabeth Trabert Piper, 22, a recent graduate of Loyola University who came to the gathering and had started a “Beauty and Women” group at her school. “But I think Tress gives us a chance to at least vent about it. And that’s a good start.”
This article is about Russian and Soviet chess composer. For Russian and Soviet footballer, see Aleksei Troitsky (footballer)

A. A. Troitsky

Alexey Alexeyevich Troitsky, or Alexei, Troitzky, or Troitzki (Russian: Алексе́й Алексе́евич Тро́ицкий) (March 14, 1866–August 1942) is considered to have been one of the greatest composers of chess endgame studies.[1] He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern art of composing chess studies (Seirawan 2003:91). Troitsky died of starvation during World War II at the siege of Leningrad, where his notes were destroyed.

One of his most famous works involves analyzing the endgame with two knights versus a pawn, see Troitsky line. John Nunn analyzed this endgame with an endgame tablebase and stated that "the analysis of Troitsky ... is astonishingly accurate" (Nunn 1995:265).

Compositions [ edit ]

This section uses algebraic notation to describe chess moves.

Troitsky was a prolific composer of endgame studies. Irving Chernev included nine of them in his book 200 Brilliant Endgames. The diagram shows one of them.

Troitsky, 1909 a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h White to move and win

The main line goes:

1. Nb6! Qe8 2. Nd7! Kc4 3. Qxc7+ Kb4 4. Qc5+ Kb3 5. Qc3+ Ka4 6. Qd4+ Ka3 7. Nc5 Qb8 8. Qa1+ Kb4 9. Na6+

and White wins (Chernev 1989:207–8).

Books [ edit ]

Troitzky, A. (1924), 500 Endspielstudien , Verlag Kagan Berlin

, Verlag Kagan Berlin Troitzky, A. A. (1968), 360 Brilliant and Instructive End Games , Dover Publications (reprint), ISBN 0-486-21959-3

Troitzky, A. (1992), Collection of Studies, Tschaturanga Ed. Olms, ISBN 3-283-00114-6. Reprinted in 2006 by Ishi Press, ISBN 0-923891-10-2. The 360 studies above plus a supplement on the theory of the endgame of two knights against pawns.

See also [ edit ]

Two knights endgame (contains Troitsky line)

Notes [ edit ]

^ Collection of Chess Studies, In the introduction to Sam Sloan writes "... Trotzky is considered to have been the greatest composer of chess endgame studies ever."

References [ edit ]

Troitzky Chess, invented by Paul Byway, a chess variant where checkmate by two knights can be forced.
Mewes is here to talk his new movie, the Clerks legacy, and the future of Jay and Silent Bob.

TMS: We typically never talk politics around here. But dude, who do you think you're gonna vote for this crazy election season?

JM: Honestly. I haven't been following it. I will actually vote however my wife tells me to vote. So that's gonna be what it is. I hadn't voted up until a couple years ago. Because I had a felony, I was told I was not allowed to vote. I just assumed they were right and I never did any type of research about it, so I just never voted because I thought I wasn't allowed to. My wife researched it and it was somewhat true. You can't vote while you're on probation. But after you're off, you can vote. So, I just started voting when Obama came around. So, I had never voted before and I was like 'Who am I? Am I democrat or am I Republican?'.

TMS: I think you're a Democrat.

JM: My wife gave me some input about what's what and this year it's the same thing. I'll listen to what she says. I guess I should know a little bit more and should be more supportive about that stuff but I think I'm playing with my baby too much and traveling. When I am home and I have downtime, I read comic books and play video games. Maybe I shouldn't be doing so much of that.

TMS: So, how is it being a parent? Seems crazy that Jay has a baby!!!

JM: I had no idea how much time a baby takes. I knew but I didn't know. I didn't know that when she started walking I'd be literally chasing her around the house because I'm so petrified that she's gonna fall and hit her head or something. So, I literally chase her around. She wants to go up her slide and down her slide in the living room. She wants to get on her scooter which she's just learning how to get on. It's a blast. I love it.

TMS: What's up with Vigilante Diaries? Where can people see it? And what do you want them to know about the movie?

JM: This Friday it'll be out on VOD, iTunes, and in some theaters. I'm very excited about it. It started out as a little passion project that my friends Christian and Paul made as a web series. We shot it and put it out there. Someone saw it and really dug it. They said 'Hey man, we wanna make this into a movie'. They gave Christian and Paul some money to make it into a movie. I think they did a great job. So here we have it. I went back and shot some more stuff for my character. They went somewhere like Belize or Brazil, somewhere awesome that I didn't get to go. But the production value turned out fantastic. I was super stoked.

TMS: I know it was a seven episode web series. Did they reshoot the entire thing or did they put the scenes they had already shot into the movie?

JM: They just shot and they intertwined the web stuff into it. I feel the way they did it worked very well. They used the web footage to keep the flow of the movie which I thought was genius. It wasn't like 'Hey look, this idea is genius, let's scrap the web series!' to start over. They shot the movie and pieced in the web series and it works really well.

TMS: I don't wanna spend too much time on the Kevin Smith movies because I'm sure it gets tiresome. But, how do you deal with fans that are incessantly quoting movie lines at you?

JM: I dig it, man. I'm flattered. Twenty years later people are still quoting stuff from the movies. And watching those movies. People are coming to our podcast that we do. It's been awesome. I never expected that Jay and Bob would be around twenty years later doing stuff.

TMS: Well, Clerks started it all, man. What can you tell us about your experience making that flick?

JM: After Clerks I went back to roofing. It's funny cause if you watch Clerks, Jay's not even on the poster. We shot the movie with a couple of friends. I didn't know anything about the world of trying to sell....'like hey, we're gonna bring this to film festivals, people watch it, they can buy it and put it in theaters'. I had no clue. I just thought we shot it. We watched it in the video store with like 15-20 of us. I was like 'Cool. That's awesome. That was fun. We made a movie.' Then all of a sudden Kevin was like 'Miramax bought it. It's gonna be in theaters. I got a deal where I'm gonna make a couple more movies and I'm gonna throw us into the next movie'. So again, I had no idea that I'd do more than one movie and that we'd still be doing it.

My point is that I don't mind if people drive by and are like 'Snootchie bootchies'. People come up and show me tattoos of Jay and Bob. I think it's fantastic. I don't get sick of it at all. It's flattering and awesome that people enjoy us.

TMS: He's getting ready to make this Mallrats tv series. We thought we were getting another movie but instead it's being turned into a show. Will you guys be returning for that?

JM: Oh totally! He definitely planned on us being in the movie. Hopefully all goes smooth and as planned with the tv show. I don't know how he's going to convert the storyline of the script. I'm curious. But I do not that Jay and Silent Bob will be in it. Then hopefully we get to shoot Moose Jaws, part of the True North trilogy. Kevin did Tusk and Yoga Hosers. The third part of that trilogy will be Moose Jaws, which is basically Jaws with a moose.

TMS: That's awesome!!! Comic book movies are huge right now. So, why not a Bluntman and Chronic movie?

JM: Believe me, I would love that. Honestly, it's Kevin's stuff. If Kevin is willing to make it or wants to make it, I would love to make it. I honestly would. I think if we were gonna make it, we'd need stunt guys running up the sides of a wall, roundhouse kicks, some really cool stuff. But you're right. It could totally work as a superhero/comedy. I'm down with it. If Kevin could write it, it would be amazing.

TMS: What's the best comedy of all time?

JM: House Party is one of my favorites. It's old school. And Do The Right Thing. Those are two that stand out to me and I watch a bunch. Do The Right Thing is something me and Kevin have been watching for twenty years and always quote between each other.

The Movie Sleuth thanks Jay for talking to us. It was definitely an experience!
Labour’s travails with the media are more deadly than it thinks

‘People don’t vote for a divided party; we’ve got to learn some lessons about how we handle the media.’

So said John McDonnell during a recent LSE lecture, and frankly amen to that. Five months in, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has formed a relationship of sorts with the press, but it remains an uneasy one.

Talk to lobby journalists and the complaint is not, as Corbyn’s loyal fans imagine, that the wrong guy won. It is that the leader’s inner circle do not understand what reporters want.

The rehiring last month of formerly disgraced spin doctor Damian McBride to advise Emily Thornberry will be welcomed by many hacks – if not by the colleagues McBride sometimes briefed against – on the grounds that at least he knows a story when he sees one.

Forget the comforting fiction that Corbyn would be polling over 40 per cent if only the wicked Murdoch press/BBC/mainstream media were not out to get him. Nothing good comes of blaming everyone but yourself for being unpopular, and, while a fierce sense of being oppressed by the establishment is hardwired into large parts of the left, there is something faintly surreal about claiming victimisation by the rightwing press even as it moves on to ripping the Tories apart over Europe.

The truth is that newspapers thrive commercially by reflecting, not driving, readers’ opinions of individual politicians, and often fall flat on their faces when attempting the latter. Neither Rupert Murdoch nor Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre ever rated David Cameron much – the Daily Mail twice backed Ken Clarke for leader, which did not end well – but so long as their readers liked him, he got a relatively easy ride. Watch them turn the minute that that is no longer the case.

That said, Corbynistas are right in their complaint that the rightwing press outguns the leftwing press in terms of newspaper market share. And, with the closure of both Independent print titles, the number of sympathetic outlets for Labour has further reduced.

Social media is an increasingly important news source for the JezWeCan generation but Twitter, the liberal left’s favourite meeting place, is shedding users. The BBC is watched and trusted by millions, and since it is statutorily obliged to be impartial, is crucial to levelling an otherwise uneven playing field. But it too faces a potentially existential threat from the licence fee review, a bigger picture seemingly lost on Corbynistas haranguing any BBC reporter deemed insufficiently respectful of their hero.

And all this fits into a worrying bigger picture for the groups and institutions Labour has traditionally worked alongside to amplify its voice. Charities’ political activity is being limited by legislation, trade unions undermined, public interest litigation constrained by legal aid cutbacks. The liberal left is basically learning how it felt to be a Conservative in the 1990s: marginalised, defensive, feeling the argument slip away from you. It is a dangerous time for the Labour party to retreat into self-pity.

New shadow culture secretary Maria Eagle is right to start by pledging to defend the BBC, and she has her reasons for making the full implementation of the Leveson inquiry a priority. But Corbyn should be extremely wary of expending goodwill he does not have on starting a war over media plurality. It was a huge issue in the 1990s, when Tony Blair rather ingloriously sidestepped it, but times have changed; the coming threat to the liberal media’s survival is not Murdoch but the internet, currently threatening to put everyone out of business.

Which leaves the awkward question of how to tackle the Sun. Team Corbyn must be sorely tempted just to wash their hands of it, given the paper’s aggressively personal attacks on him. But one in four Sun readers and one in six Daily Mail readers vote Labour; they cannot just be ignored, like embarrassing relatives.

Retreating to your safe space, whining that no other politician ever had it so tough – as if the Sun had not also flayed Neil Kinnock and portrayed William Hague as a dead parrot, as if Gordon Brown was not asked live on television if he was taking pills for depression – changes nothing.

Objecting to specific stories that overstep the mark can work; many Daily Mail readers quietly agreed with Ed Miliband that their paper’s attacks on his late father were spiteful. But objecting to the very existence of these papers is pointless when millions of Britons enjoy reading them. Better to try and understand why than recoil from the people you supposedly seek to represent.

For purists, the mere idea of running an effective press operation sounds like everything the new politics was trying to escape. But conveying your message effectively to the public is not a betrayal of Labour principles; it is just a means of expressing them. Ken Livingstone was as canny a manipulator of public opinion in his day as Peter Mandelson and it did not make him any less radical, just more successful than his ideological fellow travellers.

The coming challenge for Labour, meanwhile, is not getting a fair hearing so much as being heard at all. Already infighting in the parliamentary party is becoming accepted as the norm, barely worth reporting unless it is big. I remember a similar feeling in the Tory wilderness years, when lobby hacks simply got used to tripping over Tory rebels every time we moved. But if the rows soon faded from the front page, so did Tory policy ideas. It was obvious they were never going to win the election, so why waste space analysing things that realistically were not going to happen?

As the novelty of Corbyn fades Labour will face the same battle against irrelevance, the same uphill job to get in the papers. And the same creeping realisation (ask a Liberal Democrat, if you do not believe me) that the only thing worse than a daily mauling from the papers is the slow living death of just being ignored.

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Gaby Hinsliff is a columnist at the Guardian

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This article originally appeared in the International Women’s Day special edition guest-edited by broadcaster and former adviser to Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman, Ayesha Hazarika.

If you are a woman member of the Labour party, but not currently a member of Progress and would like a free copy of this edition please get in touch.

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What do you guys know about Nova? Nothing? Unless you love the New Warriors or the cosmic Marvel shenanigans, chances are you haven’t seen this guy cannonballing into the bad guys’ faces. Luckily I’ve got the lowdown on this garishly clad cosmonaut so sit back, relax, and enjoy the read.

Firstly, Nova is actually Richard Rider, an all ’round average American teen. In a story that eerily resembles Hal Jordan’s origins, Rider discovers Rhomann Dey, a dying alien and the last centurion of the Nova Corps of Xandar. Dey bequeaths the youngster with all the powers of the Nova Prime (flight, strength, energy blasts, etc.) and Rider starts beating the crap out of the thugs in New York City.

To make a long story a little shorter Xandar eventually recalls its centurions, the planet having been reformed, and then Nova starts punching cosmic thugs.

After a while Nova gets tired of the endless void and the endless punching (but not really), and after racking up some great rivalries and deadly enemies, he decides to go back to Earth, relinquishing his powers. He tries to live Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream but like a junky, he goes into Nova Force withdrawal until Night Thrasher reawakens the energy inside him and invites Rich to join the New Warriors. For a while he teams up with the Thrasher, Namora, Speedball, and the rest of the gang but it’s not long before he takes to the stars again as a member of Xandar’s finest. If he’d been stateside, things might have gone differently in Stamford on that fateful day that sparked the Civil War. Alas, it was not to be.

Rich decides not to pick sides in the war, especially since there are more pressing matters developing at the fringes of the universe. Eventually everything comes to a head when the Annihilation Wave rolls out from the Negative Zone. Nova and his United Front take on the Wave, legion upon legion of Annihilus’ insectile minions, until the psychotic conqueror taps into the power of Galactus. In an all too brief summation of way too many comics composing the Annihilation: Ronan the Accuser is bad ass, millions of worlds are destroyed, Thanos does some crazy shit, Drax kills people and then Thanos, Nova and his pals lose the war, and then in a final showdown with Annihilus, Rich rips his insides out through his freaking mouth!

From there he and the Worldmind, the source of the Nova Force, try to rebuild the Nova Corps. They recruit some new members, among them Rich’s younger brother Robbie, the Shi’ar Imperium shows up, massacres some more centurions, and then Nova deals with Cthulu-esque creatures that don’t belong in our dimension. Did I mention he takes on the Phalanx too? Richard Rider’s life = madness. Power-wise Nova has a lot going for him when he’s in possession of the Nova Force. His official moniker – Nova, the human rocket – spells out one of his chief abilities: he can blast through the air with the greatest of ease. He can fly, has super strength, agility, speed, and reflexes. He can survive in the void as long as he’s wearing his suit and the Xandarian Worldmind helps him open stargates and calculate complex plans of attack in seconds. He also has access to powerful energy blasts, can absorb energy directed at him, and has shields that function somewhat like Invisible Woman’s forcefields.

Honestly I think Nova looks absolutely solid. I love the fact that he has 3 different level 1 hypers that he can use in the air. He can OTG himself, has a serious beam hyper, projectiles, and some decent speed and power. Also he’s got that flight mode which could substantially increase his combo ability. His animations leave a lot to be desired and like Iron Fist, I’m a little disappointed in his overall presentation. I think he’ll be decent but…

If you haven’t seen the release videos yet check them out below!

Again ladies and gentleman, if you dig any of this stuff leave me a comment below and let me know what I could improve on.

Also don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for more comic book and fighting game goodness – Kingofbreaker

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06.07.2017

Schalke

Mit Oczipka einig – jetzt geht’s um die Ablöse

Foto: firo

Er gehörte zu den wenigen positiven Erscheinungen in einer ansonsten sehr mäßigen Schalker Saison:

Umso schmerzlicher wird man in Gelsenkirchen Sead Kolasinac in der bevorstehenden Spielzeit vermissen. Nun scheint der Fußball-Bundesligist allerdings Ersatz gefunden zu haben für den Publikumsliebling, der sich dem FC Arsenal angeschlossen hat.

Radio FFH bestätigte den Informationsstand dieser Zeitung vom Interesse der Königsblauen an Bastian Oczipka von Eintracht Frankfurt und geht sogar noch einen Schritt weiter: Laut dem Sender sind sich Schalke und der Abwehrmann des Pokalfinalisten über einen Wechsel einig, nur bei der Ablöse kommen die beiden Klubs noch auf keinen gemeinsamen Nenner.

Laut FFH-Informationen befinden sich Schalke und Frankfurt aber in Verhandlungen über die Entschädigung. Im Gespräch sind 3,5 Millionen Euro – das ist der Eintracht allerdings offenbar zu wenig. Denkbar, dass S04 also noch ein bisschen drauflegen muss für den Kolasinac-Ersatz. Allerdings dürfte Sportvorstand Christian Heidel auch nicht gewillt sein, einen zu hohen Preis zu bezahlen, denn: Der 28 Jahre alte Oczipka hat nur noch ein Jahr Vertrag bei den Hessen und wäre im nächsten Sommer gegebenenfalls für lau zu haben.

Die Anfang der Woche bekannt gewordenen Abwerbeversuche aus dem Ruhrgebiet haben bei Eintracht-Trainer Niko Kovac für Empörung gesorgt. Denn er schätzt die Qualitäten Oczipkas sehr – auf und neben dem Platz. Der in Bergisch Gladbach geborene Profi hat sich seit 2012 in 146 Bundesligaspielen für Frankfurt (zwei Tore, 22 Vorlagen) als konstant und extrem zuverlässig erwiesen. Er fiel nicht als Lautsprecher auf, wohl aber als wichtiges integratives Element innerhalb der Mannschaft. Noch vor zwei Wochen hat sich Eintracht-Sportvorstand Fredi Bobic zuversichtlich gezeigt, das 2018 auslaufende Arbeitspapier zu verlängern.
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Tennis fans worldwide were stunned when top player Venus Williams abruptly dropped out of the U.S. Open this week. The reason for her sudden withdrawal was a diagnosis of Sjögren's syndrome, a little-known disease with a wide range of symptoms. Here, a brief guide to this condition:

What is Sjögren's syndrome?

Sjögren's (pronounced show-grens) syndrome is an autoimmune disease — in other words, the body's immune defenses attack healthy tissue. The disease targets the tear ducts and salivary glands, causing dryness of the eyes and mouth. In advanced cases of the disease, it can cause debilitating joint pain, fatigue, and severe rheumatoid arthritis. Other symptoms include acid reflux, sleep disturbances, and numbness in the legs and feet.

Who is most at risk for Sjögren's syndrome?

The disease affects some four million Americans — 90 percent of whom are women. Symptoms usually appear when people are in their 40s. There's no known cause, though Sjögren's syndrome seems to have a genetic component, since it and other autoimmune diseases tend to run in families.

Will Williams return to professional tennis?

Hopefully. But there's no cure for Sjögren's. "How the disease will play out for Williams is unclear," says Margaret Steele in USA Today. "Symptoms can remain mild, worsen or, occasionally, go into remission." Patients usually manage the symptoms with drops for dry eyes, anti-inflammatory drugs, and immunosuppressive agents. But let's not worry too much, suggests Dr. Robert Spiera of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, as quoted by MedPage Today. "Most patients with the disorder live very productive lives."

Sources: MedPage Today, NY Times, USA Today, WebMD
Among the far-reaching ambitions of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s OneNYC plan, one proposal stood out in the transportation world on Wednesday: the study of a new subway line along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.

The concept is hardly new; it has been debated for at least a century, with no discernible results.

A 1910 article in The New York Times, under the headline “Transit Outlook Bright in Brooklyn,” said “a strong movement” was afoot to construct it. Another effort was made in 1928. More recently, an attempt in the 1970s failed after a City Council member from Brooklyn complained that the area did not have a large enough population to support the line.

Nonetheless, the de Blasio administration placed the concept back in the spotlight, suggesting that the area was a prime spot for expansion because it is one of the most crowded parts of the city without direct access to the subway.

The mayor’s request for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to examine bringing No. 3 and 4 train service down from the Eastern Parkway branch, through East Flatbush, came as a surprise to many.
(CNN) When it comes to shocking developments in the winding probe into President Donald Trump's campaign, the 2016 election, the Russians, hacking, allegations of collusion, and who-knows-what-else, the revelation on Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller had issued grand jury subpoenas somehow managed to feel like an anticlimax.

Mueller's particular concern in this case appears to be Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer, among others, at Trump Tower in June 2016. But the real news here has less to do with the particulars than the existence of the grand jury itself -- and where that leads.

This investigation, triggered by Moscow's meddling, is now expanding. Mueller is on the money trail, with an eye on Trump and his associates' financial ties to Russia . That is a potential rabbit hole that could lead to some very weird places, including those with no bearing or relation to the 2016 election.

So again, while the panel will in theory allow Mueller and his team to expedite their work and help bring about some kind of legally and politically satisfying conclusion to what is -- and who would disagree at this point? -- a generational fiasco, it could also prolong and deepen it.

A photograph showing former White House intern Monica Lewinsky meeting President Bill Clinton at a White House function submitted as evidence in documents by the Starr investigation and released by the House Judicary committee September 21, 1998.

History would vote for the latter.

Just ask former President Bill Clinton. Or the special prosecutor who led the probe that took us from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky's blue dress. Ken Starr, in an interview on CNN Friday, warned about the danger of Mueller ranging too far from his mandate -- remarks that, as CNN's Chris Cillizza noted, confirmed irony's untimely death . But years have gone by and there is, perhaps, an argument that Starr, as much as anyone, has a sense of precisely how these things can go haywire.

We are coming up now on the 19th anniversary of Clinton's big grand jury testimony, the first given by a sitting president into an inquiry focused on his own behavior. Nixon took his turn after leaving office . Clinton answered the Starr team's questions from the White House, his image and voice beamed out over closed-circuit television.

Given Trump's predicament, the subject matter that day underlines a certain ironic twist. Starr began his inquiry because of a controversy surrounding Clinton's finances and Whitewater investments. He ended up elbows deep in graphic inquiries about the President's sex life. Mueller, by contrast, was hired to probe the Trump campaign and Russia, and the potential for collusion or other kinds of skullduggery, but he could now feasibly get bogged down in Trump's financial transactions.

April 14, 1999: Independent counsel Ken Starr testified to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that the act should not be renewed as, in his view, it is a violation of the separation of powers. (JOYCE NALTCHAYAN/AFP/Getty Images)

exchange yielded what Starr would ultimately characterize as The August 1998exchange yielded what Starr would ultimately characterize as three lies -- or instances of perjury. First, when Clinton denied engaging in oral sex (answering the question of whether it was performed on him, "As I understood it, it was not, no."); next when Clinton suggested, "You are free to infer that my testimony is that I did not have sexual relations, as I understood this term to be defined"; and finally that he had implicitly misled prosecutors about when the relationship began.

But the interrogation is most famous for Clinton's lawyerly demurrals and deflections. None more so than his response when asked whether "the statement (made by his lawyer) that there was 'no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,' was an utterly false statement"?

Clinton replied (and this is just the first couple lines!): "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the -- if he -- if 'is' means is and never has been that is not -- that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement."

Whatever else it is, the exchange was a deeply damaging for the President, who had clearly moved on from trying to convince the public to salvaging is job and beating back a potential perjury charge.

If you're wondering now what this conversation had to do with Whitewater, the investigation into a bad land deal the Clinton's were involved in back in Arkansas, you would have been in good company in the late 1990s. If you're curious as to how the broader story is relevant today, simply consider how easily the initial focus of the probe switched gears.

And that, simply, comes from subjects giving false or potentially false or misleading statements under oath. The grand jury will speed up the process of requesting testimony and documentation.

If, in the case of the Trump campaign and its "satellites," conflicts begin to emerge, like in certain parties' recollections (and records) of that June 2016 meeting, the potential for prosecution could arise even if the meeting itself was legally above board.

But that's all, in all likelihood, a long way off.
If you are reading this at you computer you are most likely also aware of the fact that keyboards have a tendency to get quite dirty after a while. The slime-like Cyber Clean is a product that “blots out the muck from every crevice of your keyboards with a grime-slapping antibacterial action.”

While compressed-air sprays and tiny brushes will just move the dirt around in your keyboards, telephones and other electrical gadgets, this devilish ooze will splurge into every tiny corner, swallow up dead skin, hair and food and absorb it back into itself. Because it’s made from an unique antibacterial formula, the dirt is actually neutralised and sanitised while it’s inside the putty – up to 80% of all germs can be destroyed in this way.

You can get a jar of Cyber Clean from Firebox.com for £7.95 (about $14 USD).

Update June 2011: Cyber Clean Electronics Cleaning Putty is also available for $8.99 from ThinkGeek.

Related Deals: ThinkGeek Coupon
After reading my Assassin’s Creed 3 multiplayer abilities and crafting guide, it’s only natural you wanted more information on setting up your ability slots. After all, that stuff only makes up the active half of assassination… what about passive effects?

Today, we’re taking a look at the perks, streaks, and bonuses available in Assassin’s Creed 3 multiplayer. Find out what every option does, where it shines, and whether or not you should be using each passive boost available. Combined with our abilities advice, you’ll have an excellent head-start in virtual colonial manslaughter.

Assassin’s Creed 3 multiplayer perks explained

Perks are always-on effects you choose that give your persona an advantage in certain gameplay situations. Some are offensive in nature, letting you find and kill your targets more easily. Others are defensive, allowing you to hide and escape from would-be murderers. Yet other perks are fairly neutral, granting bonuses that influence the way you navigate or use your abilities.

For each ability set, you may have exactly two perks. For the most part, there’s no downside to filling them right away, so study the advice below and stock up on the passive boons that best resonate with your game mode and personal style.

Blender: 4/5

Ideal for the lonely-hearted, Blender ensures you’re never alone. Whenever your persona enters a blend group, if there are no duplicates already within, one will randomly transform into a clone of you. The animation is noticeable, but quick, and the effect lasts indefinitely. If you move to a new blend group, your magically-created copy will revert, and a fresh clone will spring up in your new group.

Blender is a strong consideration for Deathmatch, where there are no natural clones of your character. It allows you to constantly create diversions without expending an ability slot, something most perks can’t do. It’s also generally useful whenever you’re on defense, since generating additional twins will always decrease the odds that your pursuers will identify you correctly.

While Blender is powerful, it does have its downsides – this perk has no use on offense, and can actually be a detriment when you’re on the hunt. If you move into a blend group with or near your target, he or she is likely to notice the animation of a fresh copy being spawned. Your cover as a real player will immediately be blown, costing you an otherwise high-scoring kill.

Copycat: 1/5

Don’t have any good ideas for an ability set? Or perhaps you’re simply too starved for Abstergo points to buy one? No problem. Copycat will duplicate the skill loadout of anyone who kills you, giving you instant access to whatever overpowered abilities led to your most recent demise.

With rare exception, Copycat is terrible. Sure, having access to better skills might net you an advantage, but they might also throw off your gameplan. Upon your death, you may find the person who just off’d you is actually in possession of a fairly terrible bunch of abilities. Hell, they might be using the same stuff you are! To that effect, Copycat is a risky way to use one of your perk slots, since odds are it won’t yield anything useful. And, even if your killer does have something cool, how much will it really help you recover?

Hot Pursuit: 3/5

With Hot Pursuit active, winning chases is much easier. You’ll get a speed boost whenever you run after your target, giving him or her less time to escape your blade. Additionally, your Approach Meter will deplete more slowly, so even when you do have to run, you won’t lose as many points.

Hot Pursuit is a fairly strong option for offensive play, since it basically removes the option of winning chases from your intended murder victims. Additionally, the second, score-boosting effect will net you quite a few more points over the course of a match. It won’t make or break a hotly contested round, but extra experience is never a bad thing, right?

Of course, Hot Pursuit doesn’t have any uses for defense, as the speed boost only applies while you’re on the hunt. You can, in theory, attain the acceleration while simultaneously chasing your target and running from your pursuer, but this scenario is highly unlikely to occur.

Kill Buffer: 4/5

When you’ve got Kill Buffer, you take your streaks with you upon death. More specifically, Kill Buffer gives you a penalty of -1 instead of resetting your Kill Streak whenever you would normally lose it. So if you’ve built up 6 out of 7 kills/stuns needed to activate your Streak and suddenly get shot, you’ll respawn at 5 out of 7 (instead of the normal zero).

Kill Buffer is incredibly powerful when paired with high-cost Kill Streaks, making some that are typically impossible more attainable. Since building up six or more kills/stuns can often be a matter of luck, this perk preserves most of your momentum, making it more likely you’ll land a Mass Morph or Animus Hack. In general, Kill Buffer works better in frantic game modes like Assassinate and Deathmatch, where you’re more likely to be using a higher-requirement Kill Streak.

Note that Kill Buffer has limited utility on lower-numbered streaks. For instance, using it with the Silent +250 would be a waste, since it only requires three hits to trigger. If you died with either zero or one stuns, Kill Buffer would provide no benefit. You’d only get a bonus if you were assassinated with exactly two kills in your queue! By comparison, Kill Buffer would offer valuable momentum at anywhere between two and seven kills for the highest-requirement Kill Streak.

Overall Cooldowns: 5/5

Easily the most versatile perk in the game, Overall Cooldowns cuts down the delay of your activated abilities whenever you use them. As a result, you’ll get to drop more Smoke Bombs, fire more Throwing Knives, and create more Decoys than you’d normally be able to.

There is no time when Overall Cooldowns is bad, since having more frequent access to your skills is a powerful effect. Hell, Overall Cooldowns is actually better in AC3 than it was in Brotherhood or Revelations, since it now affects three abilities’ cooldowns (as opposed to two, previously).

It’s important to remember that since Overall Cooldowns applies a fixed reduction in cooldown time, its effect is more pronounced on abilities that already have a shorter cooldown. For example, a skill that goes from a 50 second cooldown to a 40 second one gets a 20% reduction. By contrast, an ability that goes from 100 seconds to 90 only sees a 10% drop in delay. Of course, if those ten seconds save your life even once, it’s probably worth it!

Resilience: 3/5

Making a return from Revelations, the Resilience perk cuts the duration of abilities used on you by about half. Tripwire Bombs, Wipe, Throwing Knives, and the like are all greatly weakened against you, making it more likely you’ll escape these traps with your life.

Resilience tends to offer the most value in Wanted and Deathmatch, where one-on-one fights typically boil down to “who hits whom first.” If your target throws a Smoke Bomb or launches knives at you from close range, Resilience won’t help… but if he or she flings abilities your way from across the room, odds are they’ll dissipate before you eat a big, fat, fist. Even in other situations, Resilience has its uses, like letting you recover from a Wipe in time to shoot a fleeing opponent.

The only real downside of Resilience is that the perk icon displays over your character’s head whenever it takes effect. So yes, you’ll recover from a Tripwire Bomb faster than normal, but your enemies will also be able to identify you in a crowd of NPCs more easily. In most cases this won’t be a factor, but be prepared to get ousted by wayward (reduced duration) Firecrackers every now and then.

Resistance: 4/5

The kid brother to Resilience, Resistance instead decreases the time you spend stunned whenever someone slaps you in the face. You’ll spend less time on the ground, shaking off your failures and getting on with life. New to AC3, Resistance also confers a reduction in dizzy time following a Contested Kill. Your character will recover from poorly executed executions more quickly, ready to face down the next foe.

Resistance is a very strong pick for offensive team modes and for Assassinate. In matches of Manhunt, for instance, spending less time recuperating from offensive blunders means you have more opportunities to get revenge on the guy who stunned/contested you. In fact, your reduced incapacitation may throw off defenders who didn’t expect you to get up so quickly. In Assassinate, Resistance allows you to plow forward from Contested Kills, which are common due to the mutual locking that so often occurs. The stun recovery isn’t as valuable here, but it might force other players to kill you sooner than they’d like, robbing them of valuable points.

Resistance, like Resilience, shows an icon when it takes effect, but unlike Resilience, this perk won’t really give your identity away. Everyone will know you’re a player whenever you get stunned or contested anyway, so your cover will only be blown when you yourself blow it.

Sentry: 2/5

If you don’t like letting anything slip out of your grasp, Sentry may be for you. This perk increases the time your synch-lock stays on a character that’s left your field of view. Other players will therefore have a tough time shaking you, giving you an advantage in any scenario where locking on for long periods of time is necessary.

Despite its power, Sentry is a relatively narrow boon. You’re not likely to need the extra time in most situations, and even when you do get extra information out of it, just knowing the exact location of an opponent may not be enough to matter in the long run. It’s a shame, because Sentry is a cool idea in theory – perhaps Ubisoft will find a way to buff it for Assassin’s Creed 3, Part 2.

There is one particular use for Sentry that should be mentioned: it makes you immune to “corner stuns.” You see, many savvy enemies will run around a corner, count out the default lock duration, and use its expiration as the perfect time to jump out and get a cheap stun on their unlocked pursuer. Since nobody expects you to use Sentry, it can catch would-be corner stunners completely off guard. It’s a very narrow advantage, but something to consider if you find everyone in your lobby is employing this trick.

Sixth Sense: 3/5

The opposite of Hot Pursuit, Sixth Sense makes evasive maneuvers easier to achieve thanks to both its bonuses. The first provides you with a visual and audio alert whenever a pursuer enters high profile off-screen. The second drastically slashes the time needed to win an escape once you’ve broken line of sight. In total, Sixth Sense allows you to better spot your killers, then get away from them more quickly once they’ve made their move.

Sixth Sense has a very specific use: finding and eluding pursuers. It has no value when you’re tracking down your own quarry, but it is a decent insurance option in Wanted. This perk will basically act as a security alarm, watching your back for killers you can’t see. And, if you’re forced to run, you can complete your escape and get back to pursuing your target faster than you’re used to. It’s not an incredibly powerful bonus, but it will definitely save your skin more often than almost any other perk.

Unstoppable: 2/5

In Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Basher sucked. In Revelations, Basher still sucked. Now, in AC3, Ubisoft has combined Basher with another perk to create Unstoppable… and it doesn’t totally suck! In addition to being able to charge straight through NPC crowds without losing steam, you’ll get the ability to reset closed Chase Breakers just by approaching them. Now, nothing can slow you down, except for Throwing Knives!

Unstoppable may not be amazing, but it does what it does well. If you’re hunting a particularly escape-happy defensive team in Manhunt, you might find they’re capable of eluding you with the help of chase breakers and dense, digital crowds. Unstoppable, combined with Hot Pursuit, can give you a ridiculous advantage whenever your victims decide to run. You’ll outspeed them, outscore them, and outright trample over anything they try to put in your way.

Despite all these positive comments, Unstoppable is still a very narrow perk, hence the score. Most gameplay doesn’t involve winning chases, and when it does, the points yielded aren’t usually worth the effort. Ironically, Unstoppable would have been better in Assassin’s Creed 3 had Ubisoft not given players immunity to chase breakers closed by teammates. With this helpful addition, Unstoppable lost a lot of potential value. As such, it’s a niche perk you probably won’t often use.

Kill Streaks explained

Just like in Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed 3 multiplayer rewards players who are able to string together a series of undisturbed kills and/or stuns. Players can opt for one Kill Streak per loadout, which grants either a score bonus or a special effect once the requisite number of violent acts have been performed.

If a player is killed, stunned, or breaks their streak in another way (performs a non-silent kill while using a Silent Kill Streak), the counter goes back to zero. For this reason, everyone should pick Kill Streaks they can reliably attain – a high-value streak isn’t better than a low value one if you can’t get enough kills to activate it!

Streak +250 (5 kills/3 silent), Streak +550 (7 kills/5 silent)

Extremely straightforward, the player is awarded +250 or +550 points for performing five or seven kills/stuns in a row. If you opt for the silent version of either Kill Streak, the numerical requirements drop by two. In exchange, you’ll have to perform Silent or Incognito kills to retain your streak progress, which is obviously harder.

Don’t get greedy if you’re not sure you can pull off the Streak +550. Getting five or seven kills/stuns in a row isn’t easy, not even with Kill Buffer, so consider Streak +250 a perfectly viable option. You’ll trigger it more reliably, and you’ll hate yourself a lot less when you mess up and lose your momentum.

As for deciding between regular are silent versions, try to avoid Silent except for Deathmatch or defensive rounds of team games. In Deathmatch, the small arena size means your targets can’t start chases, so it’s more likely you can score Silent or better kills. On defense, you’ll only be getting stuns (no kills), so the silent restriction doesn’t even matter. You might as well take the lower stun requirements and consider it a bonus for playing pacifist a little while.

Mass Morph (6 kills/4 silent)

When activated, 15 nearby personas will suddenly become your #1 fans, insofar as they’ll decide to completely copy your look. Suddenly, your area of the map is swimming with duplicates, making it significantly harder for opponents to sniff you out of the crowd.

For most game modes, Mass Morph sucks. In Wanted, Assassinate, Domination, etc., you’re moving around the map too much to gain major value from a local pocket of lookalikes. And, half the time, you’ll be on the hunt, meaning a large blend crowd doesn’t really even help you.

Mass Morph is basically only useful in Deathmatch and in some defensive team modes. In Deathmatch, the ability to create copies at all (since they don’t spawn naturally) is powerful, and can often confuse enemies enough to net you free stuns. In Domination or Manhunt, having an army of clones standing around can intimidate pursuers, though it’s unlikely the advantage you gain will outweigh the benefits of using another Kill Streak instead.

Animus Hack (8 kills/6 silent)

The Animus Hack turns you into a sort of cyber god, granting you 30 seconds of indiscriminate killing power. Once this nasty, high-end streak is activated, you’ll be able to kill any character at any range on the map. It doesn’t matter if they’re your target, your pursuer, or a hapless neutral victim… you’ll be able to extinguish them with the press of a button, instantly. Additionally, you’ll see an increasing score the more bodies you pile up, with each kill worth more than the last. It’s not unheard of to earn a few thousand points at the end of a well-timed Animus Hack!

While incredibly powerful, Animus Hack is basically restricted to Deathmatch. This mode’s close quarters means it’s easy to target every player on the map, and the fact that there are no duplicate personas means you can identify prime targets quickly and without hesitation. In other game modes, you’re unlikely to find yourself near lots of players when your Animus Hack gets triggered, meaning you’ll net few points, if any. Additionally, Animus Hack has less value any time your adversaries can simply avoid the section of the map you’ve got locked down.

Loss Bonuses

Loss Bonuses activate when you’re doing your worst, typically after you’ve died or lost your contract several times in a row. As such, it’s important to think of Loss Bonuses as a comeback tool – something that will help you make up for your multitude of mistakes in a row. Unlike in previous versions of Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, all Loss Bonuses now end on either a kill or a stun. As such, the power of several defensively-minded bonuses has dropped considerably, as they cannot be used to fuel stuns.

Overall, most Loss Bonuses are actually quite bad. As you’ll see below, only two or three even worth your consideration.

Ability Switch: 1/5

Once activated, Ability Switch allows you to change your ability set whenever you lose a new contract. In other words, it gives you the opportunity to compensate for your (clearly) failing strategy. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to magically turn the match around for you in most circumstances (same with the Copycat perk). Sure, it could be marginally useful in Manhunt if you accidentally picked your “offense” loadout when you meant to pick “defense,” but that’s a rare occasion.

More importantly, you can switch ability sets at any time for 60 Abstergo credits anyway! On Xbox 360, you simply hold the Back button and press A. While burning pretend money to get this option kind of sucks, it means you won’t have to use up your Loss Bonus slot to have this flexibility. Not only that, the pay-to-change option can be done whenever you want, making it significantly more convenient than relying on misfortune to strike.

Boost Cooldowns: 3/5

One of the best Loss Bonuses from ACB and ACR, Boost Cooldowns resets your abilities and greatly shortens their timer delays for as long as it’s activated. If you’re falling behind in score, getting your Throwing Knives and Poison reset can drastically improve your odds of recovering. In Brotherhood and Revelations, this could also be used to turbo charge your Smoke Bomb, Mute, Charge, and other defensive abilities to pump out stuns.

In Assassin’s Creed 3, however, this power has taken a hit, since stuns now end the effect. As such, it can still be used to generate insane ability frequency, but you’ll have to get inventive. Running Bodyguard, Decoy, Morph, or Disguise could (for instance) give you nearly infinite sources of Lures and Escapes. That’s not as useful as infinite stuns, but it’s still significantly more worthwhile than most other Loss Bonus choices.

Minor Hack: 2/5

With Minor Hack, you can kill your contracted target at any distance. Like Animus Hack, you’ll gain an infinite-range assassination prompt that strikes your victim down with a crack of digital thunder. Unlike Animus Hack, you can’t use this prompt to defeat your pursuers, and you won’t get a streak of kills that piles up points.

While Minor Hack can be useful for eliminating roof runners or other unsavory targets, it’s only for the bare minimum score and won’t help you recover from a game that’s slowly getting away from you. On top of that, this bonus’ narrow, offensive scope means it’s useless in any scenario where being killed is your main problem, not eliminating your target(s).

Revelation: 3/5

When Revelation activates, you’ll gain the supernatural power to see exactly who all your pursuers are. Would-be killers are highlighted with a red marker, making it incredibly easy to stun or avoid them. As with Boost Cooldowns, this bonus is less powerful in AC3 than previously, since stunning someone will end your psychic abilities. That said, it’s easily the best defense-focused option, since it becomes impossible for your pursuers to sneak up on you. In modes like Wanted, this means you’ll be protected from getting picked off at inopportune times. It also means you can plan and win chases significantly more successfully.

Scavenger: 1/5

Haven’t gotten a kill in a while? Scavenger tries to make up for it by increasing the bonus for Ground Finishes from +50 to +200. So when you’re running around and getting table scraps, they’re at least a little more tasty than normal.

Of course, the situation where you’re piling up Ground Finishes is not a common one, and even then, banking on them for points isn’t exactly a winning strategy. There are a few situations where accumulating a large number of 200-point stomps could win the game, but in most scenarios, you’d be better off just getting 200+ point kills instead.

Score x2: 5/5

Easily the best overall Loss Bonus, Score x2 doubles the value of your next kill. Yes, doubles. When you think about it, it’s easy to understand why this bonus is so good: it activates when you’re falling behind (like other bonuses) and gives you the means to climb back to the top. With a well-timed Incognito, Poison, Hidden kill, you can easily rake up 1600, 2000, or more points (with insane luck, potentially 3k!), which is usually enough to at least give you a chance at taking the lead.

Now that most other Loss Bonuses have taken a big hit, Score x2 is far and away the best choice for almost every situation. Of course, it’s useless if you’re on defense in Manhunt, or if you’re on the capping side of Domination and Artifact Assault. But nothing says “comeback kid” in Deathmatch, Wanted, or Assassinate like a 2400 point assassination.

Shadow Approach: 2/5

With Shadow Approach, you’ll go from Discreet to Incognito more quickly, filling your approach meter at an enhanced rate once you’ve found your target. As a result, you’ll be less likely to accidentally trigger a chase. And, once you do kill your opponent, you’ll get a higher score than you’d normally earn.

Sadly, Shadow Approach is still fairly weak. It does offer a score boost, which is more than most Loss Bonuses give you, but in 90% of situations, you’d get more points by using Score x2. In the instanced where Shadow Approach would be more beneficial than the #1 point pushing option, you’re chasing your quarry. That’s not exactly ideal, and hell, I’d rather have Minor Hack for those cases anyway. In other words, Shadow Approach is outshone by other, more viable picks.

Vision: 1/5

The opposite of Revelation, Vision shows you exactly where your targets are, even if they’re currently on the other side of a building. You’ll get an x-ray view of anyone you’re eligible to kill, making it impossible for them to hide.

Of course, there are already tons of active abilities that do pretty much the same thing: Firecrackers, Money Bomb, Wipe and Morph. As such, Vision is pretty much a waste unless you’re really, really bad at finding and identifying targets. Even then, you’re probably also bad at actually killing them (hey, you did just trigger a Loss Bonus after all!), so good luck approaching them with eating a stun or Contested Kill.

There just simply isn’t a situation where using Vision is a good idea. Rely on your gaming skills and in-game abilities to identify your targets instead, and reserve your Loss Bonus slot for something that makes your kill more rewarding upon execution (hint: Score x2).
Jürgen Klopp can't wait for his latest taste of the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United having whetted his appetite with last season's Europa League meetings between the sides.

The Reds are back at Anfield on Monday evening for a hotly anticipated Premier League clash with their foes from the other end of the East Lancs Road.

Klopp will be hoping for a repeat of his team's European success against United last term, when a 2-0 win on Merseyside and 1-1 draw at Old Trafford saw LFC through to the quarter-finals.

And he expects a typically raucous atmosphere when Jose Mourinho's team are welcomed again.

“We are really looking forward to what will be a fantastic game at Anfield,” he told the Liverpool Echo, speaking at event in support of the 'Seeing is Believing' campaign.

“Those Europa League games were really nice. Both games were intense and competitive.

“We were better in the first game at Anfield. We had a fantastic atmosphere and the players were inspired by that.

“It was my first time at Old Trafford for the second leg. Maybe people don’t like to hear it, but there was actually quite a good atmosphere there too!

“It changed the game a little bit and it was real proof of what an atmosphere can do. United were on top but we killed that atmosphere with Philippe’s wonderful goal in the 45th minute. From then on it wasn’t that difficult any more.

“It’s a perfect moment for ‘Seeing is Believing’ because this game will have to be seen for people to believe what will happen.”

LFCTV GO: Relive Philippe Coutinho's performance at Old Trafford

After a good start to 2016-17, Liverpool are five places and as many points better off than they were at this point last season in the Premier League.

Reflecting on his team's development over the last 12 months, the boss added: “It’s been a busy, intense year.

“There have been a few ups and a few downs but always with a really optimistic view about the future. I think that’s what we still have.

“It’s a job we have to do. We all enjoy working together and it’s much better when you enjoy it.

“From my side, it feels like a short year! It’s gone like this (clicks fingers). Hopefully I will have many more years here.

“I’ve never thought about the speed or the tempo of our progress, I only knew that we had to get better – that’s how life is.

“Even when you are good, you need to get better because the teams around you all get better too. To stay in the race, development is everything.”
“Climate change” is a bland generic label that can mean anything, and therefore means nothing

A Short Primer on the Global Warming Scam

As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. — Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States The Paris Climate Treaty has nothing to do with “climate” and everything possible to do with economics, globalism and the controlled redistribution of economic wealth as constructed through decades of advanced policies of multinational financial interests.

Posted by Sundance “Multinational Banks and Corporations Trigger Immediate Angst Over Trump Withdrawal From Paris Treaty” Caution: If you are a global warming enthusiast then I strongly advise you to stop reading, grab a cup of hot cocoa, and retreat to your nearest safe-space immediately. Otherwise you will get triggered, guaranteed.

With that out of the way, let me get into the meat of this article, which is, as the title suggests, a short lesson on a few of the more egregious lies connected with the global warming scam. Just a day spent on the Internet doing due diligence on this topic with an open mind will convince anyone with half a brain that global warming is a criminal shakedown of historic proportions. Rather than go at the topic of global warming with hammer and tongs I will just briefly visit a few of its more popular talking points – simply to steer any interested readers in a profitable direction. The Science is Settled Balderdash! (My inner editor/censor instantly popped to attention at my initial, sadly deleted, remark and insisted on a quick fix). The science (and “science”) surrounding global warming, or climate change, or whatever the term du jour is, is NOT settled – it is, in fact, far from being settled. This is as good a place as any to point out that the word science does not possess the hard and fast definition that most of us think it does. There is a whole branch of philosophy that deals with just that question – what science is, and what it is not. This is a topic that is apt to induce a bout of narcolepsy in a number of my readers, so I will hurry on and wrap this segment up. Let me just say that if we accept a very general definition of science – that it is a search for what is true and factual in the physical realm – then most of the “science” behind global warming is no science at all. It is agenda-driven pseudo-science—not true open-minded scientific research so much as an attempt to funnel findings down a profitable (and prestigious) channel to a predetermined end.

Is climate change a real phenomenon? Of course. No sensible person would argue otherwise. But is it primarily caused by humanity, or are other factors more to blame, such as electromagnetic solar activity and radiation, volcanic eruptions, oceans, and so forth? After studying some of the various deceitful ploys used by global warming “scientists” over the years, I simply no longer trust their word about anything. Which is a shame, because I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, of the scientists promoting man-made climate change are sincerely concerned about the earth. That doesn’t mean that they are right though, and it does not excuse the many lies used to force-feed us global warming. Carbon Dioxide is a Dangerous Pollutant Balderdash again! NEWS FLASH: The earth has experienced much higher carbon dioxide levels in the past—long before any “Industrial Revolution.” The idea that increased CO2 levels are something new, or inextricably linked to fossil fuels alone is simply rubbish. Periodically, carbon dioxide levels have been considerably higher throughout earth’s long history, and humanity didn’t have a darn thing to do with it. And what’s more, the increased CO2 levels did not ruin the planet. In fact, plant life flourishes under increased CO2 levels. If carbon dioxide is truly a dangerous pollutant, then the earth would have suffered grievously eons ago.

Climate Change “Climate change” is a bland generic label that can mean anything, and therefore means nothing. Does weather change? Of course it does—yesterday it was raining and today it’s sunny. What’s your point? The point, such as it is, is to have a term so amorphous that it can cover any eventuality. If the climate gets warmer, that’s climate change; if it gets colder, that’s climate change too. All bases covered—it’s a wonderful thing, if you’re into spineless duplicity. I recall when the term “climate change” first gained wide popularity, around the year 2012 or so. Until then all we had heard about was “global warming” or AGW (Anthropocentric Global Warming). Then it got colder, and when those pesky temperatures started dropping, the AGW “scientists” put on their thinking caps and explained to us how things were getting colder because they were getting hotter. The globalist faithful accepted this dubious proposition at face value, but the rest of us scratched our heads and thought “Hmm, I don’t think that makes sense actually.” So, going back to the drawing board the “scientists” came up with the generic, one-size-fits-all, term “climate change.” “Just you try denying that one!” Don’t buy into their hogwash though—it’s just the same old crapola in a new container, that’s all.

Climate Change Deniers Are Guilty of Hate Speech First of all, as I point out above, no one is saying that the weather doesn’t change. I’ll gladly swear on a stack of Bibles that, yes, the weather does indeed change from time to time. I noticed that all on my own some years back. What is in question, however, is the hypothesis that climate change is primarily caused by carbon dioxide, fossil fuels, and/or humanity as a whole. Also, there is no doubt that climate change “science” has put its thumb on the scale in order to promote its one-sided and debatable claims. That is not hate speech. It is simply what common sense, logic, and due diligence have shown me to be the truth. Unfortunately, the truth is all too often obscured and twisted, when it is not being ignored or hidden, by the more nefarious proponents of AGW. If I were to engage in hate speech you would know it, trust me. You would have no doubt whatsoever about where I was coming from. The truth is only “hate speech” to those who hate the truth—a simple meme, but nonetheless true. Conclusion I will conclude by saying that I thank God every day that we have a president who cares more about what is good for the United States and its citizens then catering to political correctness and kissing globalist butt. May God continue to guide, bless, and protect President Trump, his family, and his aides.

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Born June 4, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. Worked as a commercial diver in the waters off of Scotland, India, and the United States. Worked overseas in the Merchant Marines. While attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student in 1998 was presented with the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award,” 1st place undergraduate division. (The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with money she won from successfully suing a national newspaper for libel). Awarded US Army, US Navy, South African, and Russian jump wings. Graduate of NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School, 1970). Member of Mensa, China Post #1, and lifetime member of the NRA and UDT/SEAL Association.

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New USC survey finds region’s escalating home prices hindering senior-level recruitment

LOS ANGELES (April 11, 2017)– Housing costs are deterring top-talent from entering the Los Angeles job market, and leading to higher costs in recruiting and retaining employees, according to a new survey released today by Raphael Bostic, a USC Price School of Public Policy Professor and the newly appointed head of the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Bostic led a team of USC researchers in surveying major L.A. employers accounting for nearly 200,000 jobs in key sectors including utilities, healthcare, education, government, engineering and finance. The resulting report, The Affordable Housing Crisis in Los Angeles: An Employer Perspective, released in partnership with the Los Angeles Business Council, focuses on how the high cost of housing in the region has affected employers and puts forth key recommendations.

“This study shows that high housing costs are burdening our leading employers, either by having to develop special hiring packages, or subsidizing transportation and relocation costs,” said Bostic. “Though we have yet to see a critical mass of businesses priced out of the region, this is an area of concern. There’s ample evidence to show that the time is now to implement strategies to reduce housing costs.”

Nearly 60% of employers surveyed cite the region’s high cost of living as impacting employee retention, and 75% cite housing costs specifically as an area of concern. The impact of high housing costs is most apparent when employers try to recruit top talent: 64% of employers report that they include cost of living when negotiating hiring packages for high-level employees.

“It’s concerning that high housing costs could lead to Los Angeles losing its competitive edge in recruiting top talent. That would be devastating to our economy,” said Mary Leslie, president of LABC. “This survey underscores the need to think outside the box and tackle our city’s high cost of living problem.”

To address the strain on L.A.’s limited housing supply, the report recommends examining successful employer-sponsored housing projects, such as the LAUSD affordable housing apartments completed in 2016. It also makes a strong case for investing in higher-density housing at a range of prices near key transit centers. Other recommendations include: reducing parking requirements for new development, identifying single-story buildings that could be modified to support housing, exploring innovative transportation solutions, and encouraging employers to engage with community and government groups around housing construction projects that could benefit their workers.

“This report provides compelling evidence for the need of well-designed, affordable homes connected to quality transportation, education and jobs,” said Jacqueline Waggoner, Vice President and Southern California market leader of Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. “The burden of high housing costs not only impacts our quality of life, it threatens our economic foundation. With affordably-priced homes, employers will have a greater ability to recruit senior employees and retain current employees at all levels. ”

The problem is not unique to Los Angeles— nearly every metropolitan area is burdened by high housing costs. According to the report, nationwide, over 10 million households pay more than half their income in housing costs.

Besides impacting employers’ bottom lines, housing costs negatively affect employee’s satisfaction and productivity. Pushed out of housing markets closer to jobs, workers have to undergo long and taxing commutes. Nearly every employer surveyed reported that more than 25% of their employees spent more than 90 minutes getting to and from work.

“This is further evidence that L.A.’s housing crisis is dire, and provides more reasons for business, civic, and community groups to work together to tackle this serious problem,” said Erin Rank, President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles.

While the negative impact of high housing costs on lower and middle-income families has been long studied, this report is one of the first to look at housing costs from an employer perspective.

“This report should be seen as a call to action,” said Ann Sewill, Vice President, Housing and Economic Opportunity, of California Community Foundation. “We need to do all that we can to increase people’s access to affordable housing by incentivizing new affordable housing and preserving existing stock.”

The Los Angeles Business Council and USC conducted the study in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, California Community Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and Habitat for Humanity. The report is a follow-up to LABC’s influential Los Angeles Employer Assisted Housing Handbook released in 2009.

About the LABC Institute

The LABC Institute is a forward-thinking research and education organization dedicated to strengthening the sustainable economy of California, particularly the Southern California region. Founded in 2010, the LABC Institute provides a bridge between the business, government, environmental, labor and nonprofit communities of Southern California to develop policies and programs that promote investment, jobs and business development. We are the research and education arm of the Los Angeles Business Council, one of the most respected business advocacy organizations in Southern California.
Liver regeneration is the process by which the liver is able to replace lost liver tissue from growth from the remaining tissue. The liver is the only visceral organ that possesses the capacity to regenerate.[1][2] The liver can regenerate after either surgical removal or after chemical injury.[3] It is known that as little as 25% of the original liver mass can regenerate back to its full size.[2][4] The process of regeneration in mammals is mainly compensatory growth because only the mass of the liver is replaced, not the shape.[5] However, in lower species such as fish, both liver size and shape can be replaced.[6]

Mechanism [ edit ]

Liver regeneration involves replication of the liver cells, mainly hepatocytes, followed by other cells such as biliary epithelial cells and sinusoidal endothelial cells. Once cell proliferation is completed, the newly divided cells undergo restructuring, angiogenesis and reformation of extracellular matrix to complete the regeneration process.[2] In most cases, liver function is only partially affected during liver regeneration. Whereas certain specialized functions such as drug metabolism decrease, many other primary functions such as albumin and bile production are not substantially affected.[1]

Liver regeneration is a highly controlled process regulated by a complex network on highly redundant signals. Several signaling pathways are known to stimulate regeneration in the liver including cytokines, growth factors, hormones, and nuclear receptors.[1] Discovered and studying in vivo some natural multicomponent liver regeneration substances – hepatic stimulator substance,[7] hepatic regeneration set,[8] augmenter of liver regeneration.[9]

Function [ edit ]

The ability for the liver to regenerate is central to liver homeostasis. Because the liver is the main site of drug detoxification, it is exposed to many chemicals in the body which may potentially induce cell death and injury. The liver can regenerate damaged tissue rapidly thereby preventing its own failure. However, a predictor of the true speed of liver regeneration depends on whether Interleukin 6 has overexpression[10]. Liver regeneration is also critical for patients of liver diseases where the partial removal of the liver due to fibrosis or tumor is a common therapy that utilizes the ability of the remaining liver to generate back.[citation needed]

Experimental models [ edit ]

Two main types of models are used to study liver regeneration, including surgical removal, also referred to as partial hepatectomy (PHX), and chemical-induced liver damage. Whereas the mechanisms and kinetics of liver regeneration in these two models are different, many of the same signaling pathways stimulate liver regeneration in both pathways.[11]

References [ edit ]
Bisexuality is the tendency to be sexually attracted to both men and women. To some, this may sound like a superpower doubling one's romantic options (and odds). But in real life, bisexuality can be an awkward to have, creating a challenge truly fitting in with either the “straight" or LGBT communities.

But most important, bisexuality tends to be quite misunderstood.

Myths and stereotypes about bisexuality abound, some even contradicting one another. Straight and LGBT people alike can hold such stereotypes, compounding the difficulties bisexual people can have fitting in. Luckily, an increasing number of researchers have been producing research improving our of bisexuality.

Here are three examples of how science has worked to combat misconceptions about bisexuality:

Myth 1: "There's no such thing as bisexuality."

This is especially laughable. How can you tell a group of individuals that they don’t exist? But the idea that all people have to be either straight or gay is pervasive and persistent, especially when it comes to men. Frustratingly, even within the most LGBT-friendly circles, you encounter the idea that “there’s no such thing as a bisexual man.”

Researchers have quite clearly laid this myth to rest with a study recently published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior(1). Researchers recruited straight, gay, and bisexual men, and exposed them to a variety of erotic film clips. Not only were participants asked to rate their subjective feelings of arousal in response to the clips, they were also connected to physiological equipment that measured changes in genital arousal. As would be expected, heterosexual men responded with much more subjective and genital arousal to films containing women rather than men, and vice versa for gay men. However, bisexual men were aroused relatively similarly by videos of both men and women. They were also more aroused by bisexual clips—for example, two men and one woman—than were the other two groups. Importantly, these differences were in both their reported arousal and the objective measurement of their genital arousal. It is clear from this study that these individuals were not “pretending” to be bisexual.

Myth 2: "Bisexuality is just a phase."

With this myth, bisexuality is represented as a state of experimentation or confusion—stereotypically experienced during the college years—that occurs before a person settles on their “true” identity.

Lisa Diamond has conducted some very sophisticated work on this topic, in which she examined the sexual identities of women over long periods of time. In a paper published in Developmental Psychology(2), she reports on a sample of women she followed over a period of ten years. Her results clearly showed that bisexuality was not a transitional period: Very few women who had identified as bisexual in changed their identity to either straight or lesbian by the end of the study—only 8% of that group did so. Rather, bisexual women were consistently sexually fluid over time, maintaining attractions to both genders, to varying degrees, over the course of a decade.

Myth 3: "Bisexual people can’t be faithful to their partners."

This myth—arguably the most pernicious one—stems from the assumption that one partner can not fully satisfy a person who is attracted to both genders. Sooner or later, other people assume, they’ll yearn for someone of the that their partner is not. In studies, people tend to perceive bisexual individuals as being more likely to partners than heterosexual, gay, or lesbian individuals(3).

In reality, a great many bisexual individuals have happily monogamous ; for example, by the end of Diamond’s 10-year study(2), 89% of bisexual women were in monogamous, long-term relationships. Further, research suggests that bisexual individuals who do desire multiple sexual partners may typically achieve this goal by negotiating open relationships with their partners, not by sneaking around behind their partners’ backs(4).

I could find no research supporting the idea that bisexuals are any less faithful, or less honest, with their partners than people of other sexual orientations.

Insights on identity

The growing field of research on bisexuality is promising, in that it counteracts many myths and misconceptions while also providing some interesting insights into in general. Unlike pop culture sources, these scientific studies suggest that bisexuality is a relatively stable, consistent sexual identity. We still need more research to better understand the ways in which bisexuality is similar to monosexual (heterosexual, gay, lesbian) identities, as well as the ways in which it might be unique.

Source: Aliaksei Smalenski/Shutterstock

Follow Samantha on Twitter or visit her website.

This article was originally written for Science of Relationships: a website about the psychology of relationships that is written by active researchers and professors in the field.

1. Rosenthal, A. M., Sylvia, D., Safron, A., & Bailey, J. M. (2012). The male bisexuality debate revisited: Some bisexual men have bisexual arousal patterns. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41, 35-147.

2. Diamond, L. M. (2008). Female bisexuality from adolescence to adulthood: Results from a 10-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 44, 5-14.

3. Spalding, L. R., & Peplau, L. A. (1997). The unfaithful lover: heterosexuals’ perceptions of bisexuals and their relationships. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 611-625.

4. McLean, K. (2004). Negotiating (non) monogamy: Bisexuality and intimate relationships. Journal of Bisexuality, 4, 83-97.
VIDEO=>CBS News Reporter Major Garrett Has On Air Tantrum Over Trump ‘Birther’ Press Event

CBS News reporter Major Garrett went ballistic following Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s press event Friday at the new Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. The event featured Medal of Honor recipients and other veterans endorsing Trump and was also billed as where Trump would make a major announcement on the President Barack Obama ‘birther’ controversy.

Major Garrett reports from Trump press event, image via screen grab.

At the end of the half-hour event following the endorsements by the veterans, Trump made a brief statement that he believes Obama was born in the U.S. and then left the podium without taking questions from the press.

This caused the assembled reporters to go into a rage. One example is Major Garrett, who seethed with anger during his live stand-up report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieaZLdqGdhw

Garrett’s fellow reporters stood on chairs and screamed at Trump for five minutes following the press event.

In protest of Trump’s treatment of the press, Washington bureau chiefs voted to delete news video taken during Trump’s guided tour of the new Trump hotel.
An iPhone app that teaches you proper cunnilingus technique – A new app called Lick This offers to “train your tongue” in the art of oral sex because “practice makes pleasure.” However, to use the app, you have to be willing to lick your phone screen. If you're concerned about germs (which wouldn't be unreasonable, because our phones are covered in them), I guess you could wrap your phone in Saran wrap first. If you’ve always wanted to get past second base with Siri, this app may be your dream come true.

The most realistic sex dolls money can buy – Forget blow-up dolls, a company called Sinthetics is now offering “life size, fully articulated, anatomically correct” sex dolls (or “manikins” as the company calls them). These are probably the most life-like sex dolls money can buy (check out some sample images on the Sinthetics website), and they can be completely customized to your personal likes and (if applicable) fetishes. Breasts and penises come in all sizes, you can say where you want hair and where you don’t, and you can even give your new friend things like tattoos, piercings, and tan lines. Oh, and elf ears and monster eyes are options too. Manikins start at $5,500, but if you want a completely custom body or head, expect to spend quite a bit more.

Pleasure your partner (or yourself) with remote-controlled underwear – blueMotion, developed by OhMiBod, is a set of vibrating panties that you can control from your smartphone via a Bluetooth connection. An app on your phone lets you control the speed and intensity of the vibrations. Learn more here. And, no, I don’t know when the wi-fi model is coming out!

Turn ordinary household items into dildos in an instant – Have you ever looked at an object around your house and said, “I wish I could turn that into a dildo?” If so, Dildomaker is the device for you. It quickly and easily transforms everything from vegetables to hot dogs to candles into dildos. It works kind of like a pencil sharpener: just stick the tip in, crank the device, and presto! A perfect dildo every time. Check out a few examples here.

The robot that helps you masturbate – Finally, for that guy in your life who thinks masturbation is just too much work, here is a prototype of a robot that can literally give him a hand. This robot basically holds a plastic tube over your penis and moves it up and down while you wear a pair of virtual reality goggles that displays a sex scene. The robot moves its arms in time with the thrusts you see on screen. Check out the video below for a closer look at how it works, complete with a truly uncomfortable anime sex scene.
I've had Deus Ex MD sitting on my shelf since Day 1 (I got it for a deep discount on day 1, like twenty-something dollars, but it's way cheaper now). I only booted it up to check out HDR when I finally got the Pro and a 4kTV and that was it. The only way I'd probably end up playing it now is if it was digitally installed on my system ready to be played at the drop of a hat if I feel like it, so this is a good thing for me even though I own it.

Also, thinking about the PS+ service with taking console life into perspective, I think PS+ on PS4 has actually been better than PS+ on PS3 for new games.

It just launched late on PS3 so we had to only wait two years until big games started showing up frequently, but that was really almost 6 years into the PS3's life. We currently just passed the 4 year mark for PS4.
An 77-year-old was murdered in a Fairfax County retirement community, and police are searching for a suspect.

WASHINGTON — A 77-year-old was murdered in a Fairfax County retirement community, and police are searching for a suspect.

Cong Huu Nguyen, 77, was found dead in his apartment in the Little River Glen Senior Retirement Community, located at 4003 Barker Court in Fairfax Thursday morning. Nguyen had trauma to his upper body.

On Friday, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that the trauma to his upper body caused his death, which was ruled a homicide.

It is not yet clear if someone forced entry into Nguyen’s apartment, said Fairfax County police spokesman Don Gotthardt.

Police also do not know if this was a random act or not.

“We have to classify it or characterize as a threat to public safety at this point because we don’t know any different,” Gotthardt said.

Detectives are asking for the public’s assistance in identifying anyone responsible. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 703-246-7800 or 703-246-7810.

Little River Glen Senior Retirement Community has 120 one-bedroom apartments in four residential buildings, according to information on the Fairfax County website.

The facility is operated by the county. Ashley Montgomery, director of public affairs for Fairfax County Department of Housing and Community Development, said the community is in the process of notifying residents about what took place.

Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority Chairman Robert Schwaninger said the agency is working to make sure residents of the senior community are safe and their families are informed about updates in the case, too.

“Our hearts go out to Mr. Nguyen’s family for their loss, and they will be in our thoughts. Little River Glen is a wonderful, safe and welcoming community where our residents can age with dignity in a home they can afford. We have an outstanding police department, and we have every confidence in their ability to make an arrest in this case,” Schwaninger said in the statement.

Editor’s note: Fairfax County police corrected that Nguyen was 77 when he died.

WTOP’s Mike Murillo contributed to this report.

Like WTOP on Facebook and follow @WTOP on Twitter to engage in conversation about this article and others.

© 2017 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.
The surge in borrowing in October was fueled by a 9.9% increase in revolving credit outstanding, which mostly consists of credit-card loans.

U.S. consumer borrowing rose in October at the fastest rate in 11 months, reflecting heavy credit card spending.

The Federal Reserve said Thursday that total consumer credit increased $20.5 billion to a record seasonally adjusted $3.8 trillion, climbing at an annual growth rate of 6.5%.

It was the second straight strong monthly gain in consumer borrowing after a revised $19.2 billion in September, down only slightly from the prior estimate of a $20.8 billion. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected a $17.2 billion increase in October.

Revolving credit outstanding, which mostly consists of credit-card loans, accelerated to an annual rate of 9.9% in October, up from the 7.3% gain in September. Nonrevolving credit outstanding, mainly student and auto loans, rose at a 5.3% annual pace compared with 5.7% the previous month.

“The hefty above-trend gain in consumer credit in October was likely aided by the post-hurricane surge in auto sales,” MarketWatch said, adding that the increase in revolving credit may boost holiday sales.

According to Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, non-revolving credit has been decelerating, in part because the low unemployment rate is attracting younger people into the labor market and reducing the demand for student loans.

“While some of the increase in credit-card debt could be related to spending following the hurricanes, the strength of consumer sentiment surveys suggests there could be a greater willingness on the part of the consumer to re-lever modestly,” T.J. Connelly, head of research at Contingent Macro Advisors, said.

Household debt totaled $12.955 trillion in the third quarter, up 0.9% from the spring, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said last month. That was the most on record, though the figure wasn’t adjusted for inflation.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported last month that household debt reached a record $12.955 trillion in the third quarter, up 0.9% from the spring.
CLOSE On Thursday afternoon, Woods and about 100 students rushed Davis' cash register to surprise her with an oversize check for nearly $2,500, printed on an image of the blues, pinks and greens of the Aurora Borealis.

Watch Vicke Davis receive $2,500 to see the Northern Lights in Canada below.

ASU sophomore Chase Ebiner (left) hugs from dining room cashier Vicke Davis after she received a $2,350 check for her dream trip on Jan. 21, 2016, at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe. (Photo: Rob Schumacher/The Republic)

Vicke Davis, 59, is something of a celebrity among students at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University.

“Everyone knows her,” junior Alysa McCormick said. “She remembered my name before I remembered her name.”

As an employee in the college's dining hall in Tempe for the last three years, Davis has asked about the students’ lives before every breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And because she cares, she remembers their answers. She knows if they’re a freshman or senior, how their classes are going, where they went on vacation.

“Vicke is obviously a star component of the Barrett experience,” sophomore Hannah Houts said. “She knows all my family. … She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to my dad once even though it wasn’t his birthday — because he was getting cake.”

One chilly fall day last semester, junior Quintin Woods handed Davis his meal card to buy lunch and, as she swiped it, asked about her “dream trip."

Without hesitation, she replied “the Northern Lights,” the bands of light that appear in the sky at night, especially in arctic regions. She heard that if you sing or whistle, the colorful streaks will dance with you.

On Thursday afternoon, Woods and about 100 students rushed Davis' cash register to surprise her with an oversize check for nearly $2,500, printed on an image of the blues, pinks and greens of the Aurora Borealis.

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As Woods handed her the check and a camera to document her travels, Davis began to cry.

“See, that’s why I love my babies,” she yelled to the crowd of students surrounding her. “No wonder I was seeing you all today; I haven’t seen you all in a year!"

“I love my Barrett babies”

“A lot of freshmen come here and live in the complex, and they don’t get mom’s home-cooked meals anymore, but they get Vicke saying, ‘How you doing baby? How my Barrett babies doing?" McCormick said. "It’s so welcoming in a place that doesn’t necessarily feel like home at first."

“She always brings this extremely positive, extremely nurturing, caring spirit here,” McCormick said.

Davis regularly engages with students on Facebook and Snapchat – she’s been featured dancing or skateboarding on ASU’s daily Snapchat story many times – and she’s always posting about her “Barrett babies.”

“I told them the first day, I left all my babies in Chicago, so they my babies now. I love my babies. They’re sweet,” Davis said after she finished hugging every student that showed up for the surprise. Davis is from Chicago and began working at ASU in 2013, she said.

“Each one of them is gonna get a whooping. They could use that money on themselves,” she said, laughing. “Y’all spoil me, but y’all my favorite babies and you know it. I gotta bring back a lot of key chains.”

$2,000 in two days

ASU junior Quintin Woods (left) surprises dining room cashier Vicke Davis with a $2,350 check for her dream trip on Jan. 21, 2016, at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe. (Photo: Rob Schumacher/The Republic)

Woods, 20, created the fundraiser on GoFundMe.com on Christmas Eve. Within 48 hours, more than 150 people had raised his goal of $2,000.

“It’s not necessarily surprising because I know how well-liked she is, but still," he said. "It's pleasantly surprising that it was an immediate ‘boom’ effort."

Two fraternities – Pi Kappa Phi and Lambda Chi Alpha – each donated about $250. One student donated $150 on her own; another gave $100.

Donations trickled in after, eventually topping out at $2,486. The money will cover travel expenses for Davis to go to Canada over ASU’s spring break in March.

While in Canada for the first time, more than 1,000 miles from her cafeteria, Davis plans to eat.

“I want real food. ... I’m from Chicago – very picky anyway – and a lot of the restaurants that say 'Chicago style'… nuh-uh. So I’m gonna do a lot of eating.”

Before the hubbub died down, Davis ran off to clock out for lunch and stand in line for food alongside the students.

“I only got 30 minutes off, I can’t kiss everybody,” she said, laughing. “Y’all gonna have me crying in my sushi.”

Thank you to everyone who made this possible 😍 we love our Barrett momma pic.twitter.com/lGzhYzwnSB — P Fitz (@paigefitzgerald) January 21, 2016

Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1RCvJnE
Without completing the statutory public hearings in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, Environment, Forests and Climate Change Minister Prakash Javadekar has done away with a stop-work order against the Polavaram dam, allowing construction work to resume.

He did so at the personal request of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and without informing Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Also, the orders of the environment ministry have not been put in the public domain.

The project is expected to displace about 200,000 and affect 300 villages, according to the 2010 environmental clearance order which uses data of 2001 population of these villages. The population over the decade and a half has risen considerably. It is to irrigate about 300,000 ha of agricultural land, store 550 million cubic metres of water and generate 960 Mw of power.

The project is to be built on the Godavari in Andhra Pradesh. But the water is expected to inundate many tribal villages in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, too. Construction has to be carried out for the project in these states, too.

A July 3 letter by Javadekar to Naidu, reviewed by Business Standard, reads: "I have your letter dated April 25 regarding continuation of works of the Indira Sagar Polavaram project in Andhra Pradesh. I have got the matter examined in my ministry... with the anticipation that the pending public hearing will be resolved through discussions and persistent engagement with Odisha and Chhattisgarh, my ministry has taken the decision to keep the 'stop-work order' in abeyance for a period of a year. A copy of the office memorandum in this regard is enclosed for your information."

The letter attaches executive orders from joint secretary Biswanath Sinha, dated June 23. It says, "This ministry has decided to keep the stop-work order in abeyance for a period of a year." It conceded public hearings hadn't been carried out in the two states and that both had approached the Supreme Court against the project and the verdicts were pending. The order is marked to principal secretary (irrigation) in the Andhra Pradesh government.

Baijendra Kumar, principal secretary to the Chhattisgarh chief minister, told Business Standard, "We have not been informed of this order. We have filed a plea in the Supreme Court against the project. Mandatory public hearings have not been conducted in the state. Sometimes, they say four villages in our state will be submerged and sometimes they say 40. How can we know the exact situation till studies are done and public hearings are carried out in our state as well? We are surprised how the Centre keeps permitting work be carried out like this. The project has been almost completed like this, illegally."

Pradeep Kumar Jena, Odisha's water resources secretary, confirmed the state hadn't been informed of the decision, though the Centre was aware the state had taken strong objections to the project.

While Chhattisgarh has a BJP government, headed by Chief Minister Raman Singh, Odisha has a Biju Janata Dal government, under Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.

A detailed questionnaire sent to Javadekar did not elicit a response till the time of going to print.

Oddly, the executive order from his ministry reads, "During the first three-six months of this period of one year, the government of Andhra Pradesh shall ensure public hearings are conducted in the states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha and submit the outcome of the public hearings to the environment ministry." This is despite the fact that public hearings in the two states cannot be organised by the Andhra Pradesh government; these have to be carried out by the respective state government, through the state pollution control board concerned.

The Environment Protection Act makes it mandatory for public hearings to be held for all areas impacted by a project. Only after the hearings can an environment-impact assessment be conducted. A positive appraisal of the assessment permits the Centre to give a nod. Construction on the project can take place only after this and other clearances.

In 2005, the Andhra Pradesh government secured a clearance for the project component falling within its territory. In 2010, the state sought clearance for the parts of the project in the two other states. The Union environment ministry gave its approval that year. However, in 2011, it issued a stop-work order when Chhattisgarh and Odisha protested that their areas would also be impacted, adding no studies or hearings had been conducted. Subsequently, the two approached the Supreme Court separately against the project.

The executive order of the environment ministry says, "The government of Andhra Pradesh has assured it will bring about changes in the design and operating parameters of the project in case warranted as a result of public hearings in Chhattisgarh and Odisha and such changes would be carried out in consultation with the CWC (Central Water Commission) and the consent of all states. In that case, change in design or/and operating parameters might be required to ensure the area falling in the states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha does not come under submergence due to impounding of the project reservoir."

It wasn't explained how the project could be retrofited once near completion.

An executive order of the ministry has to operate within the legal provisions of the environmental laws governing clearances. The law provides only for a prior-informed consent for the project. The ministry order says a similar order to let work on the Polavaram project continue had been issued on January 1, 2014, for six months.

Business Standard had asked the environment minister under what provisions and on what legal grounds the stop-work order for the Polavaram project had been withdrawn, and whether Chhattisgarh and Odisha had been consulted on the matter before the decision or informed of it after the decision was taken.
New screenshots from a preview build of the upcoming Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 have shown off the new Mixed Reality Viewer app, giving us a glimpse of what Microsoft plans for supporting the range of mixed reality headsets which are due to launch alongside the update on October 17.

The images, posted on the Aggiornamenti Lumia blog, show how the existing View 3D app has been rebranded into the Mixed Reality Viewer. It allows users to open 3D models inside Windows 10 and view them with a mixed reality headset, or through a standard 2D monitor.

The screenshots of the app were taken on a computer running Windows 10 that's been signed up to the Insider’s Program with ‘Fast Ring with Skip Ahead enabled’. This gives users a chance to download an early version of upcoming Windows updates to test out before they are finished.

Image 1 of 3 Image credit: Aggiornamenti Lumia Image 2 of 3 Image credit: Aggiornamenti Lumia Image 3 of 3 Image credit: Aggiornamenti Lumia

Trying out the new features

The blog post explains some of the new features of the Mixed Reality Viewer app, including a new logo and interface.

These images show how mixed reality content will be handled in Windows 10 in the future. While it hasn’t been explicitly confirmed to feature in the Fall Creators Update, we’re hoping that it will be included, or shortly afterwards.

The blog also hosts a download of the new app for people to try out, but we'd recommend holding fire and waiting for the final version to appear on the Windows Store in the future.

Microsoft has made a big deal of supporting mixed reality, so to have a flagship app included in its next major update of Windows 10 will be a good indication of just how serious it is about MR.

For the fastest results in Windows, upgrade to the best wireless router
Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford are being taken to court by Toronto resident and activist Jude MacDonald for allegedly violating the Municipal Conflict Of Interest Act. This is the second time the mayor has faced such charges but the first go-round for his brother.

In the application, filed in Superior Court by lawyer Tim Gleason, MacDonald alleges that the Fords improperly mixed their personal and public interests by speaking and/or voting on a slew of council items that directly or indirectly affected clients of their family business, Deco Labels and Tags.

The identities of nearly all of Deco's clients remained a well-kept secret until this past summer, when Globe reporters viewed an internal list. The majority of allegations in MacDonald's application stem from the paper's resulting story that highlighted several instances in which the Fords advanced policies that aligned with their clients' interests.

Porter Airlines, for example, was among the firms that have reportedly contracted printing from Deco. And not only was Mayor Ford the salesperson listed on the account, according to the Globe, but Deco "salespeople - including the Fords - receive commissions whenever one of their accounts places an order."

As chief magistrate, Ford has taken a very active interest in facilitating Porter's request for jets at the Island airport and has never once declared a conflict on the matter. (It's worth noting that if John Tory were to become mayor, he would very likely have a conflict on the same issue.)

Other alleged conflicts include:

• voting on a motion pertaining to an industrial wastewater treatment program in which both Deco itself and one of its clients were enrolled;

• voting on and advocating against a new set of "healthy vending criteria" for vending machines in rec centres that would have adversely affected Deco client Coca-Cola;

• voting on and advocating against a ban on the sale of bottled water at City facilities that adversely affected Deco clients Nestlé Canada and Coca-Cola (which produces Dasani);

• and voting on and advocating for the appointment of Darius Mosun - chair and CEO of Deco client Soheil Mosun - to the board of the Toronto Parking Authority.

If either or both Fords are found to have violated the Act, the judge must declare their seat(s) vacant and may disqualify them from holding office for up to seven years. (It's not immediately clear how the first, mandatory penalty might apply to a Council member who's switched offices since a breach occurred, but it's likely that the second, discretionary penalty could be used to the same effect.) If, however, the Fords successfully argue that a conflict came about through inadvertence or an error in judgment, or that their interest was so remote as to be unlikely to have influenced them, they're off the hook.

In November 2012, a Superior Court judge ruled that Ford broke the Act when he voted to overturn an earlier Council decision ordering him to repay money he'd solicited from lobbyists for his football foundation. The judge ordered the mayor out of office, but the Divisional Court overturned the ruling on a technicality.

This is at least the fourth notice of civil action served on Rob Ford since becoming mayor, and at least the second for Doug since becoming councillor. (An additional defamation suit, brought by Boardwalk Pub owner George Foulidis, was commenced just prior to the last election.)

The court application and MacDonald's accompanying affidavit are below.
I have just found out something that has excited my greatly while reading the latest edition of Practical Reptile Keeping. Well any news of this kind is enough to excite any reptile enthusiast, but it excited me a little more this time around. Me and my girlfriend are currently saving up for a working holiday in Australia, which we aim to be setting off sometime in late 2015 if all goes well. While we are over there, I am hoping to not only gain more experience in working with reptiles and amphibians, but to also see the variety of species in their natural habitat while travelling the continent. Well cut to the chase, the news is that there have been new herp species discovered in Cape York Peninsula, North-East Australia. These include a leaf-tailed gecko, a golden-coloured skink and a boulder-dwelling frog.

In this area of Australia, there is a place called Cape Melville which is a sort of mountain range filled with exceptionally large black granite boulders. Earlier this year, the National Geographic Expedition Council and a film crew choppered into this largely unexplored area and weren’t disappointed in what they discovered. The nature of this landscape has effectively stranded several species of animals away from the rest of the continent by a border of hot, dry forest, for possibly millions of years.

The gecko that the team found is a species of leaf-tailed gecko, that bears a resemblance I think to one of my favourites, the aptly named satanic leaf-tailed gecko. Though due to the isolation that these animals have endured, they are rather different to their relatives. It spends its daytime hidden away in those granite boulders, emerging at night to hunt in much cooler temperatures. Although hunting maybe isn’t an appropriate word to use based on the method carried out by the geckos, they rather ambush their prey while lurking in the cracks and crevices of the boulders. They have very slender bodies, making their legs appear unusually long, and their colour gives effective camouflage.

The second creature found was a species of skink, with a beautiful gold colour to its skin. Reptiles never fail to impress with their variety of colours and patterns. This animal is also long and slender in limbs and body, but is more active in the day unlike the gecko. The name given to this skink (Saproscincus saltus) was assigned because the word saltus means leaping, and this skink was seen leaping through the rocky terrain of its environment hunting insects.

And finally the boulder-dwelling frog. Now known to science as the blotched boulder-frog, is a small creature and has an even more restricted habitat than the previous two, Being found only in the fields of Cape Melville. During the dry season this frog remains in the cooler area deep down in the boulder fields, where there is a more suitable moisture in the air. The frogs posses swollen foot pads which assists them in climbing among the boulders. Again I love the coloration of this frog, it appears to have a sort of golden colour also, with brown spots rotten across its back and limbs.

It is a shame that they are in an area that will be difficult to access for myself due to few transport opportunities and the unusual terrain, otherwise visiting Cape Melville in order to try and catch a glimpse of these newly discovered animals would be high up on my list.

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Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) say 2012 was the ninth warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998. The last year that was cooler than average was 1976.

The map at the top depicts temperature anomalies, or changes, by region in 2012; it does not show absolute temperature. Reds and blues show how much warmer or cooler each area was in 2012 compared to an averaged base period from 1951â€“1980. For more explanation of how the analysis works, read World of Change: Global Temperatures.

The average temperature in 2012 was about 14.6 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit), which is 0.55°C (1.0°F) warmer than the mid-20th century base period. The average global temperature has increased 0.8°C (1.4°F) since 1880, and most of that change has occurred in the past four decades.

The line plot above shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2011 as recorded by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. All four institutions tally temperature data from stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warm or cool compared to other years. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the last decade as the warmest.

Scientists emphasize that weather patterns cause fluctuations in average temperatures from year to year, but the continued increase in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere assures that there will be a long-term rise in global temperatures. Each individual year will not necessarily be warmer than the previous year, but scientists expect each decade to be warmer than the previous decade.

“One more year of numbers isn’t in itself significant,” GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. “What matters is this decade is warmer than the last decade, and that decade was warmer than the decade before. The planet is warming. The reason it’s warming is because we are pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

Carbon dioxide traps heat and largely controls Earth’s climate. It occurs naturally but is also released by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. The level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising consistently for decades, largely driven by increasing man-made emissions. The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, the first year of the GISS temperature record. By 1960, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, was about 315 parts per million. Today, that measurement exceeds 390 parts per million.

The continental U.S. endured its warmest year on record by far, according to NOAA, the official keeper of U.S. weather records. NOAA also announced that global temperatures were 10th warmeston record by their analysis methods.

“The U.S. temperatures in the summer of 2012 are an example of a new trend of outlying seasonal extremes that are warmer than the hottest seasonal temperatures of the mid-20th century,” NASA GISS director James E. Hansen said. “The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.”

NASA images by Robert Simmon, based on data from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NOAA National Climatic Data Center, Met Office Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit, and the Japanese Meteorological Agency. Caption by Patrick Lynch and Mike Carlowicz.
The symbol for pawnbroking is three gold spheres suspended from a bar. The pawnbroker symbol has been in use at least since the medieval period in Europe. It is still used by pawnbrokers all around the world today. There are differing theories proposing how these three spheres came to represent pawn shops and pawnbroking.

House of Lombard

Although pawnbroking and pawn shops have existed for thousands of years, pawnbroking became synonymous with the Italian province of Lombardy, which is located in Northern Italy. Bankers in this province built up the success of their businesses using the pawnbroking business-model, which later acquired the name, Lombard banking. Lombard merchants are said to have hung three golden spheres outside their homes. It is thought that the golden spheres originally represented three gold coins, which later were redesigned as spheres to attract more attention.

The Medici

Three circles make up the family crest of the famous (and sometimes infamous) Medici family. The Medici family were affluent bankers who were widely known throughout Europe as influential patrons of the arts. With deep pockets, the family held sway with politicians, lawmakers and church leaders. As the Medici family’s success in finance and money-lending increased, other families assimilated the three circles into their coat of arms. Before long, the three circles became synonymous with money-lending and banking.

St. Nicholas of Myra

Saint Nicholas of Myra was a 4th century Greek Bishop and is the patron saint of pawnbroking. Tales abound recounting his generosity to the poor. According to a well-known tale, a poor man in his town had three daughters but was not able to afford an adequate dowry for them to be married. Without a dowry, they would not be able to fetch husbands and, as such, would most likely have to become prostitutes. St. Nicholas, under cover of night, dropped a sack filled with gold coins into each daughter’s window, effectively rescuing them from a life of misery. The three bags of gold came to represent the three gold spheres used by pawnbrokers on their store fronts. Saint Nicholas day is December 6th, which is also National Pawnbrokers Day.
On Sunday, former US ambassador to the UN and recent Trump deputy secretary of state appointee, John Bolton, challenged the primary intelligence-gathering agency of the United States government, arguing that reports of Russian hacking during the presidential election may not be what they seem.

In an interview with Fox News’ Eric Shawn, the former ambassador used the phrase “false flag operation” in reference to the CIA’s purported assessment which concluded that Russia deliberately interfered with this year’s US election to help Donald Trump secure the White House.

Suggesting that the Obama administration’s lack of transparency makes it impossible to definitively conclude that the Russians were behind the hacking of US political parties, Bolton, who was reportedly appointed as Trump’s deputy secretary of state (the second highest position at the State Department), appeared to break away from his characteristically national security-first philosophy to assert a theory about foul play at the highest levels of government,

“It is not at all clear to me, just viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC was not a false flag operation,” he told Fox News.

When asked to explain what he meant by the highly suggestive phrase “false flag,” Bolton gave a hazy answer.

“We just don’t know,” stated Bolton, refusing to say whether the US government was purposely misleading the public, or worse, had a hand in the “false flag operation.”

“But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree,” said Bolton, adding:

If you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints… We would want to know who else might want to influence the election and why they would leave fingerprints that point to the Russians. That’s why I say until we know more about how the intelligence community came to this conclusion we don’t know whether it is Russian inspired or a false flag

Here's the transcript, detailing the relevant part of Bolton's interview with Eric Shawn:

Bolton’s comments reflected echo the skeptical attitude of the Trump team in the wake of The Washington Post’s report on the CIA’s unsettling findings about Russia’s interference during the presidential election. Trump, himself, called the CIA’s assessment “ridiculous” in a pre-taped interview that aired Sunday.

“I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it,” the president-elect told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “Every week it’s another excuse.” Trumped added that “nobody really knows” who was behind the hacking of emails belonging to top Clinton advisors and DNC officials.
The quick down and dirty! Just in case its 3AM and you’re legs and arms are twitching and you are ready to lose it!

We cannot operate on NO sleep, let alone deal with the stress of our bodies freaking out while we are not sleeping! I would find myself still pacing the floor when the morning alarm went off! So how do we even have a hope of dealing with the resulting memory loss, “sorry I have no brain” and increased pain that comes with this lack of sleep and general crazy making . It makes a healthy individual’s life difficult to navigate!

So…. from my hours and hours of late night research looking for answers, trying desperately to stop my mandatory committal to a “rubber room”.

Here are a few points, a condensed version of what helped me.

I am not a Dr. and before starting any new medical approach, review these points with your GP and/or specialist and form a plan of action! A plan gives control (kind of, thats what they tell me). This article on RLS has an autoimmune slant. If you do not have a chronic illness such as RA there may or may not be other things to consider. There will still be many suggestions you can use!

STARTING POINTS:

Identify your triggers: LOW IRON (RA affects iron levels) SPECIFIC FOODS, Too much or too little EXERCISE, INFLAMMATION (this is where RA again rears it’s head), STRESS , MEDICATIONS, NICOTINE, CAFFEINE Check your blood work: FERRITIN, KEEP YOUR level greater than 50, THYROID LEVELS, HORMONES Consider the role of FOLIC ACID especially when taking Methotrexate which depletes Folic. Increasing my Folic dose has had a big impact. Can you and your chosen professional add any prescribed medications to help?

HERE ARE MY TRIGGERS (things I envision bathing my nerves in irritants) which exacerbate my RLS:

1. Aspartame and artificial sweeteners

2. Too much exercise

3. Alcohol, Caffeine and Chocolate

4. Ice cream (go figure!)

5. HORMONES the night before my menstrual cycle

6. Inflammation: Flares, RLS worse a couple of days before my next biologic dose

Initially I cut out what I could from the above list entirely. Once the treatment plan started to take effect, I started to play with when in the day and how much I could eat those specific triggers and started practicing moderation. I was in this for the long term!

MY TREATMENT:

At least an hour before bedtime

I take my daily Iron ( 2 tabs of PROFERRIN) I have increased my FOLIC ACID to 4mg at bedtime, except the night of my Methotrexate dose. Magnesium Citrate (best type utilized efficiently by the body) powder (1 scoop in warm water)

If my arms and legs start “going” before I fall asleep, I get up and do a chair squat against the wall, fatiguing my muscles until I feel like I’m about to fall down. I then return to bed and try again.

All of the above combined is successful 75-80% of the time. Much better than my before treatment picture which was not sleeping 75-80% of the time.

IF NOT SUCCESSFUL:

Consider adding a prescribed medication which should be determined by you and your physician. You can decide together what would be most appropriate. I added Gabapentin 🙂

RLS is not for the Faint of Heart, it really is crazy making at its best. It is not easy giving up ALL your ‘fixes’ (triggers) but I know when you’re this desperate you might be more willing to try.

Hang in there 🙂 Please share if you think this will reach someone it could help! and like this post to give it a better chance to reach them! and seriously if you have a tip that works for you…comment and save someone the energy they need to keep them upright and their face out of the mud. Someone out there ( maybe you ) will always have the right answer. Thank you!

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(AllHipHop News) For many years, the feminine voice in mainstream Hip Hop was lacking, but in 2014 more focus has been placed on female rappers than has been seen in years. That highlighting of women representing the culture will be further expressed at this year's Soul Train Awards.

[ALSO READ: EXCLUSIVE: Shawnna Calls For Unity Among Female Rappers, Suggests Forming An All Women Hip Hop Tour]

Legendary performers Lil Kim, Missy Elliott, and Da Brat are set to reunite on stage for the event. The trio was featured on Kim's 1997 platinum single "Not Tonight (Remix)" along with Angie Martinez and the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC.

Other acts scheduled to perform include Chris Brown, Jeremih, Nico & Vinz, Aloe Blacc, KEM, and Jodeci. The Soul Train Awards will air on BET and Centric on November 30. Wendy Williams will serve as host.

[ALSO READ: Jodeci, Chris Brown and More To Perform at 2014 Soul Train Awards]

Watch the video for Lil Kim's "Not Tonight" featuring Da Brat, Missy Elliott, Angie Martinez, and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes below.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Five years after a Zanesville animal keeper triggered panic by unleashing tigers, lions and bears in Ohio's countryside, the federal government is looking anew at restricting the public's ability to pet and pose for pictures with young, potentially dangerous animals.

The risk to humans from petting an adorable 5-week-old tiger cub at a roadside zoo is not so much the issue. But to make tiger and bear cubs available for cuddles, ooohs and aahhs, wild animal parks rely on a breeding-and-handling ecosystem that animal-rights activists say results in cruelty and abandonment.

If the government would eliminate your right to snuggle with a big cat while that cat is still little, the activists say, then the larger ecosystem -- the one that helped Terry Thompson acquire 56 wild, dangerous animals that he released from cages before killing himself in October 2011 -- could be quashed.

Some people say this is overkill.

The federal government, which in March began tamping down on public handling of baby lions and tigers, wants to hear more from the public about proposed restrictions.

What it's about:

The move to restrict handling of wild animals by anyone other than professionals in accredited zoos or wildlife sanctuaries grew heated after Thompson, deeply in debt and reportedly despised by some neighbors, released 56 animals from his 73-acre Muskingum County farm, then killed himself with a gunshot.

The animals included tigers, lions, bears, leopards and wolves. In the ensuing panic throughout the countryside, police killed 49 of the animals.

Panic in Zanesville

Ohio clamped down on ownership of dangerous animals in the aftermath, first with an executive order, and then with a state law requiring a permit for ownership of dangerous animals including tigers, lions, bears, elephants, alligators, crocodiles and anacondas and pythons 12 feet or longer. The state made exemptions for animals already in possession if certain rules were followed.

How petting became an issue:

Not all states have laws like Ohio's -- and it took the Zanesville emergency to get Ohio to act. In fact, former Gov. Ted Strickland had signed an order in 2010 requiring exotic animals to be registered, but Gov. John Kasich let it lapse in 2011. Kasich signed a new, related order soon after the Zanesville animal mayhem, and state lawmakers went to work soon after that.

Yet regardless of state laws, a separate issue was unresolved in the eyes of the Humane Society of the United States, a group that fights animal exploitation. As the society and its allies saw it, abuses would continue as long as wildlife attractions could let visitors pet and pose with soon-to-be dangerous animals, then dump the animals when they were no longer useful.

"Zanesville was just the symptom of a much bigger problem," Anna Frostic, senior attorney for wildlife litigation at the Humane Society, said in a telephone interview.

So the Humane Society petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to clamp down. The department had authority, according to the Humane Society, because it oversaw animal handling for any facilities that engaged in interstate commerce involving animals.

What the Humane Society wanted:

The petition asked the Department of Agriculture to explicitly prohibit any entity licensed under federal wildlife rules "from allowing members of the public to come into direct or unsafe close contact with big cats, bears and nonhuman primates of any age."

Help Prevent Another Zanesville - The Humane Society of the United States http://t.co/AScC19W3 -- Animal Advocate (@Miles9906) October 19, 2012

The Humane Society was joined by the World Wildlife Fund and the Detroit Zoological Society, among others. They filed the petition exactly a year after the Zanesville incident, and amended it with additional petitioners in 2013.

How existing law had loopholes:

You might think animal abuse was already outlawed by the federal Animal Welfare Act, a 1966 law that regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport and sales. But the Humane Society and allies said the language in the law and its related regulations was too vague.

For example, federal regulations require big cats to be "under the direct control and supervision of a knowledgeable and experienced animal handler." But what is direct control? Is it good enough to be standing nearby?

And regulations say that big cats "must be handled so there is minimal risk of harm to the animal and to the public." But what does that mean?

What the real issue was:

The overriding issue can be understood easily by considering a tiger cub.

Tiger cubs are most popular for petting and cuddling when they are between four and eight weeks old. By then, their immune systems are thought to be ready for human contact. But this can lead to premature separation from their mothers, to bottle feeding of formula rather than letting them get nourishment from their mothers' milk, and to exploitation, says the Humane Society.

The cubs are no longer considered safe for petting after eight weeks. They're often sold then, and many wind up in caged, deplorable conditions, says the Humane Society. Their entire existence, from breeding to eventual sale or dumping, was for the sake of exploiting a four-week period in their lives.

This has led to a skewed tiger population: There are 5,000 to 7,000 tigers in U.S. captivity, the majority kept in substandard conditions, Frostic said. That's about twice the entire population of tigers in the wild worldwide, she said.

Why there's a different view:

Critics, particularly companies accused of animal exploitation, sometimes call the Humane Society extremist in its animal-protection views. But the petition has been supported by a number of mainstream groups including the American Veterinary Medical Association. Even the Association of Zoos & Aquariums -- whose board members include the top executives of the Smithsonian's National Zoo and the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo -- said in late 2013 that it generally agrees with the petition.

Yet a different group, the Zoological Association of America, takes a different view. The Zoological Association generally represents smaller and new zoos as well as private zoos.

This is not the first issue over which the Humane Society and the Zoological Association have tussled. The zoological group views the Humane Society as radical, while the Humane Society says the zoological group supports weak standards for roadside zoos -- and each side says the other is wrong.

The Zoological Association of America is committed to animal welfare and public safety http://t.co/vn6heyEbwc -- Facilities Chap (@SirFacilities) August 27, 2015

"Our members as licensees have witnessed first hand the power of exhibition and interaction in support of conservation of species," the Zoological Association told the federal government in a five-page letter. "Visitors to our facilities form a special connection with the animals they meet and are, as a direct result of that experience, motivated to support conservation work."

As for why the Humane Society is pursuing this, the Zoological Association said it is "merely an attempt by the petitioners to push their well publicized agenda to end interaction with all species and the eventual elimination of all public exhibition and animals in captivity."

Why Zanesville keeps coming up:

In correspondence with the government, the Zanesville animal tragedy gets cited repeatedly to explain why these changes are needed. But the Zoological Association said Zanesville makes a poor parallel:

"While tragic for the animals involved, what happened in Ohio was not a matter of deficient federal oversight and is hardly indicative of the activities of hundreds of responsible and lawfully licensed exhibitors overseen by USDA. In reality the number of facilities in the US possessing the animals in question is declining at a rapid rate due to state and local rules and regulations."

every time i drive through zanesville i always think in my head, "lions and tigers and bears oh my" [?] [?] -- Nikki (@nicoleperalli) January 21, 2013

Why the feds seem likely to act:

It has taken several years to get to this point. But in March, the Department of Agriculture issued a notice that non-domestic cats -- lions and tigers -- under four weeks of age have special needs and should not be exposed to public feeding and handling. Violating this will put a zoo or animal exhibitor out of compliance with the Animal Welfare Act.

Then on June 24, the department demonstrated it is not yet done. It reopened the public comment period on the Humane Society's petition -- even though by November 2013 it has received 15,379 comments -- and said it wanted to hear more.

It posed specific question, such as: What factors should be considered in determining whether an animal is suitable for public contact? What animals should be defined as dangerous? What constitutes sufficient barriers to keep the public away?

It will accept comments through August, then make a decision at a undermined time.

What this means for petting zoos:

Might this spell doom for petting zoos?

It depends "how you define petting zoos," Frostic said.

The Humane Society's petition concerns big cats, bears, nonhuman primates -- animals that grow up to be dangerous and whose life cycle too often involves abuse, she said.

As for worries about cows, goats, fowl and other farm livestock, "that's certainly not what we're after."
In light of Triple Eight’s proposed appeal arising from last Sunday’s Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000, CAMS has today released a short Q&A paper regarding the process for such an appeal.

Triple Eight has lodged a “Notice of Intention to Appeal” the 15 second penalty levied against Car 88 in the closing stages of Sunday’s race. A “Notice of Appeal” must subsequently be lodged in order to progress the appeal and a date for hearing the appeal will then be set.

Supercars Chief Executive James Warburton said: "While the race has been run and won, the appeal process against decisions of the stewards is open to any team at any Supercars race.

“It is important to note that Supercars operates in compliance with the highest global standards and that the same appeal process applies to other motor sport categories such as Formula One.

“The process and any appeal hearing takes place completely independently of Supercars and the CAMS stewards."

Q: How is an appeal lodged?

A: The appellant must lodge a Notice of Intention to Appeal and an appeal fee of $10,000 (plus GST) with the Stewards within one (1) hour of being advised of the Steward’s decision. If the Appeal or elements of the Appeal are successful, the Court has a discretion to refund part or all of the fee.

On what grounds can a decision be appealed?

The appeal can be against the severity of the penalty, an error in the application of the rules, and/or an allegation that natural justice has been denied by the Stewards.

Does that mean the Appellant has to put their whole case forward in one hour?

No, only the Notice of Intention to Appeal must be lodged in that time frame. The Appellant has 92 hours from when they were advised of the Steward’s decision to lodge the Notice of Appeal. The Notice of Appeal must contain all relevant matters the Appellant wishes to have addressed by the Court.

Who will hear the Appeal?

The Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) appoints a Supercars National Court of Appeal. The Court is made up of three individuals with the requisite legal and motor sport knowledge to decide the Appeal. In respect of each appeal, as soon as the relevant persons have confirmed their appointment, CAMS will make an announcement.

Where and when will the appeal be heard?

Under the Rules, any Appeal will be heard in Melbourne, Victoria and will ordinarily be within nine (9) days of the Event. This can be varied by agreement between the Court and the parties to the appeal. All relevant parties attend in person and the hearing is conducted with as little formality and legal technicality as proper consideration of the matter permits. The Court is not bound by formal legal rules of evidence and generally it does not take longer than one day to hear the matter.

Can the media or general public attend the Hearing?

This is at the Court’s complete discretion, however previously Appeal Hearings have been closed to both the public and the media.

Will the Appellant have legal representation?

Not usually. The Appellant is required to state their case in person unless it would cause undue hardship. In this instance they may have an advocate (not a lawyer) however, if the Appellant wishes to have a lawyer present, they must ask for the permission of the Court. Whether or not this is granted depends on the severity of the penalty imposed and is entirely at the Court’s discretion. This is done to keep the costs and time frame of the Appeal to a minimum.

When will we know the outcome of the Appeal?

The Court must hand down its decision in writing within fourteen (14) days of the conclusion of the Appeal Hearing.

Is the finding of the Supercars Court of Appeal final?

Yes, the finding of the Court is final and all parties are bound by the decision. There is no further mechanism for appeal save for an Appeal to the FIA International Court of Appeal.
Welcome to our new summer series. A lot has happened over Todd Graham's first three seasons as Arizona State's head football coach. Over the next two weeks, we will be ranking 15 of Graham's 28 total wins so far before the 2015 season, which has potential to send the program to new heights.

Before that happens, let's look at the games that put ASU in this position. Our No. 15 win for Graham saw the Sun Devils explode in the second half for a dominating win over Colorado in 2012.

At No. 14, ASU's last game of the 2014 campaign saw the Sun Devils go head-to-head with the Blue Devils of Duke:

No. 14: Dec. 27, 2014 - Sun Devils claim Sun Bowl Thriller

In many seasons, a trip to the Sun Bowl with a chance to secure a 10-win season would serve as the culmination of a successful campaign for Sun Devil fans. But after the emotional high of winning the Pac-12 South in 2013 and climbing up to No. 6 in the College Football Playoff rankings at a late juncture in the season, Arizona State's expectations extended beyond finishing its season in El Paso, Texas.

However, as the 8-1 Sun Devils faltered late in the year, falling at Oregon State and coming up one play short in a heartbreaking loss to Arizona, ASU dropped out of contention for the major bowls and was selected to play Duke in the Sun Bowl to wrap up the season. Participating in the Sun Bowl didn't live up to the high expectations fans have grown to hold for the program, but the game provided them with an exhilrating showcase.

Having benched him in the second half in hopes of pulling out a late win against the Wildcats, Todd Graham had to make a decision on whether to put Taylor Kelly back in the starter's role for the Sun Bowl. He opted to go with his senior captain, and gave Kelly the chance to lead ASU to a victory in his final collegiate game.

Kelly played well early, but it was the play of freshman Demario Richard that stole the show for the Sun Devils. After a 16-yard completion to Jaelen Strong and a 14-yard Kelly scamper, Richard capped off ASU's first drive of the game with a 9-yard touchdown run and ASU took an early 7-0 lead.

ASU and Duke traded field goals for the duration of the first quarter, and the Sun Devil defense gave its offense to expand on its 13-3 lead with a three-and-out midway through the second. Kelly completed passes to Strong, Ellis Jefferson and Gary Chambers as the Sun Devils marched down the field, reaching the goalline on an 11-yard Kelly scramble that converted a 4th and 1.

Kelly was the catalyst on the drive but Richard got the score, punching it in from a yard out to give ASU a seemingly-commanding 20-3 lead.

But Duke remained resilient, and their efforts paid off in a late-first half rally. Shaquille Powell's 32-yard catch put Duke in Sun Devil territory and he finished the drive off with a 14-yard touchdown reception. ASU's next drive stalled, and Matt Haack came out to fulfill his punting duties. His punt was fine, but ASU's coverage wasn't and Jamison Crowder brought it back 68 yards for a touchdown that pulled Duke within three points at halftime.

The break at halftime was much-needed for the Sun Devils, and they responded out the gate with another Richard score that capped off an eight-play, 75-yard drive.

From there on, ASU's offense struggled to do much against the Duke defense. While their offense couldn't put the game out of reach, ASU's defense and special teams did their parts to clinch the bowl win.

A lengthy Duke drive saw the Blue Devils reach the Arizona State redzone, but ASU cornerback Kweishi Brown bailed the Sun Devils out with a strip of Isaac Blakeney, and Jordan Simone fell on the ball to complete the turnover.

A Zane Gonzalez field goal put ASU up 30-17 and Duke's proverbial back was against the wall, but the Blue Devils rallied and put themselves in position to win the game. A pair of fourth-down conversions kept their drive alive and Anthony Boone's 14-yard pass to Johnell Barnes found the endzone, bringing Duke within six points at 30-24.

Following an ASU turnover on downs, Duke brought out its trick playbook, catching the Sun Devils and everyone in attendance completely off-guard when Crowder took a jet sweep handoff, pulled up and tossed a 12-yard strike to Blakeney. A game the Sun Devils had controlled from the get-go suddenly was in Duke's hands as the Blue Devils led 31-30.

With five minutes left, the Sun Devils prepared to get the ball and march the length of the field in order to win the game. But freshman kick returner Kalen Ballage had other ideas, taking the kickoff down the sideline 96 yards to set ASU up four yards away from pay dirt.

Richard's fourth touchdown of the day followed, but after ASU failed the two-point conversion the Sun Devils held a fragile 36-31 lead and 4;45 on the clock for Duke.

Fittingly, the Blue Devils drove all the way from their 29-yard line to the ASU 14-yard line, giving them four chances at taking the lead. Boone's pass on first down fell incomplete and Powell was stuffed on second down, leaving Duke with a 3rd and 10. Boone sent a pass to the corner of the end zone, and it was caught.....by ASU cornerback Kweishi Brown. Brown's interception was his third of the year and most important, clinching the game and the Sun Bowl for Arizona State.

WHAT IT DID FOR ASU: After the disappointment of the losses in Corvallis and Tucson, the victory in the Sun Bowl did what wins in either of those games would've accomplished: giving ASU double-digit wins in back-to-back seasons for the first time in 40 years. The win was big for Graham and sent ASU into the home stretch of recruiting for the 2015 class with momentum.
Buzzfeed, January 14: A Mindset Revolution Sweeping Britain’s Classrooms May Be Built On Shaky Science.

Somebody needed to write this article. It’s written very well. I’ve talked to the writer, Tom Chivers, and he was very careful and seems like a great person. The article even quotes me, although I think if I had gotten to choose a quote of mine for thousands of people to see, it wouldn’t have been the one speculating about Carol Dweck making a pact with the Devil.

But I’m not entirely on board with it.

Growth mindset has been really hyped and Carol Dweck has said it can do implausibly exciting things, okay. A lot of smart people are very suspicious of growth mindset and think there has to be some trick, sure. There’s a high prior that something is up, definitely.

But one thing that needs to be at the core of any article like this is that, if there’s a trick, we haven’t found it.

I tried to be really clear about this in my own (mostly pessimistic) article on the subject:

It is right smack in the middle of a bunch of fields that have all started seeming a little dubious recently. Most of the growth mindset experiments have used priming to get people in an effort-focused or an ability-focused state of mind, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate and cast doubt on the entire field. And growth mindset has an obvious relationship to stereotype threat, which has also started seeming very shaky recently. So I have every reason to be both suspicious of and negatively disposed toward growth mindset. Which makes it appalling that the studies are so damn good.

This is the context of my speculation that Carol Dweck has made a pact with the Devil. I haven’t accused (for example) the stereotype threat people of making a pact with the Devil. They did some crappy studies and exaggerated the results. That doesn’t require any diabolic help. Any social scientist can do that, and most of them do. What’s interesting about the growth mindset research is that it looks just like the sort of thing that should fall apart with a tiny gust of wind, but it actually hangs together pretty well.

BuzzFeed doesn’t really challenge that. The article spends most of its time snarking about how overhyped growth mindset is – and no objections there, given that its advocates claim that it can eg help defuse the Israel-Palestine conflict and bring peace to the Middle East. It spends a bit more time talking about how many people are doubtful – no objections there either, I’m doubtful too.

But in terms of the evidence against it, it’s kind of thin. I only see three real points:

First, it uses a technique called GRIM (granularity-related inconsistency of means). I like its explanation so I’m just going to quote it verbatim:

t works like this: Imagine you have three children, and want to find how many siblings they have, on average. Finding an average, or mean, will always involve adding up the total number of siblings and dividing by the number of children – three. So the answer will always either be a whole number, or will end in .33 (a third) or .67 (two thirds). If there was a study that looked at three children and found they had, on average, 1.25 siblings, it would be wrong – because you can’t get that answer from the mean of three whole numbers.

But Dweck says that she “took ambiguous answers as half scores” – maybe if the child was halfway between growth mindset and fixed mindset it was counted as a 0.5. It’s bad practice to do this kind of thing without mentioning it. But everyone does some bad practices sometime. And I don’t see anybody claiming it affected the results, which were very strong and not likely to stand or fall based on these sorts of things. Nobody is claiming fraud, and Dweck released her original data which looks pretty much like she was generally honest but had some bad reporting practice. Neither the statistician involved nor BuzzFeed claims this affects Dweck’s work very much.

Second, it mentions Stuart Ritchie’s criticism of a couple of recent Dweck papers which show “marginally significant” results. These results are so weak that they’re probably coincidence, but the paper hypes them up. There are a couple of studies like this, but they’re all in very tangential areas of mindsetology, like how children inherit their parents’ mindsets. The original studies, again, show very strong results that don’t need this kind of pleading. For example, the one I cited in my original post got seven different results at the p < 0.001 level. And there are a lot of studies like this.

Third, it mentions a psychologist Timothy Bates who has tried to replicate Dweck’s experiments (at least) twice, and failed. This is the strongest evidence the article presents. But I don’t think any of Bates’ failed replications have been published – or at least I couldn’t find them. Yet hundreds of studies that successfully demonstrate growth mindset have been published. Just as a million studies of a fake phenomenon will produce a few positive results, so a million replications of a real phenomenon will produce a few negative results. We have to look at the entire field and see the balance of negative and positive results. The last time I tried to do this, the only thing I could find was this meta-analysis of 113 studies which found a positive effect for growth mindset and relatively little publication bias in the field.

My intuition tells me not to believe this meta-analysis. But I think it’s really important to emphasize that I’m going off intuition. There’s no shame in defying the data when you think that’s justified, but you had better be really aware that’s what you’re doing.

I guess my concern is this: the Buzzfeed article sounds really convincing. But I could write an equally convincing article, with exactly the same structure, refuting eg global warming science. I would start by talking about how global warming is really hyped in the media (true!), that people are making various ridiculous claims about it (true!), interview a few scientists who doubt it (98% of climatologists believing it means 2% don’t), and cite two or three studies that fail to find it (98% of studies supporting it means 2% don’t). Then I would point out slight statistical irregularities in some of the key global warming papers, because every paper has slight statistical irregularities. Then I would talk about the replication crisis a lot.

I could do this with pretty much any theory I wanted. Any technique strong enough to disprove anything disproves nothing.

(and this is especially important in light of recent really strange negative results that eg fail to find a sunk cost effect, something I would hate to enshrine as “well, guess this has been debunked, no such thing as sunk cost now”)

Again, this isn’t to say I believe in growth mindset. I recently talked to a totally different professor who said he’d tried and failed to replicate some of the original growth mindset work (again, not yet published). But we should do this the right way and not let our intuitions leap ahead of the facts.

I worry that one day there’s going to be some weird effect that actually is a bizarre miracle. Studies will confirm it again and again. And if we’re not careful, we’ll just say “Yeah, but replication crisis, also I heard a rumor that somebody failed to confirm it,” and then forget about it. And then we’ll miss our chance to bring peace to the Middle East just by doing a simple experimental manipulation on the Prime Minister of Israel.

I think it’s good that people are starting to question growth mindset. But at this point questioning it isn’t enough. In my essay I tried to find problems that might have caused spurious effects in Dweck’s studies, and patterns inconsistent with growth mindset being powerful. I think we need to do more of that, plus look for specific statistical and experimental flaws in the papers supporting growth mindset, plus start collecting real published papers that fail to replicate growth mindset. Instead of talking about how sketchy it is, we need to actually disprove it.

We owe it to ourselves, to Carol Dweck, and to her infernal masters.
WASHINGTON — Aides to President-elect Donald J. Trump announced Wednesday night that his transition team would not include lobbyists and that members of the administration would be barred from lobbying for five years after they left government service.

The announcement, made in the first transition conference call with reporters, was an attempt to make good on Mr. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. It was also a reaction to criticism that some of the original transition team members were lobbyists from interests they were being assigned to oversee.

Under the rules, announced by Sean Spicer, a transition spokesman, lobbyists joining the Trump team would have to terminate their formal registration to lobby. Aides to Mr. Trump said several of the firings in recent days were part of an effort to enforce the new rules, though they declined to reveal any names.

Others have described the firings as part of an effort by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, to rid the transition of connections to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was ousted last week as the head of the transition. Aides have denied those reports.
China's top judicial authorities on Tuesday issued a new judicial interpretation for laws on criminal cases related to environmental pollution in an effort to address pollution problems with harsher punishment on polluters.

The interpretation, which was jointly released by China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) and Supreme People's Procuratorate, effective Wednesday, offers detailed standards for the conviction and sentencing of criminals involved in environmental cases.

SPC spokesman Sun Jungong said at a press conference in Beijing Tuesday that the latest interpretation, with lower benchmarks for convictions, would help with the work of judges as it is more precise and practical, compared with the previous one released in 2006.

The interpretation lowers some benchmarks for conviction, which, Sun said, means more polluters will be targeted.

The document lists that a person can be convicted if he or she is responsible for pollution that seriously injures a person, while the previous benchmark stated that the pollution had to have resulted in death. Pollution activities which force the evacuation of over 5,000 people or poison more than 30 people will be defined as crimes, according to the new interpretation.

The latest interpretation has added new activities as criteria for the crime of impairing the protection of the environment and resources.

For instance, discharging, dumping or treating radioactive waste or waste containing infectious disease pathogens or toxic substances into sources of drinking water and nature reserves will be considered as such a crime.

Sun explained that the new criteria would convict the offenders not only for the damage they do but also for the practice of polluting.

According to China's Criminal Law, those convicted of such crimes will face a maximum prison term of seven years plus fines.

"This is a sign of progress of the Chinese judiciary in fighting against environmental pollution, as it can help to prevent pollution from the beginning by giving potential polluters a warning," Wang Jin, an environmental law professor with Peking University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The document lists that those who discharged hazardous substances repeatedly after having received administrative punishments more than twice within two years could be considered as breaching criminal laws.

Wang said such criteria could be regarded as a supplement to the current administrative punishment, which mainly includes fines and warnings by local environmental authorities.

China's law did not have a clear stipulation of what activities could result in such criminal charges, said Hu Yunteng, a senior research fellow with the SPC, which experts said was one of the reasons for China's long-standing environmental issues.

Also on Tuesday, the Ministry of Public Security announced that police have detained 118 suspects involved in environmental pollution cases since January. Police said most of the cases involved mines or petrochemical factories, including a number of large factories that pay significant taxes.

Xia Jun, a lawyer with the Environment and Resources Law Committee of the All China Lawyers Association, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the interpretation will not be sufficient given that some local governments tend to offer protection to major polluters who contribute to local GDP.

"It's possible that local environmental watchdogs choose not to turn the polluters over to the police since they're major sources of government revenue, and some may be taking bribes," Xia said.

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Image copyright Moray Council Image caption Graham Leadbitter said he did not want the issue detracting from campaigning

A Moray women's group which has a man on its board has left the Scottish Women's Aid network as the appointment does not comply with its rules.

Graham Leadbitter, a councillor, has worked with Elgin-based Moray Women's Aid (MWA) for many years.

When Scottish Women's Aid (SWA) said it breached its conditions, the board of MWA decided it would not change its set-up, and resigned.

MWA said feedback was positive. SWA said women-only boards mattered.

The Women's Aid network supports women, children and young people who have experienced domestic abuse across Scotland.

'Positive comments'

Mr Leadbitter told the BBC Scotland news website: "I have been a member of the Moray Women's Aid board for about eight years, it's not been a secret, but the SWA spotted that and they said that did not comply.

"The MWA board discussed the issue and agreed they did not want to change the set-up. It should be based on ability rather than gender.

"So MWA indicated they would withdraw their affiliation. MWA is an independent organisation and felt it was the best route.

"I would not want the issue to detract from the very good work women's aid groups do. If it opens up debate about how you can address inequality then that's maybe not a bad thing.

"I have had positive comments about the position we have taken."

'Challenge inequality'

The SWA said in a statement: "We're sorry to confirm that Moray Women's Aid are no longer members of the Scottish Women's Aid network and we wish them all the very best as they continue to provide vital services for women, children and young people experiencing domestic abuse across Moray.

"Women are often excluded from making decisions about issues that predominantly affect women's lives; just look at the decision-making tables around Scotland.

"Less than 35% of members of the Scottish Parliament are women; women are only 25% of councillors and 36% of public boards. We believe Scotland aspires to be equal, but we are not there yet, and the reality is unless we take action, the playing field will never be levelled."

The statement added: "Women-only boards are important for Scottish Women's Aid, because we recognise that in Scotland historically and currently women are not equal, and do not have the same opportunities and experiences as men.

"We want to challenge inequality at every level outwith and within our organisation, and that means promoting and protecting women's spaces and places as decision makers in the fight to end domestic abuse in Scotland.

"Whilst we are sorry that Moray have left our network, we remain committed to and passionate about women-only boards in our national network, with a strong and positive history of women helping women."
Larry Wilmore at Comedy Central’s “Nightly Show” offers up a five-minute segment on what fools Emory University has made of itself with its outrage over the “Trump 2016” chalk marks. Worth a watch here.

(Trigger warning: Wilmore uses the “n-word”! But it’s okay because he’s a comic, and they can do that.) Best part: “I had no idea I went to a school with people who had. . . different opinions than me!” “My therapist just laughed at me.” “Somebody saw the word ‘slave’ in a history book.” It is almost enough to make you want to vote for Trump.

Then there’s The Guardian, the board-certified leftist newspaper, which offers this video from Julie Bindel, who I gather is a leftist of some kind, who has decided this is all going too far in “Sorry: We Can’t Ban Everything That Offends You.”

P.S. Larry Wilmore’s panel discussion heaps additional scorn on campus snowflakes here.
In seeking to comply with new record-keeping requirements from the National Archives, Hillary Clinton turned over thousands of pages of her personal e-mails to the State Department, officials said. (John Woods/AP)

Hillary Rodham Clinton was not the first senior government leader to conduct official business on personal e-mail, a practice that — while discouraged — apparently became widespread enough that Congress tightened rules on its use late last year.

The Federal Records Act prohibits official business on private e-mail accounts unless the communications are copied and turned over to the National Archives within 20 days.

The new oversight is part of the government’s evolving policy on how to archive the massive volume of electronic communications created in a digital age of e-mail, tweets and Instagram. It follows a flurry of disclosures that several Cabinet-level officials — including former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson and former health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius — used private or secondary government e-mail accounts.

The continuing use of non-official accounts for official business has attracted congressional inquiries amid questions about transparency. On Wednesday, the head of the small office that investigates chemical accidents is scheduled to testify at a House committee hearing on an inspector general’s report that he and two deputies discussed internal disputes about agency operations on private e-mail accounts and did not preserve them.

Several large agencies, including the EPA and the Defense, State, Treasury, Interior and Homeland Security departments, said their senior leaders restrict all government business to government e-mail accounts. John F. Kerry is the first secretary of state to rely on a government e-mail account, officials said.

Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail address that she used while secretary of state reinforces everything people don’t like about her, argues The Post’s Chris Cillizza, and is very dangerous to her presidential ambitions. (The Washington Post)

The EPA “discourages the use of private e-mails,” an agency spokesman said. “Our policy is to forward e-mails initiated from and received by private e-mail accounts to government e-mail accounts to create a record in the EPA e-mail system within 20 days.”

A Treasury Department spokesman said Secretary Jack Lew conducts official department business on government e-mail.

“Treasury policy is that employees should conduct official business through their official treasury e-mail accounts. The policy recognizes that there are situations in which an employee must use a personal e-mail account for work purposes. In those circumstances, the employee must ensure that all federal records are preserved,” the spokesman said.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, benefits chief Allison Hickey is known to hand out her “work e-mail” and said she answers veterans’ inquiries in the middle of the night. But while she encourages veterans to e-mail her directly, she does not use a personal e-mail account for anything work-related, even though she sometimes receives hundreds of e-mails a week.

Under federal law, the communications of Cabinet secretaries and their deputies are government records that must be preserved so that Congress, historians, the news media and the public can see them, with exceptions for classified and sensitive materials.

But policies on managing these records in an electronic age are evolving slowly. The Archives has been debating new policies and building new computer systems to preserve the documents.

Agencies in the past sent official documents to the Archives in paper boxes. Now, the task of saving ephemeral communications and complying with transparency requirements at the same time is the subject of heated debate.

“It is perfectly understandable why someone who is secretary of state is using a private e-mail system,” said Jason Baron, a former director of litigation at the Archives, referring to Clinton. “It’s easier than logging in from an airplane to a Citrix connection. But for four years, it was used as the sole system, and no one seemed to notice.”

At the time, Clinton’s aides did not take actions to have her personal e-mails preserved on agency computer servers, as the records act requires. But in seeking to comply with new record-keeping requirements from the Archives, she turned over thousands of pages of her personal e-mails to the State Department, officials said.

“The department is in the process of updating our records-preservation policies to bring them in line with recent 2013 [Archives] guidance,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said. “These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s e-mails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records.”

E-mails have been considered official government records since the late 1980s. The White House set up an archiving system for presidential electronic records in the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton was president.

It wasn’t until 2011, amid pressure from advocates, that President Obama required a “modernized records management” system for federal agencies. All e-mail records must be archived by 2016. Agencies can decide which to save for the public and for how many years.

Until then, the Archives offered only vague guidance on the use of official e-mail. The agency issued regulations in 2009 requiring e-mails sent on non­government accounts to be preserved “in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”

Jackson, the former EPA chief, drew criticism for using a secondary e-mail account to communicate with staff and other government officials. The EPA inspector general found no evidence that e-mail was used in a way that circumvented federal requirements.

Sebelius also used a separate e-mail account for agency business.

If the use of personal e-mail is not a violation, as long as communications are forwarded and stored, they are officially subject to the Freedom of Information Act. But this raises red flags for open-government advocates, who say there is no way to monitor whether a government official picks and chooses which communications to save.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said: “The policy really should say no private e-mail accounts. Leaving to the government official who wrote the e-mail to decide what’s public is not adequate.”

Correction: An earlier version of the story said that the office that investigates chemical accidents was part of the EPA.

Alice Crites, Joby Warrick, Missy Ryan, Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, Jerry Markon and Steven Mufson in Washington and Carol Morello in Montreux, Switzerland, contributed to this report.
Update 8/4/16: Several spec teardown reports have uncovered slight difference in the graphical hardware performance of Xbox One S. Specifically, Xbox One S has a small GPU clock increase of 914 MHz from 853 MHz and an ESRAM bandwidth increase of 219 GB/s from 204 GB/s. These bumps are only noticeable in-game in a small number of situations. In fact, they exist only as an bonus side effect of Microsoft ensuring HDR content performs without a hitch.

This is more like it.

The Xbox One S is the version of the console that Microsoft should've first released back in 2013 instead of the lumbering beast that we got. It's better in a number of ways, making it even more of a worthy alternative to Sony's PlayStation 4.

Xbox One S offers a far more attractive enclosure, options for a bigger hard drive, a slightly redesigned controller and some video perks for owners of 4K TVs. It starts at $300, £250 or AU$400 for the 500GB version; $350, £300 or AU$500 for a 1TB model; and $400, £350 or AU$549 for 2TB.

That last model is available to buy as of today in the US (and includes the vertical stand that otherwise costs $20 when purchased separately in the US), while those with the smaller hard drives will be available later in August, bundled with games such as Madden 17 and Halo. (Additional bundles will follow later in the year -- including a pricier 2TB Gears of War 4 version in October -- and may vary by region.)

Sarah Tew/CNET

Sounds like a slam dunk, right? Unfortunately, it's never that simple. The One S doesn't get an across-the-board "buy it now" recommendation for two reasons. First off, it doesn't deliver huge improvements for anyone who already owns an Xbox One. But more importantly, Microsoft has already promised that the next Xbox -- dubbed Project Scorpio -- will be arriving in late 2017 with with the seriously amped-up graphics and VR-ready hardware that audiences are clamoring for.

When it's all said and done, the Xbox One S should be primarily viewed as a slimmed-down version of the Xbox One that introduces a mildly updated controller and provisions for 4K display. It's not going to warp you into a state-of-the-art gaming experience. Pragmatically, you're probably better off nabbing an older Xbox One, which are now being sold at fire-sale prices. But if you are getting an Xbox One for the first time, have an interest in the bundled games and aren't saving your pennies for 2017's Project Scorpio, the One S is certainly a good all-round gaming and entertainment deal.

What's new in the Xbox One S

There's a short but significant list of improvements and changes to the Xbox One S.

Smaller, cleaner design: To start, it's 40 percent smaller, which considering its power supply is now internal, is impressive. It's also stark white, with some slick plastic moldings flanking the entirety of the box. I think it's the best-looking Xbox Microsoft has ever designed.

The One S can also stand vertically, too. The 2TB model we received for review packs in a stand. If you buy one of the other models, you can get the stand separately for $20.

Sarah Tew/CNET

4K and HDR video: Xbox One S gets a fairly beefy upgrade on its video capabilities, with 4K resolution (3,840x2,160, or four times as sharp as standard 1080p HDTVs) and HDR (high dynamic range, which is basically enhanced contrast and color). Keep in mind: those features only work on compatible TVs and 4K functionality only works with a small but growing list of compatible video content. 4K can currently be accessed through streaming video services such as Amazon and Netflix (as long as you have the bandwidth to support it and pay for their premium tier) and those new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. Certain games, meanwhile, will eventually be able to take advantage of HDR visual improvements, but don't look for PC-like 4K graphics -- the games are merely upscaled to 4K.

So no, you're not getting native 4K gaming out of an Xbox One S. In fact, only a limited number of games will feature HDR and none of them are out yet. They are Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3 and 2017's Scalebound.

New controller design: The Xbox One controller has been updated for the S, too. It has a more streamlined top section, better range and textured grips. It can also use Bluetooth to connect, which opens the door for compatibility with other devices -- no more annoying dongles, at least on Bluetooth-compatible PCs.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of the new controller's design. It's not a drastic departure from the original, but there's just enough of a change to make it feel cheaper. The plastic textured grips don't feel good the way rubberized ones do, but thankfully the triggers seem unchanged. The D-pad also feels slightly less tactile -- I even noticed differences between two of the new controllers side by side.

IR blaster and receiver: Still present is the IR port for controlling the console with a remote, but the Xbox One S also features an integrated IR blaster to control or power on other devices in the room.

Sarah Tew/CNET

And it still does everything the old Xbox One does: The good news is that you're not losing anything with the Xbox One S compared with its predecessor. Around back the console offers a lot of the same ports as the original Xbox One, though noticeably absent is a dedicated Kinect port. You can still attach Kinect to the Xbox One S, you'll just need a special $40 (!) adapter. Either way, the omission of a Kinect port should give you an idea of how that peripheral is regarded at Microsoft HQ.

HDMI-in and -out ports are still there, so you can still make use of the Xbox One's live TV integration if that's something that appeals to you, but I never found it overly useful.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Suffice it to say, the One S plays all existing Xbox One games, and a growing list of Xbox 360 games. It also includes all of the encouraging software improvements Microsoft has made over the past few years, including the redesigned interface, support for the Cortana digital assistant (using a microphone headset), compatibility with the Windows Store and, soon, additional cross-play options with Windows PC gamers on certain titles.

4K and HDR scorecard

I want to personally thank the Xbox One S for introducing me to the hot mess that is the world of 4K and HDR formats. I considered myself fairly fluent in the language of home theater, but I was bewildered at the insane of amount of granularity and confusion that the format is currently plagued with.
THE BREAKDOWN

N.C. State

1. N.C. State

2. Ole Miss

3. William & Mary

4. Binghamton 1. N.C. State2. Ole Miss3. William & Mary4. Binghamton

North Carolina State will not be a fun team to face this weekend in the Raleigh Regional. The Wolfpack finished the regular season and conference tournament with a very impressive 18-10 mark vs. RPI Top 50 teams, but were snubbed out of a national seed, with Oregon getting the nod for the No. 8 spot. N.C. State's starting rotation has been kind of a revolving door this season, but keep an eye on imposing left-handed pitcher Carlos Rodon, who was up to 93 in the ninth inning last weekend against North Carolina, and had his usual devastating 83-85 slider working extremely well, particularly in on right-handed hitters. Left-handed pitcher Brad Stone is a tall lanky-framed guy who has shown flashes of greatness this season, making his 5.81 ERA rather deceptive, while Logan Jernigan was in the rotation last weekend and has a 1.07 ERA in 25 1/3 innings of work. Meanwhile, the strength of this team is the bullpen with quality arms such as Grant Sasser (1.18, 29 IP), Josh Easley (1.62), Andrew Woeck (2.86) and Ryan Wilkins (4.00) leading the charge. Also keep an eye on consistent closer Chris Overman, who doesn't have overpowering stuff, but is a bulldog who throws strikes. Meanwhile, from an offensive standpoint, the Wolfpack have the potential to put up some runs if they get on a roll. Third baseman Grant Clyde, who's hitting .291 with four homers and 24 RBIs has been solid lately, while shortstop Trea Turner leads the way with a .376 batting average, six homers, 40 RBIs, and of course, 24 stolen bases in 30 attempts. Bryan Adametz and Jake Fincher also are tough hitters, while imposing Tarran Senay, who's hitting .284 with six homers and 49 RBIs, has good power and is a run producer.

Ole Miss

As usually seems to be the case, the Rebels are a rather frustrating team this season. After losing several key cogs from last year's team at the plate, the Rebels appeared to be a team ready to move forward earlier in the season. However, they've been struggling at the plate and enter the postseason hitting .276. Catcher Stuart Tuner is a bright spot both offensively and defensively, hitting an impressive .381 with 15 doubles, five homers and 50 RBIs, while third baseman Andrew Mistone (.316/0/34) and Austin Anderson (.300/3/38) also have been impressive at times. Speedy outfielder Tanner Mathis must rise to the occasion this weekend, while the same can be said for sophomore Auston Bousfield, who's hitting just .262 with two homers and 24 RBIs. Pitching-wise, the Rebels have the ability to be outstanding with right-handed starting pitchers Bobby Wahl and Mike Mayers in charge. Both Wahl and Mayers will throw anywhere from 92-94, with Wahl touching some 95s on the radar gun. Mayers was impressive in the SEC tournament, perhaps serving a springboard to the postseason. Meanwhile, right-handed pitcher Sam Smith has been solid at times this season and gets up to 90 with his fastball, while in the bullpen, Brett Huber, Matt Denny, Tanner Bailey and Aaron Greenwood give the Rebels a reliable quartet.

William & Mary

William & Mary went on an offensive rampage last weekend in the CAA tournament and is an interesting team to watch this weekend in Raleigh, N.C. It's safe to say the Tribe won't overwhelm anyone from a pitching staff. William & Mary possesses a pair of solid starting pitchers in John Farrell and Jason Inghram. Farrell has a 2.80 ERA in 109 1/3 innings of work, along with 86 strikeouts and 13 walks, while Inghram has a 3.46 ERA in 96 1/3 innings along with 96 strikeouts and 23 walks. Depth is an issue for the Tribe, but keep an eye on reliever Matt Wainman, who has appeared in 24 games and has eight saves with a 3.90 ERA in 60 innings. Offensively, the Tribe can overwhelm teams with a .296 batting average entering the weekend. Michael Katz (.365/5/47) and Ryan Lindemuth (.363/4/47) are elite hitters to watch, while Ryan Brown is hitting .329 with two homers and 30 RBIs.

Binghamton

The Bearcats finished the regular season with just a 17-14 mark in the America East, but are playing a solid brand of baseball and have an upset on their minds. Binghamton isn't an overly impressive offensive club with a .266 team batting average, but keep an eye on leading hitters Jake Thomas, Daniel Nevares and Shaun McGraw. Thomas is hitting .382 with five homers and 36 RBIs, Nevares is hitting .314 with two homers and 34 RBIs and McGraw is hitting .295 with four homers and 15 RBIs. Pitching-wise, the Bearcats have a few very quality arms to watch, particularly in the way of starting pitchers Jack Rogalia, Jake Lambert and Jay Lynch. Rogalia has a 2.82 ERA in 83 innings of work, along with 51 strikeouts and 13 walks, Lambert has a 2.95 ERA in 94 2/3 innings, along with 76 strikeouts and 16 walks, while Lynch has a 2.98 ERA in 81 2/3 innings, along with 53 strikeouts and 14 walks. Binghamton's offense must step up to experience some success this weekend.

REGIONAL FORECAST
When you take into account its purchase price and all of the consumables it requires--toner or ink, paper, imaging drums, and more--you may find that a printer is one of the most expensive pieces of IT equipment in your business.

When any one user needs access to an expensive machine only intermittently, sharing the hardware among as many users as possible makes sense. The simplest way to accomplish this in an office is to put the printer on the office network, where all network users can reach it.

There are three basic approaches to putting a printer on a network. The first is to use a printer that has networking capabilities built in. The second is to attach a printer to a separate network endpoint (a dedicated print server) that may or may not have additional features. And the third is to attach the printer to a computer workstation and share it with other network users.

Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each works best under specific circumstances.

Connecting a Network-Enabled Printer

The easiest type of printer to connect is one that comes with a network adapter already installed in it. If your network architecture is simple, you can have a peripheral of this type printing across the network in a matter of minutes.

If every computer in the office or home network resides in the same network space (that is, if the first three triplets in the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address are the same for each machine), setting up printer sharing is quite simple. If different subnetworks exist (so that only the first two triplets are the same for every computer) the task is more complicated--but in such a case, your business probably also has a dedicated IT staff.

Often the product description accompanying printers equipped with preinstalled network adapters includes the words "network printer" or "network capable." Many printer manufacturers signal that the printer is network-ready by including the letter "n" somewhere in the model name. The network connection provided may be cable-based or wireless. Either method of data transfer will be faster than the speed at which paper can come out of the printer, so the method has no significant impact on printer performance. Network-enabled machines may be inkjets (such as the Epson B-510DN and the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless) or lasers (such as the Dell 5130cdn and the HP CP4025dn).

The precise process for setting up a network printer for operation varies from printer to printer, but in every case a couple of basic steps must be completed.

The first is to decide whether to assign the printer its own static (never-changing) address on the network or to allow the network's Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server to assign it an address, as it does for all the desktop and mobile clients on the network.

If you decide to accept DHCP, you're likely done with the printer's network setup. If not, you must ensure that the network address you assign to the printer isn't already assigned to any other device, and won't be assigned by DHCP. This generally means choosing an address high in the range of available options--say, 200 or above. (xxx.xxx.xxx.200). If you don't know which addresses have already been assigned on your network or what range the DHCP server uses, you're almost certainly better off letting DHCP handle address selection for you.

Once the printer is online, you can begin connecting to it from various workstations. In XP, Vista, or Windows 7, the process is similar to the one for establishing a direct printer connection. In the Control Panel, choose Printers, Add New Printer, Network Printer, and then allow the wizard to browse for printers.

You should see the new printer in the list that Windows provides, probably with a name indicating its brand and model number. If you were able to select a name in the printer options while setting up the printer, you'll see that name. Select the printer name and click add. The operating system will select the proper driver from the list of installed drivers, and you'll be ready to print.

If you don't see the printer identified in the browser wizard, check the computer's firewall settings. If you ratchet up a computer's security settings too high, the system won't permit the traffic necessary to discover and report on printer status. If this happens, you can temporarily lower the firewall settings to a more permissive level, install the printer, and raise the security settings to their previous high level.

Using a network-capable printer is the simplest way to make printing available across your network. Though the cost of network capability has come down, it does add to the purchase price of the printer, and--depending on the printer--it may encourage broader use of more-expensive print services, such as color printing.
HBO’s comedy “Silicon Valley” makes fun of the way even boring startup tech companies adopt the same mission statement: “To make the world a better place.”

But serial entrepreneur and former Microsoft executive Alex Garden isn’t shy about stating his new company’s path to making the world a better place—through pizza. It’s not just any pizza, though. Zume pizzas are made by robots, and they’re cooked in pizza ovens inside delivery trucks.

Alex Garden (right) treats me to the finished product. More

“One of the founding principles of this company is that every American has a right to a healthy meal they can afford,” he told me. “If you look at pizza, what is it? It’s high-quality bread, and high-quality organic vegetables, and meats and cheeses. All of these things are things that are good for you in moderation. And the number of calories really is a function of how much sugar is in the food. Zume Pizza is half the calories per slice, roughly half the cholesterol and half the fat, of any of the national leading chains.”

How? “The main reason is sugar,” says Garden, whose pizzas range in price from $10 for a cheese to $20 for a pineapple express.

“We don’t put any extra sugar in the sauce. We don’t put any extra sugar in the dough. And we let our dough age for 24 hours; during that process, the fermentation of the dough further reduces the sugar in it.”

He also has much to say about where he gets his ingredients—directly from the providers, without the warehouses and distribution channels that, say, Pizza Hut (YUM) or Domino’s (DPZ) employ. He uses software—predictive algorithms—to know what he’ll need when. He makes his sausage and tomato sauce in-house.

But that’s not the most headline-grabbing feature of Zume pizza, which was founded in 2015 and currently delivers in Mountain View, California, and surrounding areas. The biggest feature is the robots.

The robots

Inside the Zume kitchen, robots are displacing more human workers every passing month. These days, one robot presses out the dough into the familiar flattened circle; a second and third (Pepe and Giorgio) squirt tomato sauce or white sauce onto each pie; a fourth (Marta) spreads the sauce around (“perfectly, but not too perfectly,” Garden says). Humans apply the toppings, but then a fourth machine (Bruno) scoops up the pizza from the conveyor belt and delicately lays it into the baking oven; a fifth (Leonardo) chops it neatly into eight slices with a single, 200-pounds-of-force stroke.

Pepe squirts tomato sauce all day long. More

Eventually, Garden and his cofounder Julia Collins intend to replace all of the humans in their pizza shop.

The robots are fun to watch—as long as you can avoid thinking, “This is what the end of human employment looks like.”

But Garden insists that replacing the people is also part of making the world a better place.

“The automation exists so that we can eliminate boring, repetitive jobs, and provide a more rewarding work environment for our employees,” he says. “And it exists so that we can buy higher quality ingredients. That’s the reason why we use it.”

For example, he says, “taking a pizza off of a production line and putting it into an 800-degree oven is actually not particularly rewarding, and it’s also quite dangerous. So we found a way to automate that work now that was previously done by a person.

“So what happens to the person? Well, good news. We’re a high-growth company. We have people who’ve moved from a role in the kitchen to other roles—to customer support or to finance. You come in and prove that you can work the Zume way, and we make a lifetime commitment to you in return.”

Story continues
Thiago "tifa" França has announced he will no longer be part of Merciless, leaving the team down to just two players.

Merciless, who won the ESL Brazil Premier League #3 after 2-0 victories over Keyd Stars and Black Dragons earlier this year, and who took second place at Gamers Club Masters 2017 with stand-ins Caio "zqkS" Fonseca and Victor "bld" Rocha, losing only to Rafael "pava" Pavanelli and Bruno "bit" Lima's TeamOne in the final, is now down to just a duo.

tifa announced he will keep playing and will listen to offers

With this exit, Merciless has only Felipe "delboNi" Delboni and Ricardo "s1" Shinji in its ranks, and the future of the team hangs by a thread. Meanwhile, Thiago "tifa" França announced that while he will no longer play with Merciless, he will remain active and will be open to new offers.

With this exit, Merciless looks as follows:
Rrose - Waterfall Variations

After two separate releases of Merchant Of Salt , on Sandwell District and Eaux, Rrose has now chosen to expose the record's B-side, "Waterfall," in its foetal form: a newly issued "Birth" mix, included here on, was actually recorded before the version released two years ago. It now arrives with a remix by Stroboscopic Artefacts' Lucy, and supplemented by a new Rrose track, "Shrouds."While the well-known original was based on a gradual blossoming of a corrosive synth that built to an orgasmic peak, the "Birth" version has space for haunting atonal murmurs that add a sense of hallucinatory ambience. Halfway through, the ghastly cries take center stage, giving an almost Boards Of Canada-like eeriness to the finish. The Lucy remix is a slow-and-steady march, made memorable by sporadic guitar-like synth hits and waves of visceral noise. The artist's signature conjuration of sophisticated sonic textures is unmistakeable during the intro and outro of the track, making these often overlooked sections perhaps the most interesting. "Shrouds" is lo-fi with starkly minimalistic percussion. Calling to mind the earlier works of Regis, it's uncharacteristically dark for Rrose.
What: Ozomatli – San Diego Symphony

When: Sunday August 24, 2014

Where: Embarcadero Marina Park South, San Diego

Description: By combining hip-hop, salsa, dancehall, samba, funk, garage rock, raga and more into an irresistible groove, the members of the culture-mashing party band Ozomatli have gone from hometown heroes in L.A. to U.S. State Department Cultural Ambassadors and the first band ever to give a “musical” TED talk. Also known for having a fervent political conscience, the Grammy-winning group frequently travels the world, bringing this distinctly SoCal — but universally appealing — music to places like Tunisia, Egypt, Mongolia, Jordan, Nepal and Myanmar. For this outdoor San Diego Symphony show with conductor Matthew Garbutt, Ozomatli will play old favorites as well as tunes from their latest album, Place in the Sun, as they mark their return to Ashford University’s Summer Pops concert series after a hugely popular appearance last summer.

Check out our daily hand selected coupons & deals from our top sponsors including Match.com & Nike. Get an extra 20% Off Nike clearance styles at Nike.com. Use code BIGTIME at Checkout!

What: Pacific Classic Race Day

When: Sunday August 24, 2014

Where: Del Mar Racetrack, San Diego

Description: Del Mar’s richest and most prestigious race, the $1,000,000 TVG Pacific Classic (Gr. I), takes place on Sunday, August 24.

Watch some of the country’s top horses compete at the classic distance of 1 1/4 miles in the 24th running of Del Mar’s signature event. 3-year-olds and up. The first race begins at the special post time of 1:00 p.m.

Cost: $6

What: Sailing for a Cause – Sharp HospiceCare Annual Benefit Dinner and Regatta

When: Friday August 22 to Saturday August 23, 2014

Where: Hotel del Coronado & Coronado Yacht Club/San Diego Bay

Description: Hosted by Sharp HospiceCare, the benefit regatta brings together racers, community organizations and local families for an important cause. The event kicks off Friday evening, Aug. 22, with a dinner, followed by all-day festivities on Saturday, Aug. 23, as guests board sponsored yachts and cruise along the race course with a breathtaking view of the regatta and San Diego Bay.

What: Beach Rockin’ with Hotel California a Salute to the Eagles

When: Sunday August 24, 2014

Where: Oceanside Pier, Oceanside, San Diego

Description: Enjoy a evening by the sea with great Eagles music, food drink and much more. Proceeds will be used to support Maltese Rescue California’s continued efforts in providing the medical care, food, and loving support for California’s homeless and abandoned Maltese. Giving these unwanted, injured, homeless and abandoned Maltese a well deserved second chance with a new furever home.

What: Local Showcase – Silent Comedy, Transfer and Vokab Kompany

When: Friday August 22, 2014

Where: Del Mar Fairgrounds

Description: Del Mar Race Track continues their Summer Concert Series with FREE 4 O’Clock Friday Concerts. Get in the Summer groove with Local Showcase on August 22nd which features Silent Comedy, Transfer and Vokab Kompany.

All 10 performances of the Del Mar Summer Concert Series are free for fans attending the races. The Seaside Stage is a non-smoking venue. The Del Mar Seaside Stage is a Festival venue with standing room only and there are no reserved seats, standing room only so get here early. Concert starts after the races.

Cost: $20.

What: Movies by the Lake – Planes

When: Friday August 22, 2014

Where: Fanita Parkway, Santee, San Diego

Description: Don’t spend another Friday night sitting on the couch in front of the TV! Come sit under the stars and watch a movie on one of the biggest screens known to man. Bring your picnic, or get a snack at the snack bar and watch the kids participate in games and activities before the movie begins. $8 gets your entire carload in the front gate. This season our special guest will be the Chick-Fil-A Cow! So come out, relax and enjoy the movie!

What: Summer Movies in the Park

When: Friday August 22, 2014

Where: San Diego Parks

Description: Looking for a Fun, Free and Fabulous Family Activity in Your Neighborhood? Summer Movies in the Park is a perfect chance to relax and enjoy a safe and special night under the stars. Come early and get a good seat! All movies start at dusk (approx. 15 minutes after sunset). Movies are subject to change. Some of the movies scheduled for this Friday include Frozen – PG at Doyle Community Park and Woodland Park, San Diego, Monsters University – G at Southcrest Community Park, Planes – PG at USS Midway Museum & more.

What: San Diego Spirits Festival

When: Saturday August 23 to Sunday August 24, 2014

Where: Broadway Pier, San Diego

Description: San Diego Spirits Festival is back for another year and is set to take your experience to a new level! The two-day event from is set to delight everyone’s palate and promises to be a feast for all your senses with a weekend of cocktails, food and entertainment. You will enjoy rubbing shoulders with Brand Ambassadors and Celebrity Chefs and expect a fantastic cocktail and culinary experience!

The spirits kick in, the crowds grow, the food excites, and entertainment delights. This year’s theme is burlesque prohibition and if you went to last year’s event you have to know it’s only getting better each season, if that’s possible!

Cost: Use Promo Code SPIRITS for $25 off the tickets

What: TPHS Football Tailgate Party

When: Saturday August 23, 2014

Where: Del Mar Shores Park, San Diego

Description: Kick of the 2014 Falcon Football season with the coaches and Honorary Committee Saturday, August 23rd at The Shores Park in Del Mar from 6pm – 10pm!

The tailgate party will include gourmet tailgate fare, craft beer and wine, live entertainment, and the opportunity to have first dibs on season perks such as side-line passes, season ticket packages, and coveted reserved parking.

Additionally, unique opportunities will be packaged for bidding in our Silent and Live Auctions.

What: Coronado Promenade Summer Concert Series: Todo Mundo & Mariachi Estrellas de Chula Vista

When: Sunday August 24, 2014

Where: Coronado Park, San Diego

Description: Mariachi Chula Vista was formed at Chula Vista High School in September 2001. Since then, the group of young musicians has performed at more than 900 events and has earned a reputation as one of the best student mariachis in the country. The group has appeared at festivals around the world and has shared the stage with the world’s most famous mariachis. Mariachi Chula Vista has won numerous awards and competitions.
CHENNAI: The VR World Congress, scheduled for 12 April 2016 will see participation from over 600 buyers, sellers and developers from VR and its surrounding industries from across the globe. While Brazil was represented last year and Russia and China this year, there is no participation from India.The VR World Congress, to be held in Bristol, UK is expected to see participation from the brightest minds of the VR industry and world leaders in VR such as AMD, HTC and Samsung. The event has been sold out for 2 weeks now, with participation from many countries including Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark amongst others.Amongst the BRIC nations, Brazil was represented last year by VR game designer Ana Ribeiro. This year, Russia will be represented by Interractive Lab who is exhibiting a room-scale Gear VR tracking demonstration. Ximmerse from China is also showcasing its cutting edge VR technology. While all other BRIC nations are showcasing their talent at the Congress, India seems to have given the event a miss. According to the authorities, while there were some hits from India on their website, no inquiries (email/ telephonic) have come in from Indian companies at all."The Bristol & Bath tech cluster has a growing reputation as the European (if not global) capital of VR. The VR World Congress has had a very high level of international participation as a result. World-renowned Brazilian VR designer Ana Ribeiro was a speaker at last year's event, and this year we are pleased to have exhibitors from both Russia and China. We would have loved to have had participation from India as well so all four BRIC were involved. We're hopeful this will happen next year," said Dan Page, Director of the VR World Congress.Entrepreneurs in India in the VR/AR space believe the industry is in the nascent stages in India. “While we are attending events across the globe, it becomes expensive to cover them all. There is a general lack of awareness in the country about the technology,” said Vijay Karunankan, founder, Ingage. Entrepreneurs strongly advocate the need for a body to promote VR and help companies involved in VR to gain prominence in the global scene.“Just days before the event itself we received an enquiry from Mumbai's Gateway VR, saying they would attend if tickets were still available. It was way too late for us to squeeze them in, but I am really looking forward to having them with us next year,” said Page. The two founders of Gateway VR are Shyam Anjaria and Siddharth Mahajan.A report from Statista says that in 2017 the revenue from VR products is predicted to reach $4.6bn. CCS Insight believes that augmented and virtual reality devices will become a $4bn market in three years, in its report Augmented and Virtual Reality Device Forecast, 2015-2019. While the brightest minds of the VR Industry and world leaders in VR come together to discuss the present and future of VR at Bristol, it looks like India is already falling out of the game.
When exactly is Durin’s Day in The Hobbit?

at 5:42 am by - October 5, 20135:42 am by Demosthenes

When exactly is Durin’s Day? For various reasons, including the non-exact correlation of the Shire Calendar and our modern Gregorian calendar, it’s quite hard to know for certain.

In this extensively researched piece, DarkJackal uses Tolkien’s notes as published in John D. Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit to explains why there are conflicting theories… and, in a very Tolkienian fashion, no definitive or easily settled upon answer.

Confusticate and Be-bother these Dates! The Durin’s Day dilemma

by DarkJackal

Having read a number of articles on Durin’s Day, including various attempts to assign a date to it within the story, and to predict it in our modern world, I feel compelled to write my own brief (ha!) essay. My approach to this is two-fold: First – take Excedrin for the headache this issue is causing. Second – quote John D. Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit until things begin to make sense.

“It was the start of the dwarves new year, when the last moon of autumn and the first sun of winter appeared in the sky together.” – Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)

Many Tolkien enthusiasts estimate Durin’s Day of 2941 (which Thorin Oakenshield said happens towards the end of autumn, but not necessarily the last day of autumn, as Gandalf stated in the film) to have occurred in October. You can see how they arrived at this conclusion in the following articles:

The Moon and Durin’s Day – by Lalaith

Was Smaug Slain Oct 26, 2941 TA? – by Auraran

Durin’s Day 2013 – by Ask About Middle Earth

Is Durin’s Day Upon Us? – by The Dwarrow Scholar

Timeline/Chronology for “The Hobbit” – by Douglas Wilhelm Harder

Other authors calculate that Durin’s Day in our world would happen in December, based on our own definition of Autumn:

Observing Durin’s Day – by Kristine Larsen

Predicting Durin’s Day – by Iduna

The reason for the difference of approximately two months comes from the different interpretations of the term “autumn”. Astronomically speaking, the end of autumn is around December 21 (for those in the Northern Hemisphere). If you disregard the astronomical component of it, then you could argue autumn can mean different things to different cultures. It does in our world, so why not in Tolkien’s?

Unfortunately Tolkien never created a calendar for the dwarves, and because he also says that the seasons of Middle-earth have no specific beginning or ending dates, it is possible the dwarves may view the beginning and ending of autumn as occurring on different dates than the hobbits, or elves, or men did. Unfortunately there is nothing I know of in the canon to confirm or deny this, but Tolkien did have this to say regarding the names of months used in The Lord of the Rings:

“…the seasonal implications of our names are more or less the same, at any rate in the Shire. It appears, however, that Mid-year’s Day was intended to correspond as nearly as possible to the summer solstices. In that case the Shire dates were actually in advance of ours by some ten days, and our New Year’s Day corresponded more or less to the Shire January 9.” (The Return of the King, Appendix D).

This becomes important to our discussion further on, since Tolkien uses both the Shire calendar and the Gregorian calendar in his (unpublished) notes. We also know that, at least in The Lord of the Rings, events take place “‘in the Northern Hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather’” (Rateliff 827).

[Read More]

Bootnote: Having read all the articles, I agree with DarkJackal, headache tablets (or whisky!) is in order. However, Rateliff seems to indicate Tolkien was leaning toward October 19 as the Gregorian date it would have occurred on in TA 2941 but just couldn’t make the numbers fit and eventually gave up. I think?
Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 February 20

Comet Lovejoy over the Great Wall

Image Credit & Copyright: Jiajie Zhang

Explanation: Fading now as it returns to the outer solar system Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1) still graces planet Earth's sky, a delicate apparition in binoculars or small telescopes. The comet, a relic of the solar system's formative years, is seen here rising in the morning twilight on January 12 among the stars of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. Posing near the comet is bright star Alpha Ophiuchi, also known as Rasalhague, from Arabic "the head of the serpent collector". Of course, the serpentine shape below is the ancient Great Wall of China, along the Panlongshan section northeast of Beijing. Panlongshan is translated as "a coiled dragon". A moving and fortuitous scene, it was captured with a digital camera and telephoto lens in two consecutive exposures. The exposures were merged to show a natural looking foreground and twilight sky.
Image copyright Getty Images

A new study suggests there is a growing market in the illegal trade of guns and weapons in Libya via social media sites, in particular Facebook.

The report covered 18 months and found sales of a wide range of items - from handguns to rocket-propelled grenades.

Most were offered for sale on "closed" or "secret" Facebook groups.

The illicit sale of guns is a violation of Facebook's terms of service, and a spokesperson said they encourage people to report any such postings.

The report was commissioned by the Small Arms Survey, and used data collected by Armament Research Services (ARES) on a total of 1,346 sales. Researchers believe this is just a fraction of the full trade taking place on social media.

The study will be released on Thursday, but BBC Newsnight has seen an advance copy.

Col Gaddafi was an obsessive buyer of weapons and tightly controlled the market. During his 40 years in power, it is estimated he spent more than $30bn (£20bn) on arms.

Image copyright Facebook Image caption A recent example of a weapon for sale in Libya on Facebook

When rebel forces toppled his regime in 2011, the stockpiles were thrown open and a large black market emerged. Researchers believe the trade on social media began to take off in 2013, and is still growing.

They looked at the trade of small arms and light weapons across sites, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram, and found the largest volume of sales on Facebook.

The majority of weapons being traded were handguns or rifles. The most popular rifle was the Kalashnikov, which sells - they found - on average for 1,800 Libyan dinars ($1,300; £930).

"While the bulk of the traded [items] were traditional small arms - handguns through to self-loading rifles and machine guns - there were also the more significant systems that could have battlefield impacts or terrorist use," says one of the report authors Nic Jenzen-Jones from ARES.

"Manpads are shoulder-launched anti-aircraft systems. We found a number of complete systems listed, but also individual components... They're not really functional against modern fighter aircraft, but the great threat is to civilian aviation."

Researchers found anti-aircraft systems cost up to 85,000 Libyan dinars ($62,000; £44,000). One offer was of an anti-aircraft gun which came complete with a truck.

Find out more:

Tripoli 'U-turn' on unity government

Why is Libya so lawless?

Life in Libya under IS

Guide to key Libyan militias

My search for Gaddafi's golden gun

Most of the sales are concentrated in the big cities, principally Tripoli, Benghazi and Sabratha.

The trade is a mixture of militia buying arms to fight, and militia disposing of them because they are no longer needed, they believe. Most of the sellers are in their 20s and 30s, with sales often completed via private messages or telephone.

Weapons were mostly advertised for sale within "closed" or "secret" groups on Facebook - and therefore only viewable by members of those groups. The groups ranged in size from fewer than 400 members to almost 14,000.

Some had very obvious names, such as The Libyan Firearms Market (now defunct), and many had been operating for the full 18 months of the study - suggesting, the authors say, that it is rare for such sites to be reported.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: "It's against Facebook's Community Standards to coordinate private sales of firearms, and we remove any such content as soon as we become aware of it. We encourage people to use the reporting links found across our site so that our team of experts can review content swiftly."

Researchers believe this is mostly an internal trade within Libya. However there have been concerns raised by the European police agency, Europol, over the number of weapons entering Europe from Libya.

More on this story on BBC Newsnight on Wednesday 6 April at 22:30 BST - or catch up afterwards on iPlayer (UK only)
OTTAWA – Former Republican presidential candidate and libertarian Ron Paul will be the marquee speaker at Canada’s premier gathering of Conservatives next month, a figure that even organizers bill as controversial.

Paul will speak to the Manning Centre for Building Democracy’s networking conference, an event that in the past has drawn Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his key cabinet members and advisers.

Paul, referred to by some pundits as the real inspiration behind the Tea Party movement in the United States, is one of the foremost voices for small government — including eliminating foreign aid, the education department, key social programs and the war on drugs.

He is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-gun control, and opposed to President Barack Obama’s health-care reform. The 77-year-old has advocated for an end to Medicare and Medicaid in the United States.

A Texan, Paul is a former doctor turned congressman and currently the chairman of the Campaign for Liberty. He was able to assemble a loyal following over the course of two Republican races in 2008 and 2011, notably with the use of the Internet.

“We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress,” says the campaign’s website.

“We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.”

Olivier Ballou, a spokesman for the Manning Centre, said centre president Preston Manning himself will engage in an on-stage discussion with Paul following the former presidential candidate’s speech.

“He’s definitely our biggest attraction and source of controversy,” Ballou said. “He’s one of those guys that people either love him or hate him. It’s fascinating since we announced him seeing the debates online.”

On the Manning Centre’s Facebook page, commenters were divided about the wisdom of having Paul speak at the conference.

“Ron Paul is a fool who will only discredit this fine attempt at preparing conservative minds for the future,” read one post.

“Ron Paul is the best politician in the U.S.A., the real deal. Very smart man, can’t believe he isn’t President he’s so smart,” said another.

Conservative parliamentarians who are on the schedule for the conference were markedly terse in their reaction to Paul’s participation.

“I actually have heard him speak in the past, and while I disagree with what he says on occasion, I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” said Treasury Board President Tony Clement.

“The Manning Centre conference has a history of bringing up a wide variety of different speakers to appeal to a wide variety of different audiences, so I don’t think that’ll be any different this time around,” said Calgary MP Michelle Rempel.

Although there are many libertarians in the ranks of the Conservative party, including Harper himself, Paul’s small government is a different breed than that expressed publicly by Conservatives in power. Universal health care, official languages policy and supply management are just three areas that would be anathema to Paul’s positions.

Participants might more in common in another speaker — former Australian prime minister John Howard. Some in Harper’s team borrowed liberally from Howard’s campaign and communications style over the years.

Opposition MPs said it’s telling that Paul was selected to speak to Canada’s top Conservatives.

“We know that the right in Canada are getting loonier all the time, but I think it’s very telling that they’re bringing in Mr. Ron Paul,” said NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus.

“Mr. Ron Paul is a marginal figure in the United States where the right are extremely right wing, so the Harperites think they’re going to learn lessons from him? It might show an indication of where their backbench is certainly wanting to go.”

Said Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia: “I don’t understand what wisdom Mr. Paul can bring to the Canadian setting. We’re a very different country with very different issues.”

Paul courted controversy earlier this week when he tweeted that the “death of a former NAVY Seal at a shooting range confirmed that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.”‘

Paul is strongly non-interventionist when it comes to American military activities, and voted against the war in Iraq.
Yesterday I'd heard from a friend that the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush would be off the coast of Kennebunkport sunday morning. So rising early and always wanting to be a witness to fiscally responsible conservatives, Mr. PB and I headed down to the beach. Sure enough there was an aircraft carrier on the horizon. George the 1st is having a birthday tuesday and someone thought it would be neat for him to visit a big boat.

Bush and his wife, Barbara, along with their son, former President George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura, will fly to the carrier on Sunday morning, accompanied by other family members and security.

The Bushes will take photos with crew members, and other family members who haven't been on board before will be given tours.

Mr. PB and I watched as four helicopters flew up and down the surrounding beaches making sure the coast was clear, probably waiting for the Bushes to finish breakfast before at least one landed at Walker's Point to pick them up and fly them out to the ship. They probably spent about an hour aboard before flying home. Security as always was tight employing local (my tax dollars) as well as federal (our tax dollars) officers. Six hours later helicopters are still buzzing overhead costing money. The Portland Press Herald has more: And I surely don't want to forget this:

The Carrier Mission is:

To provide a credible, sustainable, independent forward presence and conventional deterrence in peacetime.

To operate as the cornerstone of joint/allied maritime expeditionary forces in times of crisis.

To operate and support aircraft attacks on enemies, protect friendly forces and engage in sustained independent operations in war.

To provide pleasure trips and photo-ops for the Bush family in Kennebunkport.

Did I mention that the USS George H.W. Bush cost 6.2 BILLION dollars? George the lesser awarded the contract to Northrop Grumman on January 26, 2001 as one of his first orders of business after his appointment to office. And why is it off the coast of Maine when "we are a nation at war?" I mean shouldn't it be somewhere like the Strait of Hormuz? Isn't Iran a dire threat of smoking guns and mushroom clouds?

So the next time you see John Bonehead crying his crocodile tears over the state of our economy, or any of the other hypocritical bloviaters screaming about democratic spending on infrastructure or programs that benefit the poor it is my hope that you will remember how the Bush family spent their sunday morning. Oh to be the idle rich playing with their boats and whirlybirds on the taxpayers dime. When it comes to republicans wasting our money.... "Mission Accomplished."

Well my diary, which I expected to scroll away, certainly sparked some interest and good debate. My apologies to those who thought I was being petty. That was not my intent. Thank you all for stopping by as I certainly value everyone's opinion.
Justin Dunning has torn his ACL and will miss the 2016 season.

Texas A&M had been fortunate this fall camp in that there were no impact players out with major injuries. However, that changed earlier this week.

On Monday, sophomore safety Justin Dunning went down with an apparent knee injury. He was taken off the field and there had not been an update since.

After Thursday's practice, though, head coach Kevin Sumlin told the media that the 6-foot-4, 220-pound defender had torn his ACL and will miss the season.

Texas A&M HC Kevin Sunlin said Justin Dunning has torn his ACL and is done for the year. Will have surgery next week. — Travis L. Brown (@Travis_L_Brown) August 19, 2016

Dunning, who was serving as a backup to Donovan Wilson at nickel, was expected to be a big contributor this year. As a true freshman a year ago, he played in 11 games, totaling 20 tackles and an interception.

Dunning can use his redshirt season in 2016 and still have three year of eligibility remaining. However, due to a history of knee injuries, Sumlin says Dunning will evaluate his football future once he recovers from the ACL tear.

(What’s happening with Texas A&M during fall camp? Make sure you’re in the loop – take five seconds to sign up for our FREE Aggie newsletter now!)
Commission seeks to block child porn websites Proposal also calls for mandatory sentences for human traffickers.

The European Commission has proposed that websites containing child pornography should be blocked across the European Union and that maximum sentences of five to ten years should be imposed on human traffickers.

The measures are part of a legislative package to combat human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children announced by Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, in Brussels today (29 March).

Malmström also announced that the Commission will appoint an anti-trafficking co-ordinator “very soon”.

Blocking websites is controversial among the member states, whose endorsement, together with that of the European Parliament, is needed for the two directives to take effect. Officials expect fierce disagreements among member states and MEPs as they debate the draft directives, which are likely to be watered down in the process. However, under the Lisbon treaty individual member states can no longer block legislation in the field of justice and home affairs.

Malmström said that she would now work with MEPs and member states to impress on them that acting on these “heinous crimes” was imperative. She said that both Spain and Belgium – the current and next holder of the EU’s rotating presidency – were “eager” to move on the matter. She said that the power to block access to websites would be limited to child pornography and would not be used to block other content.

“Child pornography is not about freedom of expression,” she said.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green MEP, has called on the Commission and the Council of Ministers to “abandon their plans for an EU internet censorship directive”.

“Filtering certain content on the web is counter-productive for the real take-down of illegal websites and constitutes a threat to liberal democracy,” he said. “There is a slippery slope from filtering child abuse and other illegal websites to filtering unwanted or politically unfavourable content.”

Malmström said that blocking websites was not a “substitute for removing content” but a pragmatic measure to prevent people from seeing it. She pointed out that the Scandinavian countries, the UK and Italy already had similar measures in place. “It works in practice,” she said.

The proposals would leave it up to member states to determine the exact methods with which to block access but would set up legal safeguards to ensure that they were effectively blocked. The draft trafficking directive also foresees improved support for victims, including the provision of shelter and medical and psychological assistance.

EU sex tourists would face prosecution in their home country if they abused children outside the EU, and prohibitions on contact with children imposed by one member state would be effective across the EU.
The Apothecarium, a cannabis dispensary set to open in Berkeley, is in danger of losing its permit because of its landlord’s refusal to lease the premise after the dispensary has paid more than $145,000 to secure the premise since 2015, according to a lawsuit.

BTHHM Berkeley LLC, owner of The Apothecarium, filed the lawsuit May 30 against Stewart Johnston, the landlord of the dispensary’s intended Berkeley location on 2578 Shattuck Ave. for alleged “breach of contract” and “other bad faith actions,” according to the lawsuit.

BTHHM Berkeley LLC and Landmark Real Estate Management, on behalf of Johnston, entered into a letter of intent in February 2015 to lease the property, the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit also states that the letter of intent clearly outlined the use of the premise as a marijuana dispensary, after receiving approval by the city.

In September 2016, The Apothecarium became one of two marijuana dispensaries unanimously granted a permit by City Council after the city changed the legal limit of medical marijuana dispensaries from four to six. The Apothecarium and Berkeley Compassionate Care Center were selected out of five dispensary applicants.

As location of the dispensaries was one of the factors considered in selection, by refusing to allow possession of the premise for months after receiving permit, the dispensary may lose its permit according to the lawsuit.

In addition, the lawsuit states that BTHHM has spent more than $400,000 over the last two years, which includes $140,000 in rent toward Johnston, and additional fees to secure the location and obtain its permit.

Johnston has insisted on making changes to terms which were agreed upon, which includes raising the base rent from $6,400 to $12,600 every month, raising the security deposit from $12,800 to $50,000 and making structural improvements to the property which is estimated to cost $700,000, according to the lawsuit.

“Johnston’s actions since the Permit was issued make abundantly clear that Johnston has absolutely no intent of following through on his obligations under the Agreement to deliver passion of the Premises or execute a lease with BTHHM,” the lawsuit reads.

City Councilmember Kriss Worthington said, however, that there have been cases, such as with the Berkeley Permit Group, in which a dispensary relocates without losing its permit as long as they go through the standard procedure.

“I hope the sides can work out a compromise,” Worthington said. “I would be happy to help facilitate so neither side gets hurt too much getting the city to approve permit getting (The Apothecarium) moved to another property.”

In the case BTHHM is not allowed to move to another property and loses its permit, BTHHM will have to secure another location and go through the permit process another time which could take years and another $400,000, according to the lawsuit.

Christine Lee is an assistant editor. Contact Christine Lee at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @christinejlee17.
North Korea continues to dominate the headlines amid growing concerns about its alarming advances in nuclear weapons capabilities. The incendiary rhetoric from both Washington and Pyongyang, the North’s testing of two ICBMs, and its sixth and largest nuclear test led to U.S. shows of force, including sending B-1B bombers further north of the demilitarized zone than any U.S. fighter jet or bomber has gone in the 21st century.

In the past several months, despite the tough talk about “military options” by President Trump and his senior officials, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continues to defy the international community. Amid escalating tensions, he issued a rare, if not unprecedented, personal statement against the U.S. president, calling him “the mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” His behavior—and the ongoing U.S.-North Korea tension—is stoking fears about the possibilities of a nuclear war or a bloody military conflict.

How did we get to this point? What is driving Kim Jong-un and how can we explain North Korea’s provocative actions this summer?

An aggressive track record

Frankly, Kim has been hurtling toward these advanced nuclear weapons capabilities since he came to power in December 2011. Lately, he has been bigger, badder, and bolder.

In the past six years, Kim Jong-un has conducted four nuclear tests and tested close to 90 ballistic missiles, more than his father and grandfather combined. And in those six years, he has yet to meet with any foreign head of state—his most significant exchanges with foreigners have been with a Japanese sushi chef and U.S. basketball player Dennis Rodman. He has also rebuffed Chinese attempts to rebuild ties and refused to engage with the United States and South Korea.

His father, Kim Jong-il, on the other hand, bargained and negotiated with the United States, South Korea, and Japan, at least paid lip service on denuclearization, and maintained good ties to China, the North’s primary benefactor.

Personality matters. Kim is unlikely to back down in the face of President Trump’s public challenges and come to the negotiating table. He wants to look tough domestically and externally and show who is driving events on the Korean Peninsula. In fact, he has more national and international political leadership experience than Trump, who has been president for less than a year, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who came into office in May.

Kim’s statement calling President Trump “mentally deranged” and promising the “highest-level of the hardline countermeasures” shows that he has taken ownership of this showdown and that he alone—as the leader of North Korea—will defend the country’s survival, as well as its dignity. Kim also has a bias for action and he wants to win, as the Kim family’s former sushi chef recalled, and as Kim’s recent behavior has shown. Not only has Kim Jong-un grown up in a cocoon of indulgence and privilege, he has inherited advanced nuclear weapons that probably have enhanced and enabled his tendencies to berate and bully even the president of the United States.

Let’s not forget that the regime has shown to be extremely sensitive to any criticism about Kim Jong-un himself. For example, in 2014, the regime said that the release of the movie “The Interview”—a comedy depicting an assassination attempt against Kim—would be “an act of war.” North Korean hackers also threatened 9/11-type attacks against theaters that showed the film.

Kim probably calculated that he could cross these major thresholds without major blowback because he saw, first, an opportunity with a U.S. president who has been the subject of domestic and international criticism; and, second, a U.S.-South Korea alliance that appeared wobbly. China and Russia, meanwhile, have publicly stated that they would not allow instability on the Korean Peninsula, watering down some of the harshest aspects of U.N. sanctions and cautioning against U.S. military action against Pyongyang. This signaled to Kim that China—and Russia—would serve as a measure of protection against destabilizing sanctions and a potential U.S. or South Korean attack. Related Content North Korea Averting catastrophe: U.S. policy options for North Korea Order from Chaos Walking back from the brink with North Korea Order from Chaos Caught in the middle: How the North Korean threat is ultimately Seoul’s problem

It is important to note that Kim has been emboldened in general. He’s gotten away with a lot since December 2011: scores of missile test launches, nuclear tests, the probable VX nerve agent attack against his half brother in Malaysia, the 2015 incident involving a landmine in the demilitarized zone, the Sony hack in 2014, and the mistreatment and death of U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier. And he’s conducted several purges of senior North Korean leaders including executing his uncle, Jang Song Thaek in 2013, deterring any potential opposition to Kim’s rule.

Finally, although Kim is aggressive, that does not mean that he is reckless or a “madman.” In fact, he knows how and when to recalibrate. Note that his personal statement threatened “highest level” countermeasures in response to Trump’s threats, but he didn’t say when and he didn’t say how, consistent with Pyongyang’s past tactic of maintaining ambiguity and preserving its options, including diplomatic, kinetic, or covert activities.

Kim is highly unlikely to abandon his nuclear deterrent, as Trump’s threats gave fresh reminders of what happens to those countries when they give up nuclear weapons.

Changing the calculus

So, while we are unlikely to be headed for a nuclear war or a military conflict in the near future, we should worry about the lessons Kim is learning from this latest episode of “Kim vs. Trump” and how these lessons would increase the likelihood of a deadly confrontation or miscalculation that could quickly spiral out of control.

First, President Trump’s threats reinforce North Korea’s narrative of a “hostile” outside world and that the United States is determined to destroy North Korea. Kim is highly unlikely to abandon his nuclear deterrent, as Trump’s threats gave fresh reminders of what happens to those countries when they give up nuclear weapons. And as new generations of North Koreans come of age in a nuclear North Korea, I fear denuclearization will become a naïve dream.

Second, even if North Korea and the United States came to an agreement, Kim has no reason to think that an agreement would stick from one U.S. administration to the next, given Trump’s sharp criticism and talk of “revisiting” the Iran nuclear deal. The message is loud and clear: The United States cannot be trusted.

Third, the U.S.-South Korean alliance is not impenetrable. President Trump tweeted his criticism about the South Korea-United States free trade agreement around the time of the 4th nuclear test and accused the South Korean government of “appeasement with North Korea.”

South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017

Finally, in North Korea’s view, China is not to be trusted, but Chinese leaders will not abandon Pyongyang because it is in Beijing’s interest to keep propping up Kim’s regime.

How do we change Kim’s calculus? How do you negotiate with someone who thinks he’s winning and doesn’t want to talk at all?

At a minimum, tone down unnecessarily inflammatory, and apparently uncoordinated, statements from President Trump. There’s no need to spoon feed the North Korean propaganda machine with easy soundbites about a “hostile” United States—or to unnerve our South Korean ally about the risks we are prepared to take with its security.

Be steady and methodical about strengthening and reinforcing Washington’s alliances with South Korea and Japan and reassuring our regional partners that the United States is serious about their security. Optics matter. North Korea is watching to exploit any cleavages in the alliance, and the Trump administration should make every effort to ensure no daylight between Washington and Seoul.

Give the latest executive order that authorizes broad secondary sanctions a chance to work. These sanctions have the potential to squeeze North Korea’s ability to earn hard currency for the regime. Sanctions that undermine Kim’s ability to reward elites and severely suppress the elites’ ability to make money for themselves or raise money for loyalty payments to the regime could make Kim more willing to consider negotiations to relieve that pressure.

Make sure to consult closely with China and Russia to keep them on board with the ever-tightening sanctions regime. Their participation is critical.

None of these is a magic bullet, but taken together and sustained over time, we could perhaps reorient Kim’s behavior and approach and create a less volatile situation on the Korean Peninsula.
Kristof Goddaert (IAM Cycling) was killed on Tuesday in Antwerp after suffering a crash during a training ride. According to Nieuwsblad.be, the 27-year-old Belgian crashed while training, apparently due to his front wheel being caught in train tracks, and then was fatally struck by a bus while still on the ground. Related Articles Tour of Oman riders remember Kristof Goddaert

Cycling community says goodbye to Goddaert

Peloton pays tribute to Goddaert before Omloop Het Nieuwsblad

Pelucchi savours his first major victory at Tirreno-Adriatico

"We think first of his family and loved ones to whom we offer our sincere condolences and assure of our support during this terrible ordeal," said a devastated IAM Cycling General Manager Michel Thétaz.

"We lost Kristof Goddaert, an exemplary professional rider and a man of quality. He came to us in December of 2012 with the desire to meet us and to take on a new challenge. His constant good mood, everyday enthusiasm and willingness to fully engage in all endeavors were very much appreciated qualities.

"He had used the Tour of Qatar to hone his shape ahead of the Spring Classics, but this tragic fate will prevent him from realizing his dreams. To honor his memory, IAM Cycling will continue to race with ten times as much desire to win given that he can no longer compete because he has moved on to eternal life."

Goddaert most recently competed in the 2014 Tour of Qatar, where he finished 34th overall. He had been a professional for eight years, with stints at Davitamon-Win for Life, Topsport Vlaanderen and AG2R La Mondiale prior to his moving to IAM Cycling in 2013.

Goddaert had one win in his professional palmares, stage 3 at the 2010 Tour de Wallonie, and other career highlights included second place to Tom Boonen in the 2012 Belgian road championships, 3rd in the 2009 Belgian road chamionships behind Boonen and Philippe Gilbert, 3rd in Paris-Bruxelles (2009), 5th in Le Samyn (2010), 8th place in Gent-Wevelgem (2011), 9th in Paris-Tours (2008) and 10th in Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne (2011).
Anthony Rizzo collided with San Diego Padres catcher Austin Hedges Monday night in what, by any definition of the term, was a dirty play. On Tuesday, in a decision that made absolutely no sense, Major League Baseball confirmed that the collision Rizzo initiated was illegal, but then opted not to discipline him in any way.

Source: MLB told all clubs today that Anthony Rizzo had indeed violated the collision rule. Could have been discipline but ruled against it. — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 20, 2017

The league did not believe Rizzo intended to hurt Austin Hedges or had crossed a line with his slide. That line, it seems, is arbitrary. — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 20, 2017

It's pretty clear Austin Hedges left a clear path to home. Say what you will about the rule, but Anthony Rizzo's slide absolutely broke it. pic.twitter.com/0OWPE5aMEe — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 20, 2017

The Chicago Cubs first baseman went out of his way to plow into Hedges in an attempt to knock the ball loose. For his part, Hedges did what he was supposed to do: give the runner a clear path to the plate. Rather than take it, Rizzo went out of his way to lay a hit on Hedges. It was a clear violation of Rule 6.01 (i), the so-called “Buster Posey Rule” that reads as follows:

” A runner attempting to score may not deviate from his direct pathway to the plate in order to initiate contact with the catcher (or other player covering home plate), or otherwise initiate an avoidable collision.”

Video of the play in question follows, watch how Rizzo crosses the baseline to his left and initiates contact, deviating from his path to the plate rather than taking the outside line that is clearly available to him:

Your browser does not support iframes.

Here’s another look with Padres manager Andy Green discussing it:

Hedges had to leave the game with an injury and is now day-to-day. Baseball has since ruled Rizzo’s slide illegal. So why hasn’t Rizzo been punished? It’s absolutely ridiculous. Even a one-game suspension or a fine would be something. Instead, he’s in the lineup Tuesday night and Hedges isn’t because of a dirty play that violated a rule put in place for player safety.

There’s no question that Major League Baseball is being extremely selective with its discipline here. You can’t just decide who to punish based on an arbitrary standard when a rule has been violated.

I don’t think Rizzo is a dirty player. In fact, I like him a lot. But there is zero question in my mind that was a dirty play, and Hedges is extremely lucky he wasn’t more seriously injured. Rizzo should have to pay for breaking a rule just like everyone else. Hell, Yasiel Puig was suspended for flipping off some fans and Rizzo got nothing for injuring a defenseless catcher? This is insane.

I get that Rizzo is the face of one of baseball’s best teams and that by all accounts he’s a great guy, but that shouldn’t matter. What he did was illegal and there needs to be some level of accountability for it. Letting him off with no punishment is absurd and smacks of favoritism.
New Languages, teams and analyzing data with Excel & CSV files

Exciting news – we have finished integrating Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic native support within MonkeyLearn. Now you can train and consume machine learning models for text analysis in these new languages.

You can select any of these new languages within the creation wizard of a MonkeyLearn model:

For existing models, you can change the language settings on the ‘Parameters’ tab within your ‘Sandbox’:

Many users have requested the possibility to train text classifiers in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic, so we hope these additions enables the creation of new and exciting text analysis models.

We plan to add more languages in the short term, so if you have any suggestions or want a specific language to be supported by MonkeyLearn, please let us know in the comments of this post.

Analyze data with Excel & CSV files using Machine Learning

We’ve released a new feature to bring more power to your MonkeyLearn account. Besides using our Graphical User Interface to train your machine learning models, now you can also use our GUI to actually use these models and analyze data. Just upload a CSV or Excel file to analyze new texts and make predictions with a classifier or extractor.

For example, let’s say that you want to use the Retail Classifier to classify a bunch of products descriptions you have on a CSV file. For doing this, you can go to the “Classify” tab (within the Sandbox or Live versions of the classifier) and then click on “Classify File“:

This section will guide you through a wizard where you upload data using a CSV or Excel file, and in exchange, it will return a new CSV file with your data plus the MonkeyLearn analysis and predictions using that particular model (like those you will get using our API).

We are really excited about this new feature as it will enable non-technical users to analyze data using machine learning without a single line of code!

Team manager

We have a new feature that you will love! Now you can invite team members to collaborate with your MonkeyLearn models.

Whether it’s allowing a teammate to add new training data, curate the data, fix confusions, make changes to the tag list, try out the model or use a team token to consume queries, it’s all now very easy to do, just invite them to join your MonkeyLearn team.

For creating a MonkeyLearn team, simply go to My Account >> Teams:

On each team, you can add as many teammates and models as you want. You will also have a Team Token for the team to use so the query consumption of the models within the team is attributed to the team owner:

Hope you like these new features! Let us know any questions, we are here to help 🙂
Israel has dismissed an urgent call to accept desperate refugees fleeing Syria's civil war, saying doing so would open its borders to terrorists.

Israel has dismissed an urgent call to accept desperate refugees fleeing Syria's civil war, saying doing so would open its borders to terrorists.

Israel's Netanyahu says admitting Syrian refugees will allow terrorists in

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was "not indifferent" to the fates of families fleeing persecution from its northern neighbour but insisted Israel had to ‘control [its] borders against both illegal migrants and terrorism.”

“Israel is a small country, a very small country,that lacks demographic and geographic depth.

"We will not allow [it] to be submerged by a wave of illegal migrants and terrorist activists."

Following his comments, Mr Netanyahu announced that a new 18-mile fence will be built along the frontier with Jordan, Reuters reported.

The Israeli prime minister has ignored calls from country’s main opposition party to step in and help with Europe's burgeoning refugee crisis.

Aylan Kurdi (left) and his older brother Galip - the two young boys whose drowning off the Bodrum coast in Turkey sparked international outrage

“Israel is duty-bound to take in refugees,” said Isaac Herzog, leader of the Zionist Union – which was created in 2015 to unseat Mr Netanyahu.

Israel has already been criticised by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees over its treatment of tens of thousands of African asylum seekers, most of them fleeing wars in Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan.

Only a handful of more than 50,000 refugees to have entered Israel through its southern border with Egypt since 2006 have received asylum status, while others have been repatriated to other African countries in a scheme that Israel claims is voluntary but critics call coercive.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, called on the United Nations to pressure Israel to allow Palestinians from Syrian refugees camps to take shelter in the occupied West Bank.

Online Editors
We gave the coming Broadway “all way walk” the headline but one of the safety improvements coming to the busy area around Capitol Hill Station will be part of a simple but hopefully effective change to pedestrian crossing signals across Seattle:

At intersections where the city knows accidents are likely, SDOT will preemptively add what Murray called “pedestrian-friendly signals” — walk signs that allow pedestrians into an intersection before drivers’ light turns green, giving walkers greater visibility — and traffic lights with left turn signals, which reduces conflicts between left-turning cars and pedestrians (or trucks) heading straight through an intersection. By adding leading pedestrian signals at 40 intersections citywide, Kubly said, the city expected to reduce crashes by 50 percent at those intersections.

After SDOT analysis, the re-timed signaling will be deployed at the busy Broadway/John/E Olive Way intersection to give pedestrians an advance walk signal before drivers get a green light. SDOT is also planning to add left turn lanes on John and E Olive Way to help better control vehicular traffic flow.

Dongho Chang, city traffic engineer, said pedestrian collision reports including near misses contributed to the decision. “Pedestrian-wise we hear about a lot of close misses,” Chang said.

The department found the majority of collisions were left-turn related from east and westbound drivers on Olive and John. Drivers heading north or south on Broadway didn’t experience many left turn collisions but did have a few rear-ending incidents.

SDOT is planning to implement the changes before summer.
Ancestry Edit

Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoevsky Dostoevsky's parents were part of a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational noble family, its branches including Russian Orthodox Christians, Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Eastern Catholics.[4] The family traced its roots back to a Tatar, Aslan Chelebi-Murza, who in 1389 defected from the Golden Horde and joined the forces of Dmitry Donskoy, the first prince of Muscovy to openly challenge the Mongol authority in the region,[5] and whose descendant, Danilo Irtishch, was ennobled and given lands in the Pinsk region (for centuries part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day Belarus) in 1509 for his services under a local prince, his progeny then taking the name "Dostoevsky" based on a village there called Dostoïevo.[6] Dostoevsky's immediate ancestors on his mother's side were merchants; the male line on his father's side were priests. His father, Mikhail Andreevich, was expected to join the clergy but instead ran away from home and broke with the family permanently. In 1809, the 20-year-old Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky enrolled in Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. From there he was assigned to a Moscow hospital, where he served as military doctor, and in 1818, he was appointed a senior physician. In 1819 he married Maria Nechayeva. The following year, he took up a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. In 1828, when his two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, were eight and seven respectively, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, a position which raised his legal status to that of the nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate in Darovoye, a town about 150 km (100 miles) from Moscow, where the family usually spent the summers. Dostoevsky's parents subsequently had six more children: Varvara (1822–1892), Andrei (1825–1897), Lyubov (born and died 1829), Vera (1829–1896), Nikolai (1831–1883) and Aleksandra (1835–1889).[11]

Childhood (1821–1835) Edit

Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on 11 November [O.S. 30 October] 1821, was the second child of Dr. Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya (born Nechayeva). He was raised in the family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was in a lower class district on the edges of Moscow. Dostoevsky encountered the patients, who were at the lower end of the Russian social scale, when playing in the hospital gardens. Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age. From the age of three, he was read heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends by his nanny, Alena Frolovna, an especially influential figure in his upbringing and love for fictional stories. When he was four his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His parents introduced him to a wide range of literature, including Russian writers Karamzin, Pushkin and Derzhavin; Gothic fiction such as Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Schiller and Goethe; heroic tales by Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer's epics. Although his father's approach to education has been described as strict and harsh, Dostoevsky himself reports that his imagination was brought alive by nightly readings by his parents. Some of his childhood experiences found their way into his writings. When a nine-year-old girl had been raped by a drunk, he was asked to fetch his father to attend to her. The incident haunted him, and the theme of the desire of a mature man for a young girl appears in The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and other writings. An incident involving a family servant, or serf, in the estate in Darovoye, is described in "The Peasant Marey": when the young Dostoevsky imagines hearing a wolf in the forest, Marey, who is working nearby, comforts him.[19] Although Dostoevsky had a delicate physical constitution, his parents described him as hot-headed, stubborn and cheeky. In 1833, Dostoevsky's father, who was profoundly religious, sent him to a French boarding school and then to the Chermak boarding school. He was described as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic. To pay the school fees, his father borrowed money and extended his private medical practice. Dostoevsky felt out of place among his aristocratic classmates at the Moscow school, and the experience was later reflected in some of his works, notably The Adolescent.

Youth (1836–1843) Edit

Dostoevsky as a military engineer On 27 September 1837 Dostoevsky's mother died of tuberculosis. The previous May, his parents had sent Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail to St Petersburg to attend the free Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, forcing the brothers to abandon their academic studies for military careers. Dostoevsky entered the academy in January 1838, but only with the help of family members. Mikhail was refused admission on health grounds and was sent to the Academy in Reval, Estonia. Dostoevsky disliked the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in science, mathematics and military engineering and his preference for drawing and architecture. As his friend Konstantin Trutovsky once said, "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F.M. Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him; and his knapsack, shako and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time and which lay heavily on him." Dostoevsky's character and interests made him an outsider among his 120 classmates: he showed bravery and a strong sense of justice, protected newcomers, aligned himself with teachers, criticised corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. Although he was solitary and inhabited his own literary world, he was respected by his classmates. His reclusiveness and interest in religion earned him the nickname "Monk Photius". Signs of Dostoevsky's epilepsy may have first appeared on learning of the death of his father on 16 June 1839, although the reports of a seizure originated from accounts written by his daughter (later expanded by Sigmund Freud.[29]) which are now considered to be unreliable. His father's official cause of death was an apoplectic stroke, but a neighbour, Pavel Khotiaintsev, accused the father's serfs of murder. Had the serfs been found guilty and sent to Siberia, Khotiaintsev would have been in a position to buy the vacated land. The serfs were acquitted in a trial in Tula, but Dostoevsky's brother Andrei perpetuated the story. After his father's death, Dostoevsky continued his studies, passed his exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet, entitling him to live away from the academy. He visited Mikhail in Reval, and frequently attended concerts, operas, plays and ballets. During this time, two of his friends introduced him to gambling. On 12 August 1843 Dostoevsky took a job as a lieutenant engineer and lived with Adolph Totleben in an apartment owned by Dr. Rizenkampf, a friend of Mikhail. Rizenkampf characterised him as "no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness". Dostoevsky's first completed literary work, a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, was published in June and July 1843 in the 6th and 7th volume of the journal Repertoire and Pantheon,[34] followed by several other translations. None were successful, and his financial difficulties led him to write a novel.

Career Edit

Death Edit

Dostoevsky on his bier , drawing by Ivan Kramskoi, 1881 Dostoevsky's grave in Saint Petersburg On 25 January 1881, while searching for members of the terrorist organisation Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will") who would soon assassinate Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoevsky's neighbours[citation needed]. On the following day, Dostoevsky suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage. Anna denied that the search had caused it, saying that the haemorrhage had occurred after her husband had been looking for a dropped pen holder.[f] After another haemorrhage, Anna called the doctors, who gave a poor prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards. While seeing his children before dying, Dostoevsky requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to his children. The profound meaning of this request is pointed out by Frank: It was this parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children, and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work.[109] Among Dostoevsky's last words was his quotation of Matthew 3:14–15: "But John forbad him, saying, I have a need to be baptised of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness", and he finished with "Hear now—permit it. Do not restrain me!" When he died, his body was placed on a table, following Russian custom. He was interred in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent,[111] near his favourite poets, Nikolay Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky. It is unclear how many attended his funeral. According to one reporter, more than 100,000 mourners were present, while others describe attendance between 40,000 and 50,000. His tombstone is inscribed with lines from the New Testament: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit. John 12:24

Personal life Edit

Themes and style Edit

Legacy Edit

Works Edit

See also Edit

References Edit
Harbour Updates - November 30, 2017

Dean Eigenmann Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 30, 2017

Since our last update showing some of the things the Harbour Project team has been working on, we have yet again been busy at work on a number of fronts. Since it’s been awhile, we decided it is time to update our community again.

New Design Language

Some of you may have already noticed that the Harbour Project has gotten a fresh new face. This came with a series of changes we decided to make as part of our branding overhaul. Including our renaming from Harbour Protocol to Harbour Project, which we decided was needed as the project has turned into a lot more than just a protocol.

With our redesign comes a fresh new logo, this fits the new image we are going for much better. Our goal is to display a more friendly and approachable image.

Along with the new logo our website has been updated too, you can see the new design over at harbourproject.io.

Whitepaper Draft

Along with our new website, we have recently released an early draft of our whitepaper. This can also be found on the newly updated website, we are updating it repeatedly so we would love to hear your feedback!

Project Outreach

Along with design changes, we have been working on reaching out to various projects talking to them and on boarding some of them to use Harbour in their respective projects.

Fee Manager

Additionally, we have decided to open source our project called feemanager. It is an in development project for easily charging fees on function executions in solidity smart contracts. We are still working on updating it to get it to optimal functionality as well as adding support for fees to be charged in ERC20 tokens.
If recent rumours are to be believed, then the Import/Export DLC released for GTA Online in December is going to the be the last one, and barring a few updates, Rockstar are going to stop supporting the title as the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 draws closer.

Yan 2295, who has leaked quite credible information related to Rockstar and their games in the past, such as leaking Red Dead Redemption 2 or recently reporting that an LA Noire remaster might be on its way, recently talked about this in a blog post, saying that Rockstar will be releasing updates for a while “just to keep it alive” but nothing else apart from that.

“GTA Online updates are going to slow down this year,” he said, “to then stop around the time RDR2 will release. Apparently Rockstar North is “divided” in 4 parts as of right now,” he further added. “Some people are helping San Diego with RDR2, some people started working on the next GTA, and some people are working on another game. So you’re left with only a few people to work on GTA Online. You can’t have updates as big as we had in the past when you have 4x less devs working on GTA Online, that’s just impossible.”

Take this with a grain of salt for now, but it does make sense. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.
A shocking 7.5 million people have left religion since 2012, a new survey released last week shows.

The so called "Great Decline" of religion continued into last year, the 2014 General Social Survey showed.

Each year, the National Science Foundation releases a multi-million dollar study that monitors societal change in the adult population of the United States. The NSF researches things like life satisfaction, race relations, crime and punishment, and religion.

For the past decade, this study has shown a steady decrease in the number of religious Americans.

Three sections of this survey show the growing trend of nonreligious Americans.

1. More Americans say their religious preference is "none"

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans say their religious preference is "none." This has increased almost 20 percent since the 1990s, when the percentage of Americans who affiliated as nonreligious was in the single digits.

In comparison, around 24 percent of Americans affiliate as Catholic, the largest religious denomination in the United States. If the trend keeps increasing, in a few years the largest religion in the United States could be no religion at all.

2. Less Americans Attend Church

The number of Americans never attending church or other worship services each weekend is at an all time high. More than a third of Americans say they never attend a worship service.

3. Less Americans Pray

Only 17 percent of Americans say they never pray compared to the almost 35 percent who say they never attend a worship service and the 23 percent who affiliate as nonreligious.

Even though people aren't attending worship services or affiliating with religion, most of the country still believes in the power of prayer.

CBN News reporter Efrem Graham spoke with Dr. Corne Bekker, with Regent University, about what the church can do to stop this growing trend of nonreligious Americans.

"We need to put the scriptures back at the center of absolutely everything we do," Bekker said. "We need to give people real hope. The church needs to be a place of hope."

Click play to watch Dr. Bekker's full interview.
Center-Right Dispute Merkel to Delay Announcement of Chancellery Candidacy Chancellor Merkel has decided to push back her announcement as to whether she intends to run for a fourth term as chancellor, DER SPIEGEL has learned. The delay is the product of an unresolved dispute with her Bavarian sister party, the CSU. more...

The Deal Makers Coalition Deal Shows Rising Clout of Lobbyists As the dust settled in Berlin, one group came out of last week's coalition deal an unequivocal winner: Germany's lobbyists. When it comes to shaping policy, corporate interests are wielding ever more influence on national politics. more...

Pushover Party Social Democrats Must Not Give Up on Europe In coalition negotiations, the center-left Social Democrats appear to have backed off on their demands to control the Finance Ministry. Relinquishing the post would mean letting Angela Merkel trample over them -- and abandoning their push to move Germany's Europe policy to the left. more...

Affirmative Action SPD Women Want Gender Quota from Merkel Female members of Germany's Social Democrats want a coalition government with Merkel's conservatives to be contingent on a gender quota for company boards. Battered in the election, the SPD's men may now take these calls seriously. more...

Wiped Out Free Democrats Reel from Election Fiasco The biggest losers of the German election are the pro-business Free Democrats, who failed to make it into parliament. After decades of playing kingmaker, its spectacular defeat marks a seismic shift in Germany's political landscape. more...

Merkel Country Trouble Ahead for Triumphant Queen Angela It hardly gets any more exciting, more enthralling or more spectacular. This 2013 German election represents a watershed. The chancellor has triumphed, and her coalition partners the pro-business Free Democrats are shattered. Germany is well and truly Angela Merkel country. more...

Mini-Drone Incident Shows Security Failings Last week, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which is responsible for Chancellor Angela Merkel's security during the run-up to the election on Sept. 22, cemented its already muddied reputation by failing to take action at a campaign event in Dresden when a miniature drone circled above the audience. more...

Why Many Former East Germans Don't Vote Nearly a quarter of a century after German reunification, Chancellor Angela Merkel still favors dishes that were common in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). "Solyanka," a sour soup with meat and pickled vegetables originating in Russia, still appears regularly on her dinner table, and likely those of many former East Germans. more...

New Poll Sees Euroskeptics in Parliament Could the euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD) make it into parliament after all? A new poll released by tabloid Bild on Thursday seems to indicate just that. According to the survey, conducted by Erfurt-based polling institute INSA, 5 percent of those asked said they plan to vote for AfD on Sunday, which would be just enough to clear the threshold for sending representatives to the Bundestag. more...
The recent Sony attack over the Christmas season sparked up a debate over the danger of cyberattacks across various fields. Notably, the area of critical infrastructure is of very high concern to many. And for a good reason – not too long ago, even the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael S. Rogers, warned the Congress that China and “probably one or two other” countries have the capability of shutting down the U.S. power grid – an event that would dwarf the 2003 Northeastern blackout.

Rogers further claims that they observe these countries “attempting to steal information on how our systems are configured, the very schematics of most of our control systems, down to engineering level of detail so they can look at where are the vulnerabilities, how are they constructed, how could I get in and defeat them.”

The main problem with preparing for a cyberattack is the fact that, unlike, let’s say, nuclear weapons, you cannot observe the development of “cyberweapons.” As Andrew T. Phillips, an academic dean of the U.S. Naval Academy points out, “the development of offensive cyber weapons is very hard to actually see. It might be occurring in the room next to you, and you’ll be unlikely to know it.” Not surprisingly, it is very difficult deter a threat whose origin we don’t know.

The North American electric grid contains about 476,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, accompanied by thousands of power plants. Combine this with the fact that in 2012, there were about 198 cyberattacks on the U.S. critical infrastructure, of which 41% targeted the energy sector, and you can see why this issue is high on everyone’s list of priorities, points out Scott DePasquale of Utilidata.

Over the next five years, our grid will be turning into a “smart grid,” a modernized, automated electrical grid, capable of gathering and responding to information, including its use, supply and more. This step will present both new benefits and new challenges. According to DePasquale, however, there is some good news: “[the] demand for significant research and development efforts in this area are already resulting in significant investments being made by both the private sector and academia — and there is no doubt we have enough innovation and talent to overcome the challenge.”
Before there were the lost Lerner emails, the congressional hearings and the retaliatory budget cuts, there was the Albuquerque Tea Party, a group of politically minded folks in New Mexico who wanted to get together and share ideas for taking back their country. The IRS had other ideas about them.

Five years after the Albuquerque Tea Party applied for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, they remain in limbo — their application apparently no closer to being approved or denied than it was the day they mailed it to the IRS on Dec. 29, 2009.

They have watched as other groups have been approved in less time, and they say they are mystified as to why the application has been held up so long, after they provided hundreds of pages of evidence and documents that the IRS requested.

“If the IRS, with its massive staff, read only 1/2 of a page daily of all the paperwork we have had to send them, they could have read it all three years ago,” Rick Harbaugh, secretary of the board of the Albuquerque group, said in an email describing his group’s five-year battle with the tax agency.

Worse yet, he said, they still don’t know why they were targeted in the first place, and every explanation from the IRS — that the targeting was by low-level employees in Ohio, for example — has been wrong. Mr. Harbaugh said they have letters from the Treasury Department saying their file was being reviewed in Washington.

The targeting exploded onto front pages in May 2013 after Lois G. Lerner, head of a division charged with scrutinizing applications for tax-exempt status, planted a question at a law forum so she could break news of the activity.

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She was trying to beat an inspector general’s report due out a few days later, which said the IRS singled out hundreds of conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and refused to approve those applications, which had piled up for years.

In the 20 months since, most groups whose applications were held up have been approved. They include the NE Tarrant Tea Party in Tarrant, Texas, which was approved in December after a four-year wait.

Julie McCarty, an official with NE Tarrant, said the organization learned about its approval from its attorney at the American Center for Law and Justice.

It’s unclear what triggered the IRS to approve the group after years of waiting. Ms. McCarty said the most recent reply to the IRS included nearly 600 pages of documents submitted a year and a half ago.

“All the back and forth questions were just stall tactics,” she said in an email. “I mean, come on — they’ve been targeting us for four years.”

The IRS, citing taxpayer privacy laws, said it cannot comment on the delays in specific cases such as the Albuquerque Tea Party or NE Tarrant.

In its latest public data on the tea party targeting scandal, from just before Christmas, the agency said nine organizations that were part of the initial backlog of 145 targeted groups were still awaiting final decisions.

Of the 136 cases that had been cleared, 104 of them were approved. The others were a mix of groups that withdrew their applications — often citing the long wait — or groups that didn’t respond to IRS questions, which the agency took as an indication that they were no longer seeking tax-exempt status.

As of April, the agency had formally denied three of the applicants after years of waiting.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress that the remaining cases were usually because the taxpayer group asked for more time or filed a lawsuit against the IRS.

The Albuquerque Tea Party is part of a lawsuit against the IRS — but so was NE Tarrant Tea Party, which received its approval after years of waiting, so it’s unclear what the difference was for the IRS.

Soon after the scandal went public in 2013, the IRS offered the targeted tea party groups a deal: Agree to keep overt political activity to less than 40 percent of what they do and the agency would approve them. Forty-three groups chose to accept that deal, but the ACLJ and other attorneys advised their clients not to take it, saying it would have meant giving up their rights.

Conservative groups argue that under current interpretation of the law and regulations, tax-exempt organizations are allowed to conduct politics as long as it represents less than half of their activities.

The agency in late 2013 also tried to impose rules on 501(c )(4) groups to further limit their activities, including prohibitions on inviting federal officeholders to speak to groups, printing voter guides or conducting voter registration drives.

In the face of tens of thousands of adverse comments from across the political spectrum, the agency put that effort on hold. Mr. Koskinen, however, vowed to try again early this year, though with both chambers of Congress firmly in the hands of the Republican Party, he may have a tougher time getting those rules through congressional scrutiny.

Republicans in Congress have vowed to continue investigating the IRS targeting. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, under new Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican; the Senate Finance Committee under new Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican; and the House Ways and Means Committee under new Chairman Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, all said they remain on the case.

The Finance Committee is awaiting final word from the inspector general about which of Ms. Lerners’ emails have been recovered, while a senior House source said the Ways and Means Committee will begin to look at how the IRS chooses whom it audits. That would expand the tea party probe beyond initial applications for tax-exempt status.

The IRS has assured a federal court that it is no longer targeting, and a judge has agreed. He denied a request from tea party groups to issue an order banning future targeting.

But Mr. Harbaugh said it’s difficult to see how the targeting is over given his own experience.

Mr. Harbaugh said his group filed the paperwork for its application on Dec. 29, 2009. On April 21, 2010, it received a two-page, 10-question reply asking for documents on the group’s activities, including copies of its Web page, newsletters and brochures, and handouts and minutes from meetings.

In November 2011, the IRS fired back with a round of 17 more questions, seeking much of the same data for the two years that had elapsed while the IRS delayed the application. Several other rounds of back-and-forth followed, including the 2013 offer to agree to the 40 percent rule. The Albuquerque Tea Party rejected that offer and has been waiting ever since.

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Verizon Wireless Puts Samsung Galaxy Tab™ in Stores in November

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and DALLAS, Oct. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon Wireless and Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) today announced the highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy Tab™ will be available Nov. 11 for $599.99. Running on Android™ 2.2, the Samsung Galaxy Tab features a brilliant 7-inch touch screen; robust HTML Web browsing experience with full support for Adobe® Flash® 10.1 for video and mobile gaming; and a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird Application processor.

"This is an incredible time in mobile technology, and as a company we're excited to add the Samsung Galaxy Tab to our portfolio," said Marni Walden, vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless. "The Samsung Galaxy Tab brings together the reliability of Verizon Wireless' 3G network and the power of Android 2.2 to deliver on our promise of providing consumers and business customers with a host of options to help manage their lives."

Popular mobile applications, including V CAST Music and V CAST Song ID, VZ Navigator®, Slacker Radio, Kindle for Android, BLOCKBUSTER On Demand® presented by V CAST Video, and the exclusive golf game, "Let's Golf," will be available on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. In addition to text, picture and video messaging, the Samsung Galaxy Tab will also feature V CAST Apps, Verizon Wireless' mobile storefront offering hundreds of applications for businesses and consumers at launch.

Verizon Wireless customers can add a monthly access plan beginning at $20 a month for 1 GB on their Samsung Galaxy Tab. For additional features and specifications on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, visit www.verizonwireless.com/galaxytab.

For additional information on Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.
Next month, Frank Castle and Matt Murdock will battle each other for the soul of Hell’s Kitchen in Daredevil season 2, but it won’t be the first time the Man Without Fear has gone up against the Punisher. Want to know more about Daredevil and Punisher’s long history together before the show returns? Here’s a few comics you should read.

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The Bully

Issue: Daredevil #257 (1988)

By: Ann Nocenti, John Romita Jr., Al Willamson

There’s a certain formula to a Daredevil and Punisher crossover. Frank and Matt both end up tailing the same criminal, they argue whether bringing them to trial or just murdering them instead is the right thing to do, they punch each other a bit, agree to disagree and team up, and bag the criminal in the end. “The Bully” is no different, but with some interesting twists.

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This story is curious because of its shifting perspectives—it’s actually a retelling of a story told in The Punisher #10, released the same month as Daredevil #257, except from the perspective of Daredevil and the criminal he and Punisher are both on the hunt for, Alfred Coppersmith. In a move that’s tonally perfect for the characters, each issue paints Coppersmith in a different light based on each vigilante’s worldview. In Punisher #10, Coppersmith is a simple, villainous entity—a murderer and threat that has to be eliminated, like so many of Frank’s foes. But in Daredevil, Nocenti has Matt investigate why Coppersmith turned to crime, revealing a picture of a man angry at an evolving world around him, and making him a more sympathetic figure who deserves the right to a day in court.

When Daredevil and Punisher inevitably come to blows, we get to see it from Coppersmith’s perspective, his own internal monologue painting Matt and Frank, and their strange relationship with each other, in a different light.

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Daredevil vs. Punisher: Means & Ends

Issues: Daredevil vs. Punisher #1-6, 2005/2006

By: David Lapham, Studio F, Chris Eliopoulos

The Punisher wants to fight crime through murder; Daredevil wants to fight it through the court of law. These diametric opposites sit at the heart of virtually every tale about the two characters. It’s a debate between the morality and ethics of heroism and vigilantism. Means & Ends doesn’t particularly offer anything fresh on that age-old clash between Punisher and Daredevil, but Lapham (best known for his excellent crime-focused independent series Stray Bullets) executes the familiar story incredibly well.

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Set in a Hell’s Kitchen without the Kingpin, Frank and Matt begrudgingly find themselves both trying to bring down Hammerhead and Jackal, who have usurped the neighborhood’s criminal operations. Lapham doesn’t just offer a deep examination the different moralities Daredevil and Punisher represent—There’s also a superb throughline, which looks at the impact the two characters have on the ordinary people of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a sort of tragic, human crime drama that wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of Stray Bullets.

Many stories about Matt and Frank together are laser-focused on having the two vigilantes debate, bounce off, and fight each other—Means & Ends might not have much new to say on that debate, but it’s a well-crafted take with the added bonus of bringing a wider perspective to the moral battle between the characters.

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The Omega Effect

Issues: Avenging Spider-Man #6, Punisher #10, Daredevil #11 (2012)

By: Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Marco Chechetto, Matt Hollingsworth, Joe Caramagna

The Omega Effect shakes up the typical Daredevil/Punisher team-up by throwing in a character with ties to them both: Spider-Man. Peter Paker’s presence naturally lends a slightly lighter tone to this short saga than many of Daredevil or Punisher’s past outings together, in which Daredevil comes into possession of a flash drive filled with information on the biggest criminal organizations of the Marvel universe. It’s a refreshing team-up from most of their stories. in which even the Punisher can’t kill people, thanks to the presence of Daredevil and Spider-Man on his shoulders advocating a non-violent solution for what to do with the drive.

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It’s strange to have an adventure with Matt and Frank that feels fun rather than needlessly grim. It works here by turning the usual debate between Punisher and Daredevil about their approaches on its head, Instead of the usual Matt-Frank fisticuffs, the battle takes place between Matt and Rachel Cole, the ally/apprentice that Punisher had taken on in Rucka’s series. Daredevil sees her as a proto-Punisher that he could redeem, unlike the lost cause of Frank.

Welcome Back Frank: Devil by the Horns

Issue: The Punisher #3 (2000)

By: Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Jimmy Palmiotti , Chris Sotomayer, Richard Starkings, and Wes Abbott

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Devil by the Horns, a small part of Ennis’ larger, stellar “Welcome Back Frank” arc, is one thing we know the show is definitely going to pay homage to—and there’s good reason for that. It’s perhaps the most iconic of all Daredevil and Punisher team-ups, and unlike many of the duo’s encounters, the Punisher actually gets to come out on top.

Ennis was totally nailing Frank Castle’s character during his run, but this crossover with Daredevil really drove it home early on in the series. Like most of their crossovers, it involved the two characters tracking down the same criminal, mob boss Dino Gnucci. Although Daredevil begins with the upper hand, easily beating Frank up, the tables quickly turn. After being knocked unconscious, Matt is tied up in chains and given a revolver by Frank. It’s the ultimate test of his morals: either shoot and kill Frank to save Gnucci, or spare Frank and watch him assassinate Gnucci. It leads to the most famous dialogue between the two, and in one masterful page, sums up how Ennis understood everything about the Punisher:

Punisher: If you don’t shoot you’ve got a death on your conscience. A death you could have prevented. If you do shoot, you’re a killer. Daredevil: What kind of choice is that...? Punisher: The one I make every time I pull the trigger.

If you’re especially looking to know more about The Punisher before Daredevil season two, this is the story to read.

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The Devil in Cell Block D

Issues: Daredevil #82—#87, (2006)

By: Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, Frank D’Armata, Cory Petit

Most Daredevil and Punisher stories are about posing Matt and Frank as complete opposites in their actions and morals, but this story from Brubaker and Lark’s run on Daredevil puts a different spin on the pair’s relationship by focusing on how Frank Castle really sees Daredevil.

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The culmination of Brian Michael Bendis’ run on Daredevil, Matt finds himself locked up on Ryker’s Island (not to be confused with Riker’s Island, the real New York’s main prison complex) alongside the criminals and supervillains that he helped put away as Daredevil. He’s pushed to the limits on the inside, as he tries to discover who killed his best friend Foggy. The Punisher hears that Matt has been locked up, and gets himself thrown in Ryker’s to help Matt survive.

This adds a fresh element to the dichotomy between Castle and Murdock—a sense of respect that was never really there as part of their previous encounters. The two will probably never agree with each other’s methods, but it doesn’t mean they outright hate each other for it.

Header Image Credit: Daredevil #183 (1982) cover by Frank Miller, marking the first time Daredevil and the Punisher met.
A Chinese developer is seeking to make Auburn the site of a medical tourism complex, the Sun Journal reported.

The Shengton Group of Beijing is proposing to convert two former shoe factory buildings on Minot Avenue, now called The Barn, into an upscale residence for patients who would fly from China for medical treatment, the Lewiston newspaper said. The patients would be able to stay in the residence while they recover and get follow-up treatment.

The company completed the purchase of the buildings in July through a Maine company it created, Miracle Enterprises, the newspaper said.

One of the developers said the company was attracted by Auburn’s clean air and water and fresh food. The Sun Journal said the company would target wealthy retirees or seniors and financially stable middle-age people who would be able to afford to come to the U.S. for treatment. That treatment would include care at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston and traditional Chinese treatment at the residence.

The investors said they estimate it would cost $30 million to $40 million to renovate the buildings and develop the site.

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Coming into the rep round I was so disappointed about this being the last City Country clash that I was starting to wonder whether we really needed a rep round at all. After two nights of international rugby league, I'm convinced it needs to be a permanent fixture on the calendar -- to ensure the game's development, and for the sheer entertainment it provides.

Daniel Tupou Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

If the game is going to grow internationally we need to allow the so called minnow nations -- Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands, Lebanon and Malta -- these opportunities to come together, to pick the best players from the NRL and Super League, and compete against each other in front of a passionate crowd. I think the key to improving the quality of these games is to continue to allow players who are not picked for Australia or New Zealand to play for the countries to which they have blood ties with no fear of losing the ability to play State of Origin or for Australia or New Zealand down the track if that is what they want to do.

The problem has long been that young players of Polynesian heritag, or players who could otherwise represent the smaller nations, grow up in Australia with State of Origin their ultimate goal. The old system meant they would give up their hopes of playing State of Origin, and all the status and financial rewards that go with that, if they threw on a Tonga or a Samoa jersey, for example. In a World Cup year those rules are relaxed to ensure all the minnows are as strong as they can be, and I think those allowances need to stay.

PNG fans Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

The atmosphere at Campbelltown Stadium on Saturday was just incredible. The singing, the tribal dances, the colours, the chanting; it was like an English football match at times. There are so many people in our community who identify with the nations represented, and the passion they feel for their teams was evident through the afternoon and into the night.

On Friday night, after playing his 50th Test for Australia, Cameron Smith said that wearing the green and gold was the pinnacle for him as a rugby league player. For a time, there was some doubt over whether the green and gold was as important to players as the maroon or sky blue. Many in the game described State of Origin as the ultimate, so it is reassuring to know Smith feels that way about representing Australia.

When Mal Meninga was appointed full-time Australia coach, there were questions over whether anyone was needed in that role; but I think Mal has done a great job of bringing a lot of the pride back into the Australia jersey.

Cameron Smith (right) says the Kangaroos jumper represents his pinnacle in rugby league. Mark Nolan/Getty Images

There were two key injuries to Australia players on Friday night with Johnathan Thurston and Josh Dugan now in doubt for State of Origin I and beyond. There will some noise from coaches about the cost to their clubs from these one-off Tests, but injuries are just a part of the game. No one wants to see the stars of the game out through injury, but it really just comes down to bad luck.

Meanwhile, Wayne Bennett did a great job with a mixed bunch of players representing England. They played a really disciplined style, taking advantage of some of the best forwards in the game, and simply strangled Samoa out of the game. Samoa were probably the most disappointing team on the night; I thought they had a genuine opportunity of upsetting England, but they were poor, made a lot of mistakes and couldn't match England's control.

Joseph Leilua Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

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Looking forward to the World Cup, I think England with a full-strength side and guided by Bennett are going to be a real threat. Obviously Australia will be favourites and they showed against New Zealand that they are still the best team in the world. The Kiwis will improve and they'll have to, otherwise they won't feature in the final.

I think the organisers are doing a great job of taking the World Cup to the regional centres where the crowds will be good and the lesser nations will play some great football in front of a party-like atmosphere. If it is anywhere near as entertaining as this rep round, it will be an event well worth watching.
SINGAPORE - Officers who provide security protection to the president and other senior political leaders have been reminded to make sure their security convoys comply with traffic rules, without compromising the safety and security of the VIPs they are escorting.

A joint statement to clarify this was issued to The Straits Times on Friday (Dec 22) by the Land Transport Authority and police after an image was widely shared on Wednesday of a uniformed LTA officer apparently enforcing traffic rules on transport for President Halimah Yacob.

The car in the image was part of the Police Security Command (SecCom) detail for the President, which got netizens speculating if it had been ticketed for an infringement.

No summons was issued, according to the LTA statement, which also elaborated on what had happened in the incident.

It said an LTA enforcement officer was conducting a routine patrol along Prinsep Street at 4.15pm on Wednesday when he spotted two vehicles waiting along a stretch marked with double yellow lines.

The offence of parking a vehicle where there are unbroken double yellow lines can draw a fine beginning at $70.

The LTA officer approached one of the vehicles to ask the driver to move his vehicle, in line with LTA's approach to enforcing this regulation, said the statement.

The driver told the officer he was there to pick up the President. During the course of their conversation, she arrived and was driven away without a summons being issued.

SecCom provides security protection for the President and other senior political leaders.

The joint statement said: "As part of the security protection operations, the vehicle convoy is to be positioned close to the event location in compliance with traffic rules, to facilitate swift evacuation during contingencies.

"In this case, the SecCom ground commander had made a decision for the convoy to wait there for the President as there were no street-side parking lots available in the immediate vicinity which would have allowed the convoy to come quickly to the scene in the event of an emergency.

"The police have reviewed this incident with LTA. SecCom officers have been reminded to park the convoy in compliance with traffic rules, without compromising their mission to ensure the safety and security of those they are escorting."
For Veterans and Servicemembers You may receive Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) services to help with job training, employment accommodations, resume development, and job seeking skills coaching. Other services may be provided to assist Veterans in starting their own businesses or independent living services for those who are severely disabled and unable to work in traditional employment. Click on the "How to Apply" tab to learn more and apply for Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment services. VA's Education and Career Counseling program is a great opportunity for Veterans and Servicemembers to get personalized counseling and support to help guide their career paths, ensure the most effective use of their VA benefits, and achieve their goals. Learn more and apply for education and career counseling.

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"I, Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, sentence you to die." ―Eddard Stark to Will [src]

Warden is a title bestowed upon the head of a Great House by the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. The Wardens command the armies of one of the constituent regions of the Seven Kingdoms in the name of Iron Throne for the defense of the entire realm. The Warden of a constituency is expected to lawfully command a quarter of all armies in the realm during a time of crisis.

By custom, the title is functionally hereditary. However, a Warden does not necessarily have to also be one of the Lords Paramount (rulers of the constituent regions of the realm) though this is almost always the case. For example, if an elderly or infirm ruler came to be the head of one of the Great Houses listed below, the office of Warden might be delegated to another family member young and capable enough to lead armies in the field. Likewise, if the head of one of the Great Houses listed below was too young, the office of Warden may be delegated to an older and more experienced individual.

Warden appears to be a title holding higher rank than that of "Lord Paramount." The Lords of the Stormlands and Lords of the Riverlands do not hold the title of Warden over their regions but instead submit to the Warden of their area. The Prince of Dorne is not a Warden, but has full control over their armies so it can be presumed that the Prince has the same military authority of a Warden in Dorne.

Littlefinger implies that a woman appointed to the title would be properly known as a "Wardeness".

Currently, the Wardens of the West and South have died and have yet to be officially replaced.

Current Wardens of the Seven Kingdoms

In the books

Typically, the Warden of the North defends against wildling attacks that come south of the Wall. The Warden of the West, from House Lannister, defends against coastal raids from the Iron Islands. House Greyjoy were not chosen to be Wardens, because more often than not, they are what the Warden of the West is defending against. Even though they submitted to the Iron Throne, illicit ironborn raiding would occur from time to time and would have to be suppressed. The Warden of the South, from House Tyrell, would defend against border skirmishes with Dorne, as Dorne actually retained its independence for two centuries after the Targaryen Conquest, and was only united to the realm (by marriage alliance) a century before the War of the Five Kings. This is why House Martell of Dorne is not the Warden of the South. The Warden of the East, from House Arryn, seems to have defended against raids or invasion from the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea, such as the threat during the War of the Ninepenny Kings when an invasion was mounted from the Stepstones in the Narrow Sea.

House Tully were not Wardens, probably because the Riverlands are centrally located within the realm and far from external threats. It is not clear why House Baratheon were not named as Wardens, as the Stormlands border Dorne to the south (and thus they could have been Wardens of the South), and also border the Narrow Sea like the Vale (and thus could have been Wardens of the East). The Tyrells may have been chosen as Wardens of the South due to the larger army and population of the Reach, and because more Dornish attacks may have been targeted at the fertile lands of the Reach instead of the forests of the Stormlands. House Arryn may have been chosen ahead of the Baratheons as Wardens of the East because they had to deal with contentious Hill tribes in their mountains and thus needed the military assets at their disposal to deal with them. Also, the Andal Invasion thousands of years ago began in the Vale of Arryn, so it has been used an invasion corridor across the Narrow Sea before.

After Jon Arryn died, Queen Cersei managed to convince King Robert to name her brother Jaime Lannister as the Warden of the East, because Jon's only son and heir Robert "Sweetrobin" Arryn is just a child. This greatly angered many lords in the Vale because Jaime has no connection to House Arryn or the Vale, so they begin to defiantly refer to Sweetrobin as the "True Warden of the East". Ned Stark is also opposed to Robert's decree because it puts the armies of two regions under command of a single house. Jaime, however, never actually travels to the Vale or makes any attempt to take command of the Vale's armies during these few months, and thus his hold on the title was nominal. Jaime continues to technically hold the position while he spent a full year as a prisoner of the Starks after the Battle of the Whispering Wood, although his imprisonment meant that the position was left officially vacant. The title of Warden of the East is restored to Sweetrobin by Tywin Lannister as one of the conditions of the marriage-alliance between Lysa and Petyr Baelish which brings House Arryn back into the Lannister fold. The TV series omitted this entire subplot.

Following Tywin's death, Cersei gives the title of Warden of the West to Daven Lannister, son of Ser Stafford Lannister - not because she trusts Daven, but due to an unpleasant discussion with Kevan, who rejects the post of Hand of the King after Cersei refuses to name him Lord Regent as well and relocate to Casterly Rock. Daven does not regard his appointment lightly, but he feels that his uncle Kevan should have been chosen for that office.

By the point the books reached, the four major Wardens of Westeros are as followed:

Warden of the North : Roose Bolton

: Roose Bolton Warden of the West : Daven Lannister

: Daven Lannister Warden of the East : Robert Arryn

: Robert Arryn Warden of the South: Mace Tyrell

In addition to the four major Wardens, in the books there are other lesser Wardens which control certain areas:

Warden of the Prince's Pass : Traditionally held by House Fowler of Dorne as the guardians of the Prince's Pass. Currently this title is held by Lord Franklyn Fowler.

: Traditionally held by House Fowler of Dorne as the guardians of the Prince's Pass. Currently this title is held by Lord Franklyn Fowler. Warden of the Stone Way : Traditionally held by House Yronwood of Dorne as the guardians of the Boneway. Currently this title is held by Lord Anders Yronwood.

: Traditionally held by House Yronwood of Dorne as the guardians of the Boneway. Currently this title is held by Lord Anders Yronwood. Warden of the White Knife : Traditionally held by House Manderly of the North as the guardians of the White Knife. Currently this title is held by Lord Wyman Manderly.

: Traditionally held by House Manderly of the North as the guardians of the White Knife. Currently this title is held by Lord Wyman Manderly. Warden of the Southern Marches: Created by Robb Stark for his uncle Brynden Tully in recognition for his military prowess during the War of the Five Kings. Currently held by Brynden Tully.

In The World of Ice & Fire and Fire & Blood, a fifth major Warden title called Warden of the Sands was created by Aegon the Conqueror during the First Dornish War. Jon Rosby was appointed to this position to rule Dorne in the king's name. However, the Iron Throne was defeated by the Dornishmen, stopping Aegon's attempt to disestablish the princedom of House Martell. When Dorne entered the Seven Kingdoms over a century later, the position of Warden of the Sands wasn't renewed; the Martells continued styling themselves as Princes of Dorne.
Like a recumbent sloth jolted into a panicked flight response, David Brooks has belatedly noticed the rancid politics of right-wing racial confrontation. The New York Times’ most venerable voice of conservative moderation is here to inform you, gentle reader, that the deranged incursion of Trumpinistas into the corridors of conservative power has transformed his beloved GOP into “more of a white party in recent years.” He seeks to nail down the flagrantly bogus argument that the Republicans had, over much of their modern career, been within the bounds of “basic decency on matters of race” via a single cherry-picked statistic: “A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.”

Well, sure—except that a “higher percentage” of Republicans meant very little, in absolute numerical terms, at the apogee of Great Society liberalism. Yes, Democrats predominated in the Jim Crow South, but once you controlled for that outsize regional influence, the apparent institutional commitment to civil rights within the GOP promptly vanishes. The significant difference wasn’t partisan—it was geographic. In states that were part of the Union cause, a higher percent of Democrats than Republicans voted for civil rights. And the same was true in states that were part of the Confederacy. Adjusting for this regional variance, “it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans from the north and south, respectively,” writes data journalist Harry J. Enten. “It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.”

This point bears close parsing for the simple reason that Brooks’s cavalier reliance upon it permits him to overlook nearly all relevant conservative postwar history on questions of racial equality. The same year the Civil Rights Act passed, after all, this same racially tolerant GOP nominated Barry Goldwater as its presidential standard-bearer—one of the only non-southern senators from either party to vote against the Civil Rights Act. While Lyndon Johnson dispatched Goldwater in one of the great campaign blowouts in modern presidential history, the rock-ribbed Arizona conservative managed to carry six (heavily Democratic) southern states by exploiting white racial ressentiment masquerading as outraged libertarian principle. Thus was born the “Southern Strategy,” which catapulted backlash maestro Richard Nixon into office in 1968, and set up the GOP as the dominant party in the South unto this day. So at least a few of those GOP congressional roll calls revered by Brooks involved cynical GOP party leaders already apprehending what Johnson himself candidly averred after the ratification of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts: that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation.

In any sane universe of political discourse, a party that connived in the nomination of a birther to the presidency would refrain from pious lectures about racial comity.

And Goldwater was just the electoral face of postwar GOP reaction. William F. Buckley’s National Review—a journal now revered out of all reasonable proportion by self-styled moderate Trump critics on the right like Brooks—was a fiery pulpit of white racial hatred from the moment of its founding. While Buckley partially recanted his revolting track record at the far-too-late date of 2004, the damage had long been done, and inscribed into the demagogic playbook of the white American right. From Ronald Reagan’s assaults on mythical “welfare queens” to George H.W. Bush’s vile Willie Horton ads to Donald Trump’s hateful birther crusade, the story of modern Republican politics on the national stage is a study in unrelieved and bottomlessly cynical baiting of white racial hatreds. Indeed, in any sane universe of political discourse, a party that connived in the nomination of a birther to the presidency would refrain from pious lectures about racial comity until it had sat alone in its room and thought long and hard about what it had done.

But what am I talking about? This is a David Brooks column! Cue the unconfirmable personal anecdotage:

Between 1984 and 2003 I worked at National Review, The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard. Most of my friends were Republicans. In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. To be honest, I heard more racial condescension in progressive circles than in conservative ones.

This is the very sort of bullshit social observation that launched Brooks’s career as a self-styled comic sociologist and it’s no more valid in this context than in that one. To confine myself to my own anecdotal world, I have moved in much the same D.C. journalistic circles that Brooks has over the lamentable past decade and a half. Most of my friends are of the left, and I have heard exactly zero displays of “racial condescension” in social circles I know better than Brooks does. Absolutely none, anywhere. So I put it to you, Mr. Comic Sociologist, that you are indulging in a lazy unproveable lie to make your disgraceful seat-of-the-pants argument appear marginally more credible to your elite liberal-leaning New York Times readership.

But such opportunistic mendacity is nothing compared to the fairy tale Brooks peddles over the remainder of his column. In this alternate-universe account of racial pathology on the right, there are two warring factions: reasonable and distressed “white universalists” like Brooks and his dinner-party companions, who endorse some vague Enlightenment model of racial fair play; and “conservative white identitarians,” who peddle fables of aggrieved white oppression at the hands of an out-of-control PC power elite.

But wait! The real twist here, Brooks writes, taking a page from the demented rhetorical playbook of fellow conservative-moderate culture scold Mark Lilla, is that the identitarians of the white right are actually the curdled hatemongering cousins of the PC left:

These white identitarians have taken the multicultural worldview taught in schools, universities and the culture and, rightly or wrongly, have applied it to themselves. As Marxism saw history through the lens of class conflict, multiculturalism sees history through the lens of racial conflict and group oppression. According to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, about 48 percent of Republicans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against Christians in America and about 43 percent believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites.

The mythos of a university-administered theology of “group oppressions” as a runaway pathogen infecting the American body politic is so widely asserted and brazenly undocumented that it suggests the real failure of American higher-ed pedagogy resides in the instruction of right-wing pundits and political theorists. Just for starters, the actually existing history of academic multiculturalism involved the explicit repudiation of class-based Marxist dialectics, so Brooks is committing a first-order category error right out of the gate. It’s a bit like asserting, again without a shred of evidence, that the trouble with the Talmud is that it fails to reckon with the theology of the virgin birth.

It’s a bit like asserting that the trouble with the Talmud is that it fails to reckon with the theology of the virgin birth.

Beyond that, though, to insist that the sense of white grievance now deranging the sanctums of GOP power was somehow incubated on the cultural left and smuggled into the staid, fair-minded house of American conservatism is to ignore social reality as it actually exists in these United States. The meme of Christian “oppression” has of course been a mainstay of the demagogic right-wing media for the better part of a generation. See, just for starters, the Fox-branded “War on Christmas,” the career of Rush Limbaugh’s monomaniacal little brother David, every other demented word out of Ann Coulter’s mouth, etc., ad nauseam.

As for the folk-belief on the right that there is now runaway “discrimination against whites,” apart from the political history Brooks inexcusably distorts and ignores, there’s a little thing called the Tea Party, which was funded and theorized into being by moneyed forces of right-wing white ressentiment. Its greatest spiritual leader, meanwhile, was Sarah Palin, a national political force conjured cynically into being on a cruise hosted by Brooks’s old-boy guardians of polite discourse at the Weekly Standard. To look up on the right-wing political landscape of 2017 and to marvel at the sinister cunning of the academic left in inspiring the white “identitarian” rebellion on the right is to perpetrate a Big Lie squarely in the rhetorical wheelhouse of the racist demagogue Trump himself. Which, come to think of it, is only fitting, since David Brooks and his beloved GOP establishment continue to sit ineffectually on their fretful hands as the Republican playbook of white reactionary privilege descends into its long-predicted, entirely foreseeable endgame. Breeding speaks to breeding, after all—and dishonesty to dishonesty.
So this is the year that libertarianism, a political philosophy advocating minimal government across the board and thus annoying as hell to both conservatives and liberals, finally up and died.

Not really, but that’s the new official story, at least as told by media types who have been prophesying the end of libertarianism for as long as they’ve been writing.

There’s a superficial plausibility to the charge, especially among those who confuse partisan politics with the real America. Among high-profile Democrats and Republicans, the constituency for more-open borders is zero and there’s nothing like Islamic terrorism in France and California to rev up the war machine and ignite bipartisan calls for encryption backdoors or a ban on secret communications altogether. After a few years of an unintended pause, our elected officials have even managed to put aside their differences and are once again cranking up spending.

But the main case that libertarianism is finally, finally, finally dead this time is the zombie walkabout that has been Rand Paul’s presidential campaign and the juggernaut that is Donald Trump’s. I think it’s a major category error to equate libertarianism with partisan politics, but for folks who believe the only important political question is who wins the presidency, the divergent fortunes of Trump and Paul tell the whole story.

There’s no doubt that Paul’s presidential campaign is on life support. What started out so promisingly as an unstoppable drive to the White House got a flat tire before it even left the parking lot. In February, Paul won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for the third year running, cruising past Scott Walker (remember him?) and positively crushing Donald Trump by over 20 points. As recently as June, Paul was topping polls of Republican contenders! And yet just a couple of weeks ago, Paul was reduced to special pleading to even get on the main stage of the latest Republican debate. He’s now scraping by with Pataki-like numbers, even as his fellow senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, duke it out for what might come if and when Trump hits the skids.

What happened to Rand Paul? He has run a bad campaign, especially from an ideological perspective. Conservatives have never been especially fond of libertarian-leaning Republicans to begin with and Paul seemed eager to show time and again that he wasn’t, well, that libertarian. Sure, he had called the GOP “stale and moss-covered” and even reached out to ethnic minorities, but once he started aiming at the presidency, he’s rarely missed an opportunity to jump on every conservative outrage of the day: sanctuary cities, ebola quarantines, Planned Parenthood, the Iran deal, you name it.

The guy who counseled—at the war-crazy Heritage Foundation, no less—that the U.S. should give peace a chance overseas was suddenly talking about bombing the Middle East and waging war against ISIS and banning refugees and ending visas for people from countries with “a jihadist movement,” a term of art that covers essentially all of Europe these days. After this summer’s shooting in Chattanooga, he called for the sort of profiling program he had once rejected as intrusive and ineffective.

The result was that Paul went from being what Time called “the most interesting man in politics” to sounding like most of the other windbags running for the GOP nomination. He abandoned exactly what had brought him attention at exactly the wrong time. And by fixating on the 2016 presidential race, he may well be undercutting the long fight he needs to wage within the Republican Party to win hearts and minds to the cause of smaller government across the board.

Whether going full libertarian would have produced different results in today’s GOP is anybody’s guess—based on the years they controlled Congress and the White House, there’s no reason to believe that Republicans are actually interested in a government that does less and spends less—but there’s no question it would have made Paul’s campaign more interesting.

That still would likely not have been enough to counteract the emergence of Donald Trump, who has reshaped not just the Republican race in his own dumb image but that of the Democrats as well. It’s still staggering to remember that his notorious Mexicans are “bringing drugs…they’re bringing crime…they’re rapists” patter wasn’t a hot mic moment or an aside at a Bohemian Grove sketch but the centerpiece of his official campaign announcement.

Fast-forward six months and Trump is not just still kicking ass in Republican polls, he’s managed to push the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, into agreement on “closing that Internet up in some ways.” If Trump is Politifact’s liar of the year, he is already goading Clinton into telling her own whoppers.

“No evidence for Hillary Clinton’s claim that ISIS is using videos of Donald Trump as recruiting tool,” reports Politifact, which rated Clinton’s charge as “false.” And as Trump himself can tell you, ISIS apparently is using Bill Clinton in videos.

If the rise of Trump has dumbed down political discourse (which has a way of always getting worse somehow), it remains far from clear to me what any of this has to do with the death of libertarianism as a force in American life. The rise of ISIS and especially the beheading of two American freelance journalists in 2014 has reawakened war hysteria, but even now all of the leading presidential candidates are careful to emphasize they don’t want boots on the ground because there is no support for such actions.

Terrorism is freaking people out but confidence and trust in government, law enforcement, and virtually all other societal institutions are at historic lows, a confluence which bodes well for libertarian ideals of autonomy and DIY community building. The embrace of gay marriage and pot legalization, criminal justice reform (something which, to his immense credit, Rand Paul has been leading on), and school choice are not slackening and the past year has seen the beginning of pushback on all sorts of political correctness.

Rand Paul was “supposed to embody a new libertarian moment,” according to Politico’s obit from the fall. “But there never was one.” Such renderings miss what that “libertarian moment” was and still is all about (as the co-inventor of the term, I’m happy to pull rank on this).

It’s not about the White House, for sure, but about “comfort with and demand for increasingly individualized and personalized options and experiences in every aspect of our lives.” As Matt Welch and I argued in our book, The Declaration of Independents, politics is a lagging indicator of where America is headed. It will be the last area of our lives to be transformed, but you can already see the old order breaking down.

So regardless of whether it’s Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or somebody else making plans to move into the White House this time next year—and regardless of Rand Paul’s thwarted presidential aspirations—I regret to inform you that the death of libertarianism has been greatly exaggerated.
Like last year, it'll also come with Amazon's voice remote that supports voice commands and can also tap into just about everything that Alexa can do. It'll cost $70/£70, a good bit more than the old Fire TV stick, but there's no doubt it's a much more capable device -- if you have a 4K TV, anyway. If you don't, Amazon has another deal for you. The old Fire TV stick is now bundled with the Echo Dot for $60. That's not a bad way to dive right into the Amazon's whole ecosystem.

What's more, you can get the new Fire TV and an Echo Dot for only $80 -- given that the Fire TV is $70 on its own, you're basically getting an Echo Dot for $10. That's probably worth it for most people, and Amazon surely wants to get the Echo into as many homes as possible. This seems like a pretty good gateway drug to help accomplish that goal.

Nicole Lee contributed to this report.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich is reportedly set to drop out of the presidential race, according to NBC News ' Andrea Mitchell.

Multiple oulets confirmed that the governor will officially suspend his campaign later on Wednesday. Kasich's campaign scrapped a press conference planned for early Wednesday morning and instead announced the governor would make a statement in Columbus at 5 p.m. ET.

The Kasich campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump all but sealed up the nomination following a landslide win Tuesday night in Indiana's primary.

Kasich was the last major Republican presidential candidate remaining in the race. Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out Tuesday night following the results of the Indiana primary.

The Ohio governor's campaign never really got off the ground. Though he picked up a handful of delegates in several nominating contests and won his home state's primary, the governor did not take home any other primaries or caucuses, and won few delegates in the last month.

Even after the Indiana loss, Kasich's team insisted that the governor would stay in the race until the Republican National Convention in July. On Wednesday morning, Kasich tweeted out a Star Wars parody video claiming that Kasich was the "only hope" to defeat Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Story highlights The alleged incident happened in 2013

DJ claims accusation got him fired

(CNN) Taylor Swift has been pretty quiet lately, but she will soon speak out about an alleged sexual assault.

The superstar singer is expected to testify in a civil case filed by a Denver disc jokey who claims he lost his job after Swift accused him of groping her backstage at one of her concerts in 2013.

According to pre-trial legal documents obtained by CNN, David Mueller, who was known professionally as "Jackson," maintains that Swift and co-defendents, including her mother Andrea Swift, falsely accused him of improperly touching her during a meet-and-greet that he attended for his then employer, KYGO radio. KYGO radio is a CNN affiliate.

Swift, who was 23 at the time, claims in a legal response to Mueller's suit that he assaulted her when they posed for a photo by "reaching under her dress and grabbing her bottom."

Swift says she told her mother and members of her team what she says happened, but denies that she complained to Mueller's employer, as he asserts in his claim.

Read More
AOL is now apparently blocking emails that are critical of their company.

On Wednesday, the EFF started getting complaints that emails sent to AOL customers with a link to the URL Dear AOL — a website devoted to fighting the proposed AOL email tax that would allow mass emailers who ponied up to get preferential delivery treatment over other senders — we being bounced. Copies of the same emails without the URL went through fine.

The EFF very quickly issued a press release about it. Within twenty minutes, AOL had “solved” the problem. But as the EFF put it: This incident only increases our worry about organizations who don’t have the ability to seek instant press attention. The next time AOL’s anti-spam filters fail for a small organization – or one without political muscle – will they move so quickly to fix them? Or will they push organizations to just sign up with Goodmail and pay to avoid the problem?

No, the real issue here is that AOL decided to censor email that it viewed “as harmful” to the company. No amount of subscription to Goodmail would have solved the problem, because AOL wanted to silently prevent AOL customers from getting emails that were not approved opinions of the bigwigs upstairs. This is really sleazy — less an illustration of the dangers of two-tiered email as the dangers of letting a company scan our communications and censor our thoughts and beliefs.

AOL Censors Email Tax Opponents [EFF]
* EU-Mexico trade agreement from 2000 seen as limited, outdated

* Mexico part of deals shaping the landscape of global trade

By Robin Emmott

BRUSSELS, May 11 (Reuters) - The European Union and Mexico will launch negotiations towards a new free-trade agreement later this year, as Europe seeks to tie its economy closer to North America following a deal with Canada and efforts to sign an accord with the United States.

Building on a pact with Mexico from 2000, the European Union hopes to create a transatlantic free-trade zone and help set the global rules of commerce before China does. Mexico is jumping ahead of Brazil, whose talks towards a similar deal with the European Union have stalled.

“We are ready to commit to a highly ambitious deal,” EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told a forum in Brussels alongside Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo. “I will ask for a mandate to launch negotiations this fall,” she said.

EU officials are expected to discuss the timing of talks in more detail at an EU-Latin American summit in Brussels on June 12, where Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is expected.

A deal, which would take several years, would upgrade the EU-Mexican accord that was signed when the global economy was far less integrated and online commerce was in its infancy. It is part of a new generation of deals that go beyond tariffs.

As with the EU’s pact with Canada and its plans for a deal with the United States, a new accord with Mexico would further open up markets in services and allow businesses to bid for public tenders in each others’ countries.

The European Union is Mexico’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, while Mexico is a top destination for EU exports after the United States and China.

A more comprehensive deal with the European Union would allow Mexico to join Latin America’s Pacific economies of Chile, Colombia and Peru that now have modern trade pacts with both the European Union and the United States.

It also deepens a divide between those nations and Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela on the Atlantic coast, which have been more reluctant to drop barriers to trade.

“With Colombia, Chile and Peru, we are sending a signal of fresh air that we are the countries of free traders. We are responsible for more than half of Latin America’s exports to the world,” Economy Minister Guajardo said.

The European Union and the South American trade bloc Mercosur have been unable to agree a deal, with Brazil unwilling to move forward without its close ally Argentina.

Mexico is also part of an Asia Pacific free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, part of a broader U.S. strategy to link its economy to fast-growing markets in the Pacific. (Reporting by Robin Emmott; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)
The St. Louis Blues aren't ready to cut ties with Russia-bound forward Vladimir Sobotka just yet.

The 27-year-old restricted free agent signed a three-year contract with Omsk of the KHL earlier this week after he couldn't come to an agreement with the Blues. But the team and Sobotka’s camp have plans to meet again on July 21 in Toronto for a club-elected arbitration hearing.

The arbiter’s ruling will set Sobotka’s salary for the season in which he returns to the NHL ... whenever that may be.

It's another odd turn in a relationship that didn't need to go sour. Sobotka is coming off a season in which he set a career-high with nine goals and 33 points and led the league in face-off winning percentage (61.9). Add in the immeasurable grit and competitiveness he brought to every shift and it was clear that he deserved a significant raise over the expiring deal that paid him $1.4 million. After several proposals from both sides were rejected, the Blues made a final offer of one year at $2.7 million. Sobotka held firm at $3 million.

It was easy for the player to draw a line in the sand considering that he had the KHL option in his back pocket all along. But it turns out the multi-year Russian offer was nowhere near as lucrative as the $4 million per season that was originally reported. Instead, an agent says it pays Sobotka just $8.5 million over three years, with $2.5 million coming in 2014-15. Taking state and federal taxes into consideration, he's still making more in Russia despite the lower dollar amount, but the minimal difference paints a picture of a principled stand rather than a cash grab.

That is what makes the arbitration hearing so interesting. Sobotka has an out-clause that allows him to return to the NHL, but the ruling would have to swing heavily in his favor to make it worth his while. And there's still some question as to who will represent him at the hearing. Sobotka switched agents at least twice last season, from Petr Svoboda to Stephen Bartlett to another agent named Petr Svoboda.

Whichever fancy suit shows up has plenty of ammo to make his case. And if the Blues are lucky, he'll beat them silly enough to expedite Sobotka's eventual return.
This amazing chickpea pattie recipe comes from my Mama (thanks mama!). The recipe is an adaptation of a traditional Punjabi dish made with potatoes called “Aloo Tikkis” (meaning potato patties). I try not to eat too many potatoes and so I asked my Mom to make it with chickpeas. She did and it was delicious. 🙂 This chickpea pattie recipe is filled with indian spices so get ready for your mouth to explode with spicy amazingness!

Ingredients for Chickpea Pattie Recipe

1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight (or 2 cans of 15 ounce chickpeas)

2-3 green onions

1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

1/2 tsp coriander powder

1/2 tsp garam masala

1/4 tsp of chat masala, optional

1/4 tsp of chilli powder, optional

1/2 of a fresh green (or red) chilli, optional

1-2 tsp of freshly squeezed lemon juice

salt, to taste (I used about 1/2 tsp)

3 tbsp of ground chia + 1/2 cup water

4 cup greens (baby spinach, kale, etc.), optional

Directions for Chickpea Pattie Recipe

Combine the 3 tbsp of ground chia with the 1/2 cup of water in a bowl and set aside. Wash & cook the chickpeas until they are super soft (you will have to mash them by hand, so the softer they are the easier it will be for you). Once the chickpeas are cooked, drain any excess water and set aside. Grease a baking sheet and preheat oven to 400. Chop the green onion, fresh cilantro and greens, if using, and set aside. Now it’s time to use your mom arms, yoga arms or if you are like me, your slightly weakling arms. 🙂 With a potato masher (or fork if you don’t have a masher), mash the chickpeas. You want to mash them just until you can’t see any more whole chickpeas. You still want them to keep their form. You don’t want to use a food processor because they will get too soft and won’t form properly into patties. Add all of the spices and the chia mixture to the chickpeas and mix with a spoon until everything is nicely combined. Using a 1/3 measuring cup, scoop up the chickpea mixture and place onto your greased baking sheet. Use your fingers to flatten your patties until they are about 2-3 inches thick. Bake at 400 for about 30-40 minutes, flipping them mid-way through. Enjoy them in your salad, in your burger, in a wrap or on their own! You can pan fry them right before you eat them so that they are nice and crispy. These freeze really well, so feel free to wrap them up and freeze them once they are cool.
'Fucking Walsh, fucking little troll, casting his spell on people, liar. I've won six Tours. I've done everything I ever could do to prove my innocence. I have done, outside of cycling, way more than anyone in the sport. To be somebody who's spread himself out over a lot of areas, to hopefully be somebody who people in this city, this state, this country, this world can look up to as an example. And you know what? They don't even know who David Walsh is. And they never will. And in 20 years nobody is going to remember him. Nobody.' Lance Armstrong, 2004.

For years Sunday Times sports writer David Walsh pursued Lance Armstrong as a drug cheat, and also a bully and serial litigator capable of destroying his enemies financially to protect his bogus image of sporting success.

Armstrong sued Walsh and his employer, successfully silencing his major critic using UK defamation laws which are so plaintiff-friendly that they have in recent years given rise to the phenomenon of libel tourism.

Last week, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong finally admitted to cheating, and also issued a qualified apology to Walsh after repeated prompting.

‘I would apologise to David,’ the disgraced former cyclist said.

Walsh joined Breakfast this morning to discuss the confession, and said although Winfrey did a good job, Armstrong’s first attempt at truth-telling was something of a dress rehearsal for the revelations to come.

‘Oprah Winfrey hasn’t been on this story for that long, and she had to do a lot of catching up, and honestly, I think she did a really decent job relative to where she was coming from,' Walsh said. ‘But Lance was quite evasive in many of his answers, and I understand that, because it was the first kind of attempt at telling the truth after lying for almost 20 years. So it’s not going to all come out in the first interview but I think as he does more interviews, and the indications are that he will do many more interviews, I think there’ll be more truth, every time he speaks, and I think in the end we will get a pretty complete story from him.’

‘My feeling about Lance Armstrong is that intellectually, he understands that he has to be remorseful. Emotionally, he can’t hack it. If you watched the interview closely, there were times when he was being asked questions that were drawing what should have been quite painful answers from him, when he was having to admit stuff that he did that really was awful, and a little smirk would cross his face. And you’re looking at him, you’re thinking, was that just, was that a bit of a smile I saw there?’

‘When he was talking about Betsy Andreu, one of the witnesses who testified against him, you know, he was making the point that... people had said that Lance had called Betsy... a bitch, he called her crazy, and he called her fat, and Lance was trying to make a joke and say: “I did call you a bitch, I did call you crazy, but I didn’t call you fat.” And he kind of laughed. Lance: not funny.’

Walsh says his paper is now planning to sue Armstrong for the return of the GBP 300,000 settlement paid to Armstrong for libel, as well as a further GBP 600,000 in legal costs (around USD 1.5m in total). He says that without the UK’s libel laws, which notoriously favour plaintiffs against media institutions, Armstrong would have been uncovered and chased out of the sport long ago.

‘At a time when the whole world was going with the Armstrong story, you had one newspaper in Britain repeatedly saying: we think this guy’s a fraud. Now the London, or the UK libel laws, shut us up, and lots of people have used UK libel laws to stop a story coming out because they are draconian, and journalists like me think they’re incredibly unfair. And so we were forced to settle with Armstrong, because we’d been the ones asking questions. Now, how unfair is that, given that history now shows we were the ones doing the right thing. Why should you be penalised for doing what I believe lots of newspapers and lots of TV channels should have been doing at this time?’
They may be good for the environment, but photovoltaic solar panels are not really something you’d go out of your way to visit and admire.

So in a bid to make solar power more appealing to young people, one Chinese company has ditched the traditional approach of filling fields with uninspiring rows of PV panels, instead building its solar plants in the shape of giant pandas.

Image: UNDP

Green Pandas

The above image is an artist’s impression of Hong Kong-based Panda Green Energy Group's first panda solar plant, which began generating electricity in June. The reality, so far at least, is a little different.

Image: Snopes/UNDP China

Located in China’s northern Shanxi province, the Datong Panda Power Plant is a giant 50MW solar array spread across 100 hectares. It is the first plant to be built under a scheme agreed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Panda Green Energy’s major shareholder, China Merchants New Energy.

As well as building Panda-shaped solar plants, the UNDP agreement also supports three initiatives aimed at promoting green energy among young Chinese.

These are: an Open Design Challenge encouraging young people to design solutions for sustainable development; summer camps at the Datong panda plant focusses on innovation in science and technology; and a Youth Exchange programme helping “marginalized” Chinese youths to go overseas.

Solar superpower

Some might question whether China really needs to invest in promoting solar power at all: it is by some distance the world leader when it comes both the manufacture and installation of PV panels.

Image: REN21

According to data published by REN21, at the end of 2016 China had 77.4GW of solar PV installed, representing more than a quarter of the global total.

China also dominates when it comes to building new solar PV plants, adding 34.5GW last year. This accounted for 46% of all new solar power plants across the planet in 2016.

While a second 50MW Panda power plant is planned for Datong, Panda Green Energy Group’s mission to promote green energy includes an ambition to expand into other countries.

Image: Panda Green Energy Group Limited

Earlier this year the Prime Minister of Fiji, Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, said he hoped the planned construction of a panda power plant on the South Pacific island would start soon.

Solar theme park

While Panda Green Energy Group’s solar power plants are striking, they are not the first PV installations to attempt to represent animals with silicon panels.

US utility Duke Energy last year revealed its 5MW Reedy Creek solar plant in Florida had taken the form of Mickey Mouse.

Image: Duke Energy

The facility comprises 48,000 solar panels occupying 9 hectares near Walt Disney World Resort, helping to meet the electricity needs of the theme park and nearby hotels.

The Mickey Mouse solar plant began operating in what was a record year for solar PV installations in the US.

According to renewable energy group REN21, for the first time ever, solar PV represented the country’s leading source of new generating capacity.

More than 14.8 GW of capacity – almost double the installations in 2015 – was brought online in 2016, representing a fifth of all solar PV capacity installed globally.
Larry Taylor (Photo: Hinds County Detention Center)

A Hinds County Sheriff's Department interdiction officer was arrested and fired this week after drugs were allegedly found in his patrol car.

A release from the HCSO stated that the undisclosed amount of drugs were found in Larry Taylor's patrol vehicle on Tuesday.

Taylor, 31, is charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, the release stated.

Taylor is a part of the interdiction unit, which deals with interstate crimes and is responsible for a large number of drug busts on the interstate.

"It is disappointing when we are put in a position to arrest one of our own," Maj. Pete Luke said. "Law enforcement officers are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard. These isolated events put doubt into the minds of the citizens that we serve."

Taylor has been booked into the Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond.

In May, Hinds Sheriff Victor Mason announced that he and the Morton Police Department had formed a joint interdiction unit in order to target drug traffickers. Under the agreement, the sheriff’s department and Morton PD split cash and property that the unit seizes during its operations, officials said. It is unclear if Taylor was one of the two officers dedicated to that unit by HCSO.

Morton is in Scott County.

We have contacted the sheriff's department seeking additional details and are awaiting a response.

Contact Therese Apel at 601-961-7236 or tapel@gannett.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Read or Share this story: http://on.thec-l.com/2lAcmz8
New Delhi: Adding yet another feather in their hat, Modi government in the first week of July launched Digital India week at Delhi. Digital India, which is a brainchild of PM Narendra Modi’s vision to bring good governance and reduce corruption, got excellent response from both industry and society. Along with PM, on the dais were Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Union I&B Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, along with top industrial honchos including CEO’s and Director’s of top Indian Companies.

India is ready for a digital war

While #DigitalIndia was trending all over Social Media, Defence Minister Manohar Parikar made an announcement. He announced at a Press Conference about the launch of National Counter Strike Portal (NCSP) as a step to train youth in combating possible militant attacks and generate a feeling of patriotism among youth. “You have to neutralise Terrorists using Counter Terrorists only”, said the Defence Minister.

In a special interview given to Faking News, Union HRD minister Smriti Irani confirmed addition of NCSP as a credit course for all the Affiliated Universities under UGC and an extra subject to be introduced in CBSE and government schools. PM Modi nominated All India Engineers Federation (AIEF) to bring maximum top class players from all the corners of the country. College students all over the country welcomed this decision.

Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif, blamed Manohar Parrikar of copying the complete idea of Counter Strike from Pakistan. “The game defines Pakistani forces and the terrorist forces,” he said. Meanwhile, China stopped its exports of computer and laptop accessories to India as a move to slow down the policy.

Sources said that this will be the prime idea of PM Modi in his upcoming Mann Ki Baat urging players from all over the country to post their selfies with the hashtag #SelfiePlayingCounterStrike as a strategic move to show India’s youth strength at the international level. PM is also planning to meet Top Game Developers like Rockstar Games and Valve Corporations and asked them to make India specific games like GTA Mumbai City and then extend its development to 10 cities including Varanasi and New Delhi.
We’ve all heard about the gender gap in tech. Women simply aren’t thriving in one of the most promising fields in the United States — and not for lack of talent. And here’s the truth: It’s not solely a problem for women. It’s a problem for men, too. In just five years, there will be a million unfilled computer science–related jobs in the United States, which according to our calculations could amount to a $500 billion opportunity cost. Tech companies are producing jobs three times faster than the U.S. is producing computer scientists. There are incredible opportunities here. We need women to help fill these jobs, and we need them now.

The reasons why women and people of color are not pursuing computer science jobs are complicated. I’ve thought a lot about this over the past 16 months, as I’ve directed my documentary on the subject, Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, and I believe there are four main reasons women don’t thrive in tech. Here they are:

1. Culture

First and foremost, this is a culture problem. The stereotype of a software engineer is a 25-year-old, hoodie-clad dude who wears glasses, is antisocial, and loves to hack strings of code in the basement of his parents’ home, eating stale pizza and drinking Red Bull until 3 or 4am. As with all stereotypes, there’s some truth here, and it’s not the most aspirational image for a young woman. Old movies like War Games contributed to the stereotype, while the image of the male geek genius is perpetuated in modern pop culture with television shows such as HBO’s Silicon Valley and The Big Bang Theory.

2. Few role models

Which leads me to another huge reason we have a gender imbalance: Tech is basically devoid of female role models. The old adage “You cannot be what you cannot see” is true here. Young girls and people of color have very few modern-day role models in tech. Megan Smith is the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, but she’s hardly a household name. We need more modern-day female role models, many more.

3. Poor pipeline

At most universities, few women make it past the 101, entry-level computer science class that should welcome all students, regardless of their prior knowledge of the subject. Instead, women entering this first-year class too often suffer from negative ambient belonging. From the first day there, they perceive that the men in the class know much more about programming than they do. And they are often right. In part, I blame this on the gaming industry. Gaming has traditionally been marketed to boys, so by the time these boys get to college, the ones who enter CS classes have likely been gaming for over 10 years. Through finding cheats and discovering the inner workings of games such as Call of Duty and GTA V, gamers can develop an understanding of the fundamentals of programming. With the recent explosion of mobile games, there exists an enormous opportunity to design games that appeal to girls and young women — and create more familiarity with code.

4. Sexism

Then there is the issue of plain, old-fashioned sexism. Like it or not, it’s present in the misogynistic nuances in startup culture, in the good ol’ boys corporations of the South, and even in the classrooms and administration of America’s educational system. Sexism might not present itself as it did in the 1960s Mad Men era; instead it is latent, subtle, but still very present. It’s things like not being heard in a meeting or a classroom discussion. It’s the assumption that if you are the woman in the meeting, you are the admin, or you brought the coffee. It’s being interrupted. It’s not being given the chance to prove yourself.

So what now?

So what do women do about these challenges? I talked to countless women in the course of working on the Code documentary. Certain common solutions have surfaced time and again: Women need to be more assertive; we should stop apologizing all the time. We should ask for raises and believe we are worthy of that raise. Younger women should find a sponsor — not just a mentor, but a true sponsor who will go to bat for their career.

Above all else, women need to support women. We often have to work harder than men to prove our worth in the workplace — and this means that sometimes we don’t look up from our desks in order to reach out and support a co-worker. That’s got to stop.

And finally, we need male allies, because we need each other in the workplace. Teams with women are more productive, have a higher collective IQ, and achieve more. Teams with women have a broader perspective that results in the creation of products that serve a greater breadth of humanity. Women offer diversity, and diversity drives innovation.

“A true male ally,” one woman said to me recently, “is a man who is willing to defend women when there are no women in the room.” So men, stand up and be counted. It will help us all.
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Karissa Haugeberg of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts studied women in the pro-life movement from the 1960s through 1990s. Her work resulted in the nationally acclaimed book 'Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century.' (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)

A new book by Karissa Haugeberg, assistant professor in the Tulane School of Liberal Arts, sheds light on women activists’ peaceful and violent work against abortion from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century reveals the motivations of these activists and how their beliefs and activism shaped our national conversation and policies. Drawing on archival records and interviews with prominent figures, the book examines these often neglected figures in history.

Readers might be surprised to discover that women usually initiated major changes in the anti-abortion movement. “Women created a vast network of crisis pregnancy centers, where they sought to persuade women not to have abortions. And women were more central to violent cells, both as architects of criminal conspiracies and as foot soldiers, carrying out destructive, potentially lethal campaigns,” notes Haugeberg.

When research reveals a new angle on an important issue, people take notice. The book landed on the cover of the New York Review of Books and earned reviews in The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement.

“Although one might assume that courses about reproductive health are rife with rancor, I’ve had the opposite experience with students at Tulane.” Karissa Haugeberg

Haugeberg serves as faculty adviser for Newcomb College Institute’s Students United for Reproductive Justice organization and draws upon her research in the classroom. “Although one might assume that courses about reproductive health are rife with rancor, I’ve had the opposite experience with students at Tulane. Instead of rehashing tired, divisive debates, they are much more invested in understanding why people have supported policies that have constrained their own economic or social potential.”

You can listen to Haugeberg discuss her research on these radio programs:

Like this story? Keep reading: Tulane group joins worldwide march for women's equality
Lynn joins fellow British racer Sam Bird in testing for the Japanese squad on 22 November, the day after Lynn takes part in the GP2 race that is on the same bill as the FIA WEC finale.

Toyota was initially planning on just testing Bird, but the deal to test Lynn was concluded the week after the Shanghai FIA WEC event earlier this month. Mike Conway will act as a benchmark for Bird and Lynn at the test.

Lynn, who has raced exclusively in single-seaters during his professional career, is well versed in endurance racing as his father Shaun regularly competes in both contemporary and historic sportscar racing.

Toyota has a 2016 place up for grabs in its two car squad following the retirement of Alexander Wurz, but Motorsport.com understands that Kamui Kobayashi is set to be announced as a full time driver in Tokyo next February.

Bird or Lynn could both be considered as official reserve drivers for 2016 when Toyota will race an all-new petrol turbo-powered LMP1 challenger, to be known as the Toyota TS 050 HYBRID.
Let’s be honest Allyson, this really is all your fault.

For months now I’ve been flying under the radar, working hard at achieving my no-reputation reputation. I openly let my peers judge me and was happy being referred to as “Who?” and “Her?”. And it was all for two reasons:

One, they didn’t know me. And two, if we ever did meet, I could scream “You don’t know me! You don’t know me!” the same way sassy, out of control, pregnant teenagers do on Maury.

But those dreams are far behind me now.

Because today is a Thursday and I find Thursdays to be exceptionally boring. So imagine my excitement when I get an email from my school telling me I need to pick up a package. I’m already in the 7.56 to 7.73 range of happiness on any given day so I hit Chris Traeger levels of optimism.

Public Service Announcement: Apparently that much happiness affects one’s situational awareness and ability to rationalize. Because I got my package and started dancing. Like, in the mailroom, started dancing. Mind you, I’m a terrible dancer. I only wish I could dance half as well as Elaine. About 45 seconds in I say to myself, ‘You should stop. If someone notices you’ll never be able to achieve your Maury-level dreams.’

Why I didn’t stop there is beyond me.

The CIA World Factbook should really examine their projected population growth rates for India and Nigeria because they have nothing on the population growth of my college’s mailroom. In the minute and a half I spent dancing our mailroom managed to grow from one person (Me) to about 30. This includes the girl that sits behind me in criminal law and two guys that I will see in chemistry class tomorrow morning. And naturally, there were all staring at the crazy person dancing (Dancing. Seizure. Call it what you will). So as any sane, reasonable person does, I took my package and ran the hell out of there.

Thank God the embarrassment is over, right?

Wrong!

I ran so fast that I body slammed my apartment building’s door which wouldn’t have been a problem if the cute guy living on my floor hadn’t been opening it with a basket full of laundry. No, instead laundry flew everywhere and I mumbled something along the lines of “thank you” and “reddit”. Now he thinks I’m an unapologetic redditor (Which isn’t too far from the truth, but he didn’t need to know that.)

In the span of five minutes months of preparation went down the toilet, my Maury dreams were destroyed and I have now been dubbed “that mailroom girl who has frequent seizures and runs”.

So thanks.

Despite being thoroughly embarrassed, I was miraculously still pumped for your gift (See Picture One). Two things I will always do: Laugh in the face of danger by opening boxes with my hand on the scissor blade (Because really, who actually uses the handle?) and making that face when I’m excited (See Picture Four). Mainly because of who I am as a person.

So I’m just now realizing how long it took me to actually talk about the books you got me. Sorry. (Not really, I’m just practicing on what to say to laundry guy. I actually like talking about myself. See? Unapologetic.)

Okay so book numero uno: “Pawn” by Aimée Carter. From what I’ve gathered (aka, the inside flap), I’m gonna like this one. It has all the things I like: Numbers (I’m being serious), something disturbing-ish (Pleeease tell me they use face transplants) and a strong female protagonist. Seriously, nothing turns me off more than weak female characters. I haven’t been able to finish a romantic comedy in two years (Except for “10 Things I Hate About You.” Because I actually like Kat). Anyways, this book sounds pretty good so I gave you my thumbs-up seal of approval.

EDIT: I just realized the protagonist’s name is Kitty. If she’s a strong female character than my days of sorting through hundreds of young adult novels are over! Strong female character = feline name. Take Katniss, for instance. Coincidence? I think not.

The first thing I should say is that I was hyped to see you got me two books. Not only have you given me more to read but I now have another reason to procrastinate and put off my homework. You also gave me the joy of laughing so hard I choked on my spit (See Picture Ten). I think it’s because his eyes follow you everywhere. Right now, I’m holding it at an awkward angle upside down and I still feel like I’m being watched.

But book number two! Or would it be one-and-a-half and two? Eh, whatever. Book 1.5/2 is “After Moonrise” by P.C. Cast and Gena Showalter. It’s made up of two novels, “Possessed” by P.C. and “Haunted”, which was written by Gena. Picture twelve is when the word “possessed” caught my eye. Picture thirteen is when I’m relieved to remember I like books about possession. What really caught my eye were the words “detective” and “murder so brutal” (I’m a words person). I’ve spent at least half of my college career studying brutal murders, so it’s nice to have a bit of light reading.

Mad props Allyson, because you seemed to have found a non-love triangle, “first time getting on a train” dystopian novel. And two-ish novels that aren’t textbook heavy on crime, which is refreshing. You’re a Grade-A Secret Santa and —

You know what? Screw this. What I’m really trying to say is thanks for the books and ruining my reputation Allyson. It was worth it.

Madison
Hello all,

In this newsletter, we will share the latest updates on the science side of the operation. We have spent the last month tweaking and playing with the specifics of our observing campaign. Also, with winter coming, we have been setting up some preparations for when the star is traditionally out of range.

Updates to the Observations

Astronomy is limited as a science in that we typically cannot do much in a laboratory setting. We can't build a baby star and scale it up, we can't repeat the Big Bang and watch it play out, and we definitely cannot go out to WTF and see with our own eyes what is going on. Instead, we get really clever with how we use the light coming from these objects. You could then guess that astronomers want ALL THE STARLIGHT. This is kind of true, but it is possible to have too much starlight. When this happens in an image the star or object from which we counted too much light is called saturated. It looks at its worst like this:

This is an image from ESO showing bleed lines (vertical stripes) on some bright stars. As you can probably guess, we have experienced some saturation issues in our data, but nothing as blatant as that image. Ours looks more like this:

Do you see it? Not really, no. A better, and more analytical way to quantify this saturation is to look at a slice through the star and see what the profile of the counts looks like. We would expect a bell curve, a normal distribution. If the star was saturated, we would expect a plateau or a mesa in the counts. Here is one of the slices demonstrating saturation:

So, how did this happen? Excellent question, internal dialogue! This is because we planned our observations with a very particular setup. We wanted as much light as possible without saturating. This required de-focusing (deliberately making our stars bigger and fuzzier on the chip) to avoid the saturation. Due to a hiccup in the telescope following the focus commands it was sent (which apparently affected other users as well), our images were actually focused rather than unfocused. These *focused* images were saturated, making light curves that look like this:

This plot was put together quickly in AstroImageJ, which is freely available if you want to analyze some data on your own. Simple GUI and beginner-friendly :p. We identified the saturated images in the above graph based on the brightness levels of the pixels illuminated by the stars. Note the value at the top of the plot window for the RMS (root mean square) is 0.057, or about a 6% random fluctuation.

This looks not good: there are many images which are affected and the data are very scattered. All is not lost though. This only affected a small fraction of the images taken and was primarily in the longer wavelengths. These images are also not worthless. Some of these can be rescued by using different comparison stars or by cleverly applying some tricks with apertures and recalibration. We have also appropriately adjusted our observation parameters so that there is no longer the threat of saturation.

Let's end this on a lovely positive note though. Here is what all of our unsaturated data in r-band looks like on the same scale as before. Note that the data are much more closely gathered:

Note that the RMS scatter is now 0.0037, or ~0.4%; a significant improvement. This is also on the same vertical scaling as the saturated data in the graph above, so that the comparison is fair.

Looking at the last ten or so observations, the uncertainties are noticeably larger. The particularly large one is likely a poor exposure due to weather or tracking, and might be removed later if there is a reason to do so. These exposures have a larger uncertainty because we have less light in each image. Our uncertainty in our measurement decreases approximately with the square root of the number of counts. As the exposures are anywhere from half to a third of the time, the uncertainties should be about 1.5 (sqrt(2)) times as large.

Updates on future observations and LCOGT

Unfortunately, as winter is rolling around, we will soon lose the ability to observe our target from Earth. All is not lost though. This gives us a chance to buckle down and polish up our analysis and current data. By the time the star is visible again early next year, the funds raised from our Kickstarter program will "kick" in to observe the star.

We are fortunate enough to be able to continue the monitoring during this time from space with the Swift Telescope. This telescope is designed to study Gamma-ray bursts, but when it is not observing these objects, it can do other science. Swift's mission control is at Penn State - which happens to be Jason Wright's stomping grounds - and Jason has been successful in proposing for Swift time. Yeah! Here is a preview of what that data set we have for the star already looks like. The different colors plotted indicate different filters used to make the observations (a description of the Swift filter set is here).

We also want to make a quick note that the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) has changed its name to simply Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). They have also updated their web address to lco.global. They have a brief update about this change on their website that is worth a read. To us, and to misquote Mister Shakespeare, a telescope by any other name operates just as sweet.

Thanks for tuning in!
This episode of RunAs Radio brought to you by Chef, the automation platform for the DevOps workflow. You can use Chef to automate and manage it all -- infrastructure, run-time environments and applications. Chef works in the cloud or in your data center, on physical servers, virtual machines and containers. Get started with Chef today at chef.io/runasradio.

About Show #473 So what happens when a country gets hacked? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about the significance of the attacks on Turkey and the Philippines, where entire voter registries have been exposed, including email addresses, passport information, even fingerprint data! Troy digs into the ideas around biometric data, the tepid reactions of the governments in question and a larger conversation about where this will ultimately lead. If you are concerned about data privacy, there are steps you can take, but only to a limited degree - anywhere that you share your data is vulnerable, even your government. Protect yourself!
Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence? Paper published in the eminent Soviet Journal 'SPUTNIK' by Russian scientists Mik...

http://humansarefree.com/2016/09/russian-scientists-published-this-paper.html

Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?

AN ARTIFICIAL SPUTNIK OF THE EARTH?

OUR HYPOTHESIS: The Moon is an artificial Earth satellite put into orbit around the Earth by some intelligent beings unknown to ourselves.

A NOAH'S ARK?

A BATTLESHIP THEY COULDN'T TORPEDO?

A SPACESHIP COME TO GRIEF?

WAITING FOR THE EVIDENCE

Although people long ago began to wonder whether the "canals" on Mars were the creation of cosmic engineers, for some odd reason it has not occurred to look with the same eyes upon the peculiarities of the lunar landscape much closer at hand.And all the arguments about the possibilities of intelligent life existing on other celestial bodies have been confined to the idea that other civilizations must necessarily live on the surface of a planet, and that the interior as a habitat is out of the question. Abandoning the traditional paths of "common sense", we have plunged into what may at first sight seem to be unbridled and irresponsible fantasy.But the more minutely we go into all the information gathered by man about the Moon, the more we are convinced that there is not a single fact to rule out our supposition.Not only that, but many things so far considered to be lunar enigmas are explainable in the light of this new hypothesis.The origin of the Moon is one of the most complicated problems of cosmogony. So far there have been basically three hypotheses under discussion.The Moon was once a part of the Earth and broke away from it. This has now been refuted by the evidence.The Moon was formed independently from the same cloud of dust and gas as the Earth, and immediately became the Earth's natural satellite.But then why is there such a big difference between the specific gravity of the Moon (3.33 grams per cubic centimeter) and that of the Earth (5.5 gr.)?Furthermore, according to the latest information (analysis of samples brought back by the U.S. Apollo astronauts) lunar rock is not of the same composition as the Earth's.The Moon came into being separately, and, moreover, far from the Earth (perhaps even outside the Solar system).This would mean that the moon would not have to be fashioned from the same "clay" as our own planet. Sailing through the Universe, the Moon came into Earth's proximity, and by a complex interplay of forces of gravity was brought within a geocentric orbit, very close to circular. But a catch of this kind is virtually impossible.In fact, scientists studying the origin of the Universe today have no acceptable theory to explain how the Earth-Moon system came into being.We refuse to engage in speculation about who exactly staged this unique experiment, which only a highly developed civilization was capable of.If you are going to launch an artificial sputnik, then it is advisable to make it hollow.At the same time it would be naive to imagine that anyone capable of such a tremendous space project would be satisfied simply with some kind of giant empty trunk hurled into a near-Earth trajectory.It is more likely that what we have here is a very ancient spaceship, the interior of which was filled with fuel for the engines, materials and appliances for repair work, navigation, instruments, observation equipment and all manner of machinery...In other words, everything necessary to enable this "caravelle of the Universe" to serve as a kind of Noah's Ark of intelligence, perhaps even as the home of a whole civilization envisaging a prolonged (thousands of millions of years) existence and long wanderings through space (thousands of millions of miles).Naturally, the hull of such a spaceship must be super-tough in order to stand up to the blows of meteorites and sharp fluctuations between extreme heat and extreme cold.Probably the shell is a double-layered affair--the basis a dense armoring of about 20 miles in thickness, and outside it some kind of more loosely packed covering (a thinner layer — averaging about three miles).In certain areas — where the lunar "seas" and "craters" are, the upper layer is quite thin, in some cases, non-existent.Since the Moon's diameter is 2,162 miles, then looked at from our point of view it is a thin- walled sphere.And, understandably, not an empty one. There could be all kinds of materials and equipment on its inner surface.But the greatest proportion of the lunar mass is concentrated in the central part of the sphere, in its core, which has a diameter of 2,062 miles.Thus the distance between the kernel and the shell of this nut is in the region of 30 miles. This space was doubtless filled with gases required for breathing, and for technological and other purposes.With such an internal structure the Moon could have an average specific gravity if 3.3 grams per cubic centimeter, which differs considerably from that of Earth (5.5 grams per cubic centimeter).The most numerous and interesting of the formations on the lunar surface are the craters.In diameter they vary considerably. Some are less that a yard across, while others are more than 120 miles (the biggest has a diameter of 148 miles). How does the Moon come to be so pockmarked?There are two hypothesis — volcanic and meteoric. Most scientists vote for the latter.Kirill Stanyukovich, a Soviet physicist, has written a whole series of works since 1937 in which he expounds the idea that the craters are the result of bombardment of the Moon for millions of years.And he really means bombardment, for even the smallest celestial body, when it is involved in one of those fastest head-on collisions so common in the cosmos behaves itself like a warhead charged with dynamite, or even an atomic warhead at times.Instant combustion takes place on impact, turning it into a dense cloud of incandescent gas, into plasma, and there is a very definite explosion.According to Professor Stanyukovich, a "missile" of a sizable character (say 6 miles in diameter) must, on collision with the Moon, penetrate to a depth equal to 4 or 5 times its own diameter (24-30 miles).The surprising thing is that however big the meteorites may have been which have fallen on the Moon (some have been more than 60 miles in diameter), and however fast they must have been traveling (in some cases the combined speed was as much as 38 miles per second), the craters they have left behind are for some odd reason all about the same depth, 1.2-2 miles, although they vary tremendously in diameter.Take that 148-mile diameter crater. In area it outdoes Hiroshima hundreds of times over.What a powerful explosion it must have been to send millions of tons of lunar rock fountaining over tens of miles!On the face of it, one would expect to find a very deep crater here, but nothing of the sort: there is three miles at the most between top and bottom levels, and one third of that is accounted for by the wall of rock thrown up around the crater like a toothed crown.For such a big hole, it is too shallow. Furthermore, the bottom of the crater is convex, following the curve of the lunar surface.If you were to stand in the middle of the crater you would not even be able to see the soaring edge-- it would be beyond the horizon. A hollow that is more like a hill is a rather strange affair, perhaps.Not really, if one assumes that when the meteorite strikes the outer covering of the moon, this plays the role of a buffer and the foreign body finds itself up against an impenetrable spherical barrier.Only slightly denting the 20-mile layer of armour plating, the explosion flings bits of its "coating" far and wide.Bearing in mind that the Moon's defense coating is, according to our calculations, 2.5 miles thick, one sees that this is approximately the maximum depth of the craters.Now let us consider the chemical peculiarities of the lunar rock.Upon analysis, American scientists have found chromium, titanium and zirconium in it. These are all metals with refractory, mechanically strong and anti-corrosive properties.A combination of them all would have enviable resistance to heat and the ability to stand up to means of aggression, and could be used on Earth for linings for electrical furnaces.If a material had to be devised to protect a giant artificial satellite from the unfavorable effects of temperature, from cosmic radiation and meteorite bombardment, the experts would probably have hit on precisely these metals.In that case it is not clear why lunar rock is such an extraordinarily poor heat conductor - a factor which so amazed the astronauts? Wasn't that what the designers of the super-sputnik of the Earth were after?From the engineers point of view, this spaceship of ages long past which we call the Moon is superbly constructed. There may be a good reason for its extreme longevity. It is even possible that it predates our own planet.At any rate, some pieces of lunar rock have proved older than the oldest on Earth, although it is true, this applies to the age of the materials and not of the structure for which they were used.And from the number of craters on its surface, the Moon itself is no chicken.It is, of course, difficult to say when it began to shine in the sky above the Earth, but on the basis of some preliminary estimates one might hazard a guess that it was around two thousand million years ago.We do not, of course, imagine that the moon is still inhabited, and probably many of its automatic devices have stopped working, too. The stabilizers have ceased functioning and the poles have shifted.Even though the moon keeps that same side turned towards us, for some time it has been unsteady on its own axis, on occasion showing us part of its reverse side which were once invisible to observers on the Earth - for example, the Selenites themselves if they made expeditions here.Time has taken its toll. Both body and rigging have disintegrated to some extent; some seams on the inner shell evidently diverged.We assume that the long (up to 940 miles) chains of small craters formerly ascribed to volcanic activity were brought about by eruptions of gas through cracks appearing in the armour plating as a result of accidents.No doubt one of the most splendid features of the lunarscape — a straight "wall" nearly 500 yards high and over 60 miles long - formed as a result of one of the armor plates bending under the impact of celestial torpedoes and raising one of its straight, even edges.The Moon's population presumably took the necessary steps to remedy the effects of meteorite bombardment, for example, patching up rents in the outer shield covering the inner shell.For such purposes a substance from the lunar core was probably used, a kind a cement being made from it. After processing this would be piped to the surface sites where it was required.Not long ago astronomers discovered variations in the gravitational fields near the large "seas". We believe the reason to be this: the Moon's dry seas are in fact areas from which the protective coating was torn from the armor cladding.To make good the damage to these vast tracts, the installation producing the repair substance would have had to be brought immediately beneath the site so that it could flood the area with its "cement". The resulting flat stretches are what look like seas to the terrestrial observer.The stocks of materials and machinery for doing this are no doubt still where they were, and are sufficiently massive to give rise to these gravitational anomalies.What is the Moon today? Is it a colossal necropolis, a "city of the dead," where some form of life became extinct? Is it a kind cosmic Flying Dutchman? A craft abandoned by its crew and controlled automatically?We do not know and we shall not try to guess.We have put forward in this article only a few of the reasons - unfortunately the evidence is so far only circumstantial - for our hypothesis, which at first glance may appear to be crazy.A similar "crazy" idea was put forward in 1959 by Professor Iosif Shklovsky, an eminent scientist, in relation to the "moons" circling around Mars.After carefully weighing up the evidence he concludes that they are both hollow and therefore artificial satellites.We feel that the questions we have raised in connection with our Moon provide sufficient food for serious thought on the matter; the result may be the illumination of our many lunar riddles.Now, of course, we have to wait for direct evidence to support our idea. Or refute it...Probably there will not be long to wait.
A Syrian woman shelters in a damaged building as civil defence workers sift through debris looking for survivors following reported air strikes in Aleppo (AFP Photo/Thaer Mohammed)

Beirut (AFP) - US-backed Syrian forces said Sunday they have established a military council to push Islamic State group fighters out of their northern bastion of Al-Bab after ousting the jihadists from Manbij.

"We announce... the creation of the Al-Bab Military Council" tasked with driving IS from the town in Aleppo province, said the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters in a statement, two days after driving the last jihadists from Manbij.

The last remaining IS fighters abandoned the city of Manbij near the Turkish border on Friday after a rout that the Pentagon said showed the extremists were "on the ropes".

The retreat from the city which IS captured in 2014 was the jihadists' worst defeat yet at the hands of the SDF alliance backed by US air power.

Al-Bab is around 50 kilometres (30 miles) southwest of Manbij, and also in the battleground province of Aleppo.

In Sunday's statement, the SDF said "we promise to our people that we will strike to liberate Al-Bab@" and the region around it.

They also called on the US-led coalition that has been battling IS in Syria and neighbouring Iraq "to back us in our struggle to liberate our land and our brothers from the Daesh terrorists".

The battle for Manbij -- a key supply route for the jihadists between the Turkish border and their self-declared capital in Raqa -- lasted more than two months.

As they fled, the jihadists took hundreds of civilians with them to use as "human shields" but later released many of them.
Venture Communism

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010).

Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s.

Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner in their club by selling the future productive value of what they create in exchange for the present wealth they need to get started. The stolen, dead value of the past captures the unborn value of the future.

* * *

Whatever portion of our productivity we allow to be taken from us will return in the form of our own oppression.

This is possible only because of a monopoly on the function of marketing future value, combined with an artificial floor under the cost of getting started. The productivity of horizontal, networked peer groups is expropriated by the holders of artificial property rights.

Those who are able to control the circulation of the product of the labor of others can impose laws and social institutions according to their interests. Those who are not able to retain control of the product of their own labor are not able to resist.

Thomas Hodgskin fairly well demolished the “labor fund” doctrine. The financing of subsistence of workers engaged in production can just as accurately be conceived in horizontal terms, as the continual mutual advance of credit by workers to each other against their future production. The capitalist is not someone who advances pay from a labor fund derived from their own “past abstention,” but someone who relies on the preemption and monopoly of this mutual advance of credit function by a privileged class, with the help of the state.

The idea of capitalist abstention as the source of the mythical labor fund, and of profit as the reward for abstention or long time-preference on the capitalist’s part, is especially laughable given the fact that the original accumulation of capital — the concentration of enormous investment funds in the hands of a small plutocracy — was actually accomplished through robbery rather than abstention or savings. And it’s rendered even more so by the fact that banks lend money into existence out of thin air, without even the pretense that it’s backed by anyone’s savings.

The radical erosion of the latter barrier through ephemeral technology (as described by Douglas Rushkoff) is making an increasing share of venture capital superfluous.

For a capitalist class to exist, the market must be rigged…. Capitalism must increase the price of capital by withholding it from labor. In reality the “free market” is an imposition by property owners on to workers…. Capital needs to make the price of labor low enough to prevent workers, as a class, from being able to retain enough of their own earnings to acquire their own property. If workers could acquire their own property, they could also stop selling their labor to the capitalists. Capitalism, then, could not exist in a free market.

This is especially true of the networked, p2p economy.

Capitalism depends on the state to impose control within the network economy, particularly to control relations through authorized channels, and thereby capture value that would otherwise be retained by its producers. Points of control are introduced into the natural mesh of social relations….

The state’s ability to grant title and privilege is based on its ability to enforce such advantages through its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

That is not to say that Kleiner is anti-exchange as such. Like David Graeber, he’s open to the possibility that exchange and markets of some sort would exist as one component of a post-state/capitalist economy. But like Graeber, he’s extremely skeptical that such a post-state, post-capitalist market would bear any resemblance to our present economy, dominated by commodity production and mediation by the cash nexus.

If “freed” from the coercion of profit-seeking capitalists, producers would produce for social value, not for profits, as they do in their private and family lives…. This is not to say that a free society would not have competition, or that its members would not seek to benefit from their own labor. Indeed, the division of labor required in a complex society makes exchange and reciprocity necessary. However, the metaphor of “the market” as it is currently used would no longer hold.

Kleiner seems to suggest, if I read him correctly, that most discrete acts of production and distribution, on the micro-level, would be governed by the ethos of social production for use, and exchange would take place on a higher level.

The “market economy” is, by definition, a surveillance economy, where contributions to production and consumption must be measured in minute detail. It is an economy of accountants and security guards. The accounting of value exchange in tiny and reductive lists of individually priced transactions must be superseded by more fluid and generalized forms of exchange.

This suggests that most production for everyday consumption would take place within primary social units with production as a part of daily living, and exchange will consist mainly — as Bakunin envisioned — of the distribution of primary resource inputs over large areas, or the exchange of surpluses between primary social units.

Kleiner sees networked communication technologies and peer production as the means to “resist and evade the violence” entailed by existing hierarchies and coercively enforced privilege. “Social relations among transnational, trans-local communities operate within an extra-territorial space, one where the operations of title and privilege could give way to relations of mutual interest and negotiation.”

Even the accumulated wealth from centuries of exploitation cannot ultimately save the economic elite if they are unable to continue to capture current wealth. The value of the future is far greater than the value of the past…. [I]t is our new ways of working together and sharing across national boundaries that have the potential to threaten the capitalist order and bring about a new society.

He also sees such liberatory technologies as the basis of an economic vision of peer-production as a modern, high-tech version of the precapitalist model of production on the commons.

Modes of production employing structures similar to peer-to-peer networks have relations reminiscent of the historic pastoral commons, long gone commonly held lands used for the maintenance of livestock and regulated by ancient rights predating modern laws and governments. The modern commons, however, is not located in a single space, but rather spans the planet, offering our society hope for a way out from the class stratification of capitalism by undermining its logic of control and extraction….

Peer networks, such as the internet, and all the material and immaterial inputs that keep them running, serve as a common stock that is used independently by many people. Free software, whose production and distribution frequently depends on peer networks, is a common stock available to all…. Mass transportation and international integration have created distributed communities who maintain ongoing interpersonal and often informal economic relationships across national borders.

All of these are examples of new productive relationships that transcend current property-based relations and point to a potential way forward. Developments in telecommunications, notably the emergence of peer networks such as the internet, along with international transportation and migration, create broad revolutionary possibilities as dispersed communities become able to interact instantly on a global scale.

But Kleiner warns that the peer production and free sharing of informational goods — even including the designs of physical products — will be insufficient to liberate producers from rent extraction if the physical means of production and subsistence remain concentrated in the hands of a small class of rentiers. The increased productivity and cost savings from free and open software and open industrial design will simply be appropriated as rent by the owners of the physical means of production, in the same way that Ricardo’s landlords appropriated the increased productivity from industrial production.

He proposes venture communism as a way to organize the material basis of life, along with the material, for a community of peer producers

a structure for independent producers to share a common stock of productive assets, allowing forms of production formerly associated exclusively with the creation of immaterial value… to be extended to the material sphere.

Just as copyleft and other free information licenses turned copyright against itself, the venture commune uses the corporate form as a vehicle for asserting control over productive assets. The commune is legally a firm, but with distinct properties that transform it into an effective vehicle for revolutionary workers’ struggle.

The venture commune holds ownership of all productive assets that make up the common stock employed by a diverse and geographically distributed networked of collective and independent peer producers. The venture commune does not coordinate production; a community of peer producers produce according to their own needs and desires. The role of the commune is only to manage the common stock, making property, such as the housing and tools they require, available to the peer producers.

The venture commune is the federation of workers’ collectives and individual workers, and is itself owned by each of them, with each member having only one share. In the case that workers are working in a collective or co-operative, ownership is held individually, by the separate people that make up the collective or co-operative…. Property is always held in common by all the members of the commune, with the venture commune equally owned by all its members….

As a platform for supporting self-managed collectives, the venture commune is one example of a larger category of economic models organized on a modular architecture.

A venture commune is not bound to one physical location where it can be isolated and confined. Similar in topology to a peer-to-peer network, Telekommunisten intends to be decentralized, with only minimal coordination required amongst its international community of producer-owners.

Although there are many networked economic models organized on a module-platform basis, one of the most prominent is the phyle. The phyle was originally created in the fictional setting of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and David de Ugarte and his comrades in the Las Indias Cooperative Group adopted the term for the model de Ugarte discusses in his book Phyles: From Nations to Networks (exemplified in practice by the Las Indias phyle and its member enterprises). Draft Chapter Five of my online Desktop Regulatory State manuscript is an extended survey of modular networked economic platforms. The phyle model is especially relevant to Kleiner’s discussion of transnational cultural communities as the base for networked economic organizations. Both Stephenson’s fictional phyles and de Ugarte’s real-life model are based on international linguistic diasporas.

Kleiner proposes a finance model similar to the kind of bootstrapping envisioned in Ebenezer Howard’s original Garden City proposals: colonists would pool their resources to buy land at a far enough distance from existing population centers to be mostly vacant and cheap, and then finance municipal services with a tax on the rapidly appreciating value of the land.

The function of the venture commune is to acquire material assets that members need for living and working, such as equipment and tools, and allocate them to its members…. The members interested in having this property offer a rental agreement to the commune, giving the terms they wish to have for possession of this property. The commune issues a series of bonds to raise the funds required to acquire the property, when then becomes collateral for the bondholders. The rental agreement is offered as a guarantee that the funds will be available to redeem the bonds.

Rents over and above the amount required to service the bonds are issued as a dividend to all members equally — reminiscent of geolibertarian models influenced by Georgism and social credit that finance public services with taxes on economic rent and issue a basic income or citizen’s dividend to everyone.

The basic model is a good illustration of the broader anarchist principle summed up by the Wobbly slogan, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” It starts out within the interstices of the present system and, leveraging the superior productivity of free people voluntarily cooperating and using their full capabilities without interference from a managerial class that fears their initiative, growing until it supplants the preexisting system.
Shaquem Griffin thought UCF football coaches were joking when they told him to join the linebackers' room last month.

Up until the start of spring practice, he spent the majority of his college football career working out with the secondary, which includes his twin brother, Shaquill. Griffin, who is a redshirt junior from St. Petersburg, made his biggest play during a game last season on special teams when he recovered a muffed punt against Tulane.

But when the new coaching staff looked at Griffin, they didn't see a safety. They saw a potential pass rusher at outside linebacker.

"My father always talked about me playing linebacker," Griffin said. "And now that I was in there I was like let's give it a shot and it actually went really good for me...my dad was like I told you so, I told you so. That's the funny part about it."

Griffin brought some experience to the position having played linebacker in sports during his time at Lakewood High School.

The Knights will rely on Griffin to bring his speed and athleticism to the linebackers as the team transitioned from a base 4-3 defense to a 3-4.

There is no set group of starters, but Griffin and senior Errol Clarke have seen their fair share of reps with the 1s at outside linebacker with Chequan Burkett and Mark Rucker working the inside.

New linebackers coach Jovan DeWitt said he's been pleased so far with Griffin and Clarke's performance on the edges.

"They're doing a really good job and buying into a lot of the things that we're doing. They're having some success. Obviously Griff came down from the back end on the secondary level but he's got some height to him and some strength and some quickness that we want," DeWitt said. "Errol's a really good football player and he's picking things up really well. He's transitioned really well into being an edge guy. He's got the combination of understanding the coverage area aspect and still being a physical enough player in the box for us."

Griffin's background as a safety makes the transition much easier in a 3-4 defense here linebackers are more spread out as if they were on a basketball court.

His brother, Shaquill hasn't been surprised by his success in the new role either. Like their father, Terry, he always saw Shaquem more as a linebacker.

"[Shaquem] was really excited. I’ve been telling him that for the longest," Shaquill Griffin said. "Now that the coaches said it, now he believes he should have been playing there for the longest. Now that he gained the weight, he’s absolutely loving it."

Griffin picked up about 10 pounds for the new role -- a feat his brother said wasn't difficult. His healthy appetite for food is only matched by his thirst for competition.

Griffin makes friendly wagers with his twin brother during every practice fueled by who makes the bigger play in practice.

"We'll make little side bets like, you have to buy lunch if I get the sack or, for me and my brother, if I make the play before you or you get the sack or interception before me, you have to run to the gate after practice," Griffin said with a wide smile on his face. "It's just a big competition and it's fun to do it."

E-mail Shannon Green at sgreen@orlandosentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at @osknights.
Two European fintech startups are teaming up to give a glimpse of what the bank of tomorrow could look like.

Number26, a Peter Thiel-backed German startup that’s setting out to create the bank account of the future, has announced a tie-up with London-based peer-to–peer money-transfer firm TransferWise. The partnership will give Number26 customers in-app access to a cheap international money-transfer service.

To recap, Number26 was founded out of Berlin in early 2013 as a “mobile-first” bank account, not too dissimilar from BankMobile or Simple in the U.S. Originally only available in Germany and Austria, the service has since expanded across the E.U. into Ireland, Spain, France, Greece, Slovakia, and Italy.

In an interview with VentureBeat at Dublin Web Summit last year, Number26 cofounder Maximilian Tayenthal hinted at the company’s future plans. Indeed, Tayenthal noted the myriad nimble fintech startups that were chipping away at various elements of the traditional bank, including bank accounts and FOREX, and observed that they could band together to “rebundle” an age-old entity that had been systematically “unbundled” with the advent of the Internet.

We’re seeing the first fruits of this vision today.

The new service is available to all Number26 customers from today, and transfers will initially be permitted from euros into eight currencies: U.K. pounds, U.S. dollars, Swedish krona, Indian rupees, Australian dollars, Hungarian forints, Swiss francs, and Polish zloty. We’re told that additional currencies will be added “soon.”

“Our goal is to leverage the best banking products from around the world and make them accessible to customers with one tap, creating a fintech hub inside the Number26 app,” explained cofounder and CEO Valentin Stalf. “And by adding one of the world’s best fintechs in TransferWise as our flagship partner, we can drive banking innovation much faster than traditional banks.”

TransferWise has emerged as a key player in the fintech startup realm with a smart international money transfer service that bypasses the banks to keep costs down. Similar to Number26, TransferWise also counts PayPal-cofounder Peter Thiel as an investor, alongside other big-name backers such as Richard Branson.

“We want to make it as easy and fair as possible for people who need to send money abroad, so we’re very excited that Number26 customers can now access the TransferWise experience without leaving their banking app,” said TransferWise CEO and cofounder Taavet Hinrikus. “This is a great step towards consumers having a wider choice of financial service providers and getting the best service for them.”

Today’s news is a notable step in the evolution of online and mobile banking. Rebundling banking in this way allows startups to focus on their core missions rather than scrambling to provide all types of financial services themselves. There’s no reason other related services couldn’t be thrown into the mix too — perhaps a Robin Hood-style stock investment offering, for example.

A Number26 spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat that the company does indeed plan to tap other startups and related services through its app this year, including savings, investments, fixed deposits, and maybe even insurance.

What we could end up with is a single app that aggregates the services of multiple fintech startups. The bank of tomorrow is almost here.
Partisans of the Left compulsively claim President George W. Bush was an imbecile who couldn’t be trusted on anything. If they’re right, all of us must reflexively and wholly refute every statement he ever made. It would seem very reasonable, then, to first dispense with a sweeping pronouncement on one of the most pressing and thorny issues of modern times, an issue that obviously no Texan troglodyte could hope to grasp: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Those words were spoken by America’s forty-third commander-in-chief at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, just six days after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Lo and behold, if there’s one thing that Bush clearly shares in common with his renowned ideological rivals—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—it’s an obstinate belief that the religion of Islam has nothing to do with violence. Obama has defended “the true peaceful nature of Islam.” Clinton has tweeted, “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” And Biden, after listening to activist, author and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali discuss the relationship between ISIS and Islam, reportedly retorted, “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.”

Actually, there are a few things that Bush, Obama, Clinton and Biden share in common. None of them are theologians, none of them are scholars of Middle Eastern history and none of them—not even Obama, as far as I’m aware—can read classical Arabic and, thus, understand the Koran, the hadith (the traditions and habits of Muhammad) or the sunna (the teachings and sayings of Muhammad) in their original form. (Whether Bush, Biden or Clinton has bothered to read a single translated page of these texts remains to be seen. Obama, who from ages six to ten, attended a public school in Indonesia influenced by the West, appears to be in much the same boat.) Yes, our political leaders are perfectly unified in their immense ignorance of the worldview to which 1.6 billion people—around a quarter of the global population—subscribe.

But let’s leave aside for a moment the contentious and oft-debated question of whether Islam is a religion of peace. Why the absence of “’splaining” accusations? After all, the numerous branches of the PC Police typically leap to castigate those who opine on topics beyond their “knowledge.” (“Knowledge” and, accordingly, “credibility” are allegedly derived not from academic training, but instead primarily from lived experience.) To “’splain” is “to explain or comment on something in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, from the perspective of the group one identifies with.”

So with today’s incessant talk of Islam, where are the social-justice warriors who summarily slam nonblack academics who, for example, seek to understand and alleviate the causes of African American poverty? Where are the feminists who excoriate male journalists who, for instance, endeavor to comprehend the difficulties women endure in the workplace? And why is the grievance Gestapo not up in arms, furiously scolding eminent non-Muslims for rendering, from the mightiest of bully pulpits, definitive judgments on issues about which they know virtually nothing? Are Bush, Obama, Biden and Clinton—if I may coin a word—“Christiansplaining”?

Perhaps. It doesn’t truly matter though. What does matter is, first, what is revealed by the dithering of liberals and progressives otherwise obsessed with enforcing mental segregation, who are usually so eager to condemn those who have strayed beyond their designated racial, religious and gender pens. To be sure, more than any other issue, Islam—specifically, the absurdly rudimentary way in which it’s characterized by prominent nonbelievers with no substantive familiarity with the faith—proves that the Left’s outrage is selective. It candidly demonstrates that “’splaining” indictments—along with their ugly siblings, safe spaces and trigger warnings—are systematically used, contrary to the Left’s avowals, to curtail rather than enhance free speech. The bottom line: Who is speaking is of little import as long as what a person utters coincides with one of the Left’s narratives, ambitions or ideals.

A second reason the Left’s willingness to overlook Christiansplaining matters? Its opinions are hollow, which means the allegations of racism and xenophobia it hurls are (usually) similarly empty. When elected officials, who are profoundly distrusted, as polling consistently shows, mimic what some imams and Islamic scholars say—that Islam is a religion of peace—suspicion naturally flows due to the transitive property of equality. Worsening the situation, the reassurances are almost always heard, due to status and the nature of the media landscape, pouring forth from the mouths of elected officials as opposed to the imams and Islamic scholars.

Moreover, when some Muslims and ex-Muslims in addition to other Islamic scholars stress that Islam does in fact have internal theological problems, then anxiety quite rightly increases rather than decreases. On June 12, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, demanded that his coreligionists develop “real reforms” and “get our Sharia Islamic law out of the 13th century in which it’s stuck.” In short, Americans have been pounded by contradictory voices.

Americans have also caught pundits and “experts” on television and radio lecturing about the urgent need for Muslim American communities to spearhead efforts to counter extremism and homegrown radicalization. But most Americans don’t live in or near a Muslim community, so they don’t see what—if anything—is transpiring to unearth and uproot the few bad weeds. In the meantime, they do witness one terrorist attack after another plotted and carried out on domestic soil: Chattanooga, Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando. It’s reasonable then to conclude that progress is not being made within those environs closest to past perpetrators.

And here are the most taboo yet prescient questions: If our elected officials—as well as the preponderance of those who comment daily on religious extremism—are, for all intents and purposes, totally unversed in Islamic theology, who are they to distinguish between what is “radical Islam” and what is “non-radical Islam”? If a majority of Muslims are not violent, does that mean the religion of Islam itself is not violent? Or could it possibly instead mean that the majority of Muslims aren’t following the religion of Islam as it is written or as it was intended by Muhammad to be practiced?

As a Jew, I would be insulted if a non-Jew were to boldly declare that “Judaism is a religion of peace.” Regardless of whether Judaism is inherently peaceful or not, I wouldn’t want my faith reduced in such an elementary way, especially by someone outside the faith. And arguably the mere notion of “religion”—as it’s used by our elected officials—is ethnocentric. It connotes, certainly within the American context, a personal and private approach to spirituality, Protestant and Madisonian, reflecting salvation and faith rather than commandments and community, which are more the focus of Judaism and Islam.

The point is that non-Muslims in high places describing Islam as a religion of “peace” has long outlived its usefulness. It’s so obvious—and frustrating—now that the rhetoric was employed with an eye toward public calm rather than the actual content of Islam. This is not to say, however, there’s a need to conversely decree Islam a religion of “violence”—or anything else for that matter. It’s not even to say we shouldn’t take seriously the avowals of those who commit terror in the name of Islam. It’s only to say that this is one of those unique circumstances in which there really has been “’splaining” and, ultimately, only authentic insiders (i.e., Muslims and scholars of Islam) are equipped to address the theological tenets of Islam being “exploited,” “distorted” and “manipulated.”

Moving forward, to better protect America, the explaining away of Islamic extremism ought to end immediately. Asserting that “gun violence,” above all, has been the cause of homicidal assaults like the one at the Pulse nightclub is to discount context, culture and ideology. It’s tantamount to maintaining that the only reason the genocides of Armenia, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur—or any other murderous undertaking—occurred is because of the presence of lethal instruments. This programmatic myopia, which shoves aside reality for the sake of shielding a dangerously utopian view of human relations, is only sentencing to death other innocents at home and abroad.

Finally, the browbeating of those who don’t impeccably conform to multicultural norms must abate. It’s having a perilous chilling effect. After each tragedy, we learn someone hesitated to report suspicious activity out of fear of being branded a bigot. In the wake of Orlando, law-enforcement officers across the big networks stressed, “See something, say something.” That’s a cute slogan, but “see something, say something” is inextricably at odds with the pervasive doctrine of “tolerance,” which in effect means “tolerance at all costs.” “See something, say something” politely requests that we put self-preservation instincts before prejudices. “Tolerance” sternly demands that we bury self-preservation instincts to avoid offending others.
Wild boot3

Chris Kesting holds the boot he found at the base of a cliff near Mt. Hood Skibowl, right where Reese Witherspoon threw it while filming the opening scene of "Wild."

(Photo by Tim Pate)

In the opening scene of "Wild," Reese Witherspoon sits down at the edge of a cliff and takes off her too-small hiking boots. Her toes are black and bloody, and she pulls off her right big toenail and throws it over the cliff, knocking one of her boots over in the process.

Exhausted and frustrated, Witherspoon throws the other boot after it while screaming a profanity. It's a cathartic moment, one that drew strong reactions when the movie was released in December.

Some people thought "Wow, Reese Witherspoon is a brave actress who really got inside Cheryl Strayed's head. I loved the book, and I'm going to love this movie!"

Others thought "Whoa, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is difficult enough with a pack that heavy, and now you're throwing away your boots? Uh, oh."

Chris Kesting, a mechanical engineer from Camas, Wash., and an avid hiker, said "Hey, I know exactly where that is. One of these days it might be fun to go up there and see if that boot is actually there."

So he did. And it was.

The scene from "Wild," the movie based on Portland writer Strayed's memoir, was filmed in the fall of 2013 near Mt. Hood Skibowl, on the south side of Mount Hood near Government Camp. Kesting recognized it immediately because he'd been in the area recently and saw Tom Dick and Harry Mountain in the background. Kesting and a friend, Tim Pate, hiked the popular trail on March 8, one of the sunny, snow-free days in early spring, and had no trouble finding the boot-tossing spot. (The film crew used a chairlift and then hiked over.) Kesting scrambled around the cliffs and searched for about 15 minutes until he saw something in the middle of a scree slope.

"The thing that stood out was the red laces," he said. "The brown of the leather blended into the soil and I didn't see that at all. I saw the red laces and thought it was weird that there were flowers out already. That's when it came into focus. It was kind of funny."

But is that really the "Wild" boot?

"Well, first of all you wouldn't find a single boot in a place where nobody would leave a boot," Kesting said. "It has red laces and it's a 61/2 woman's size Danner boot, made in Portland. If you look at the movie poster, it's that boot. You can tell the manufacturing date on it, 2013, so it's relatively new, but you could tell it had been sitting out in the sun for quite a bit of time. It was bleached out and had been sitting in that spot for awhile."

Yep, that's the one. Danner made the boots Witherspoon wore in the movie and is selling them as the Mountain Light Cascade. (Strayed wore different boots when she hiked the PCT in 1995.) The company made 25 pairs for the movie to show various stages of wear and use as Witherspoon moved along the trail. The movie crew left one boot behind. (But not two: Kesting and Pate went back later and did a thorough search but couldn't find the second boot.)

Kesting keeps the boot on a bookshelf in his house and laughs at how the "Wild" crew -- which shot all but seven scenes in Oregon and was noted for its low-impact style -- violated "leave no trace" principles with one stray boot.

"They're not supposed to leave stuff around when they film and I thought they would send somebody down to pick it up," he said. "It was pretty hard to find so maybe even if they did that they couldn't find it.

"I thought it would be fun to do but there would be no way I would find it ... It's really a pretty spot. If you turn around 180 (degrees), Mount Hood is right in your face. It's beautiful there."

-- Jeff Baker

503-221-8165
Italian squad EuroInternational have confirmed Marvin Kirchhofer and Nicolas Beer as their 2015 lineup in the FIA F3 European Championship.

Kirchhofer, 20, swept the ADAC Formel Masters and German F3 titles with Motopark in his first two years in single-seaters.

The highly-rated German then moved on to GP3 with ART Grand Prix, finishing third in his debut year with a home win at Hockenheim. He is widely expected to be retained by the French squad.

Beer, 18, is a fellow ADAC Formel Masters alumnus, taking fourth in the series in 2013. He went on to race in BRDC F4, but his campaign was abandoned after four rounds yielded only one podium finish.

The Dane made his German F3 debut with EuroInternational in late 2014 and was set to contest the series full-time this year before it called off.

EuroInternational finished ninth in FIA F3 in 2014 with Michele Beretta as their sole full-timer. Newly-appointed DTM racer Tom Blomqvist recorded the team’s most recent European F3 podium in May of 2013.

2015 FIA F3 European Championship line-up so far
The plans of Obama and the Progressive elite to transform America by inhibiting suburban and ex-urban living and propping up urban utopias instead for the sake of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” has been previously commented on. However, the urban-obsessed Progressive elite have also been using the fear of immanent climate DOOM to pack people into little urban hovels while enjoying the spiffier urban hip hangouts, which is somehow familiar…

Of course, this ecological DOOM is just an excuse, as urban density in the San Francisco Bay area has increased while people are driving… more:

“The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased.”

Further:

“Advocates argue that the demand for single-family homes is about to drop as retiring baby boomers and up-and-coming millennials will prefer to live in mixed-use neighborhoods with high densities and easy pedestrian access to stores and entertainment. “This claim isn’t supported by people’s actual behavior. The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard.”

The true “will of the people” is to live in suburban environments where they own their own home and don’t have to share walls with other people, this won’t stop the elitists who want to ride their pristine picnic and nature grounds with slack-jawed yokels. Their plans continue regardless:

“Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by 2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area, recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission. “… “Even if it’s not without precedent, Plan Bay Area could still be revolutionary because of the rationale behind it. It could help spur a nationwide movement for high-density “transit-oriented” development — in the name of reducing global warming. The federal government has signed on. The Obama administration has told metropolitan areas to include land-use regulations in the transportation plans that federal law requires them to update every five years. Washington is also giving communities “livability grants” aimed at promoting high-density development.”

Livability? This is no different than shoving a bunch of rats in a cage. The rabid Left’s delusional utopian visions won’t be inflicted on them, but only on the hoi polloi who will have to “enjoy” being crammed together to the point where even Elijah Baley would feel claustrophobic!

The utopian future of the Progressives is that of the dystopian future of Metropolis.

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What's Game Sack? Well, check out the video trailer above. That should give you the very basic gist of it. We like reviewing games, lots and lots of games each episode every two weeks. We try to put on the highest quality show we can and we're always looking for ways to make it even better. There's always room for improvement!

We love making Game Sack. We wish we could do more but we have other obligations in life at the moment. Like awful jobs and stuff. But we like Game Sack so much more. That's why we make sure to release episodes on a consistent basis. No long lulls wondering when the next episode will appear. No compromise in quality. Just a love for videogames and talking about them. We love showing you lots of different games, obscure and even popular ones.

So what's the deal with this Patreon page or whatever this is? The first thing you need to know is that we're not going to put episodes or anything else behind a paywall. We're not going to give timed exclusives here. WE WILL HAVE NO TIERS. Everyone is equal. Donate any amount you'd like. By donating you're basically helping us out and it is 100% optional. Some of our videos make a lot less money than others. Not every subscriber watches every video. Not every subscriber even gets notified! A lot more people are using AdBlock on their browsers as well. If we had a more stable income that we could count on then we could cover topics and themes that may not be as popular from time to time. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, we understand and we still value you very much as a viewer of the show. But if you do donate, it helps us with equipment, computer costs, time, and stuff like that. Oh and it makes unprofitable but fun episodes, like "Our Gaming Memories" and "How to Clean Your Stupid Games" sting us much less! And we're always looking for ways to improve quality in all areas... except our wooden delivery. So basically by becoming a Patron you're helping us out and you can cancel or change your donation amount at any time. Only become a Patron if you truly feel comfortable with it and want to support the show in this way! You can also donate directly via Youtube if you feel uncomfortable with a monthly thing.

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There are many similarities to what happened when the iron curtain was removed in the late eighties and this current effective (self-proclaimed) lift of the ban on startup investments for the general public.

Poor Product Quality Compensated by Abnormal Demand

In the Communist bloc territories in 1989–1992, after decades of the severe shortage of basic goods, consumers were happy to buy and drink technical-purpose alcohol produced in the West. In the ICO environment, many investment products are consumable, but most are inferior. And the abnormal demand we see is the cause of most discussions including this one.

Irresponsible Business and Deliberate Exploitation of Regulation Vacuum

Back then, many roguish businessmen from prosperous parts of the world were selling trains of expired food, low-quality electronics, and counterfeit “branded” clothes to miserable ex-communists. They were not breaking the word of law, but they certainly realized the wrongdoing by the standards of their home countries. The same is true for many active multi-project supporters and ICO entrepreneurs now. Let me note here that the history of the nineties should have taught those ready to compromise themselves that the backfire is quite probable and painful. It should be expected from the side of wild consumers in the first place. When properly applied, the law stands in between the two parties and protects both buyers and sellers from each other, not one way only.

No Professional Elite at Play

In the early years of post-communist transformation, global trade was represented in Eastern Europe and Russia by sleek rascals with a questionable reputation at home in the West. Now, the ICO landscape lacks prominent and reputable people from the incumbent professional investment community as well. Moreover, the more third-rate, ex-Wall-Streeters you see on a project’s team page, the more red flags you notice elsewhere on that ICO due diligence list. Blatant scams targeted to low-end idiots have someone (or a ghost of someone) with a London City past as a must.

Maintenance of Morality — A Job for a Few Selfless Heroes

Now and then, exactly the opposite can be said about people standing on nonprofit, scientific and humanitarian grounds. Swarms of various religion and meditation “gurus” aside, it was people who arranged scientific collaboration who allowed many good citizens living in post-communist ruins to not totally lose faith in humankind. Now in crypto-space, only figures like Andreas Antonopoulos inspire unconditional respect. Of course, ICOs are only a subset of the broader crypto/blockchain movement, but the noise it produces hardly allows outside observers to hear anything else today.

Local (Inner Circle) Celebrities are Mostly Dangerous Clowns

Those who satisfied the demand on the post-communist territories locally distributed inferior goods to their compatriots (consumed it as well, by the way), wore clownish but locally differentiating business suits, enjoyed life, and killed each other on a daily basis. Today, by normal [old] standards there are no gentlemen in the ICO space either.

Disbalance in Supply Distribution by the Nation States

The structure of trade back then did not correspond with normal global stats. Business communities of few nations — seemingly irrelevant to a particular industry segment — took the lead and supplied at disproportional volumes. Today, we can see many ICOs originated in Russia. For example, during the pre-ICO-boom years not many blockchain innovations were born there.
Public universities must tolerate students’ off-campus speech even when it offends some, or most, of the student body. Recent incidents at Old Dominion University (ODU) and The Ohio State University (OSU) serve as reminders that this is not always what happens.

At both universities, students adorned their off-campus residences with signs offering a less than wholesome welcome to new and returning students. The banners at ODU read, “Rowdy and fun – Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time,” “Freshman daughter drop off,” and “Go ahead and drop mom off too.” Signs at an OSU apartment, which were taken down after move-in day, read, “Dads, we’ll take it from here,” and “Daughter daycare 2.0.” The offending students at ODU have also removed their banners after being contacted by their administration, and may face repercussions from their fraternity, Sigma Nu.

While these incidents may mark the first time in the new academic year that students at ODU and OSU encounter speech they find offensive or insulting, they will undoubtedly not be the last. As Tyler Kingkade shows in The Huffington Post today, suggestive signs like these are hardly uncommon in the university setting.

In a worrying response to the banners, the ODU administration published a statement warning students that “[m]essages like the ones displayed yesterday by a few students on the balcony of their private residence are not and will not be tolerated” and that “[a]ny student found to have violated the code of conduct will be subject to disciplinary action.” An OSU spokesperson made a similar threat, claiming that “student code violations go with a student regardless of whether it is on or off campus.”

These statements are troubling. ODU and OSU are welcome to take part in the marketplace of ideas and to criticize the messages on these banners, but they must do so without threatening the students with punishment for protected speech.

ODU and OSU, like all public universities, are not the arbiters of what students can and cannot say off campus. They can’t even ban crude speech on campus. If students are found to be in violation of student codes of conduct solely for the content of these banners, ODU and OSU will have run afoul of the constitution.

In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri (1973), the Supreme Court held that students cannot be punished simply because their speech contradicts a university’s “conventions of decency.” And in Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University (1993), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the jurisdiction of which includes ODU, ruled that even crude student speech enjoys First Amendment protection. In these rulings, the courts held that the University of Missouri and George Mason University could not punish students simply because others were offended by their speech. Likewise, neither can ODU or OSU.

Additionally, universities do a disservice to their students when they censor controversial speech. If nothing else, these banners could serve the very useful purpose of helping students avoid places and people with whom they might rather not associate. Students who find the ideas behind these banners offensive can more easily avoid the people who espouse them when they are literally proclaiming the ideas on their houses.

While addressing the issue in a letter to the campus community, ODU President John Broderick shared a student’s reaction to the banners:

A young lady I talked to earlier today courageously described the true meaning of the hurt this caused. She thought seriously about going back home. But she was heartened, she explained, when she saw how fellow students were reacting to this incident on social media. She realized this callous and senseless act did not reflect the Old Dominion she has come to love.

This is what more speech looks like, and it’s always the better alternative to censorship. Suggestive banners have been around for a long time, and they show no sign of fading away. Demanding the removal of these banners is not the same as refuting the ideas behind them. College students will never be able to avoid speech or ideas they find offensive, but they will benefit from and take part in the discussion that frequently results from the controversy surrounding such expression.
This week, I continue on with my latest reading of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If you missed it, you can check out part one here.

The Wickedness of Religion

The next few chapters are primarily focused on religion and morality, during which Hitchens argues that religion itself is not just amoral but immoral, and that religion does not actually make people morally better. The thrust of his argument is neatly encapsulated in his comments on the slow moral defeat of slavery and racism:

The chance that someone’s secular or freethinking opinion would cause him or her to denounce the whole injustice was extremely high. The chance that someone’s religious belief would case him or her to take a stand against slavery and racism was statistically quite small. But the chance that someone’s religious belief would cause him or her to uphold slavery and racism was statistically extremely high, and the latter fact helps us to understand why the victory of simple justice took so long to bring about. (p. 180)

Hitchens’ strategy throughout this section of the book is to draw not just a correlation between immoral behavior and religious belief and teachings, but to show a causal connection between religion and immorality. He is, in effect, providing us with a litany of religiously inspired horror stories with the aim of destroying religion’s supposed monopoly on morality. Hitchens touches on a range of fairly well known topics, from the collusion of religion and totalitarian states; the abuse of children at the hands of religious teachings and religious teachers; the mental anguish inflicted on the religious by unobtainable religious goals; and so on. This argument does not, however, necessarily demonstrate that religion itself is problematic, but only those who claim to be religious. In order to be truly effective in divorcing religion and morality, Hitchens needs to show that religion itself is conceptually immoral.

In chapter eleven, ““The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings”, Hitchens discusses the way in which religions are founded on the credulity of the general populous:

This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sister, and is thus one of humanity’s great weaknesses. (p. 161)

This relationship, wherein the general public is beholden to the religious teachers for dispensation and salvation through the doctrines of that religion, is ripe with potential abuse. Furthermore:

There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And these faults and crimes are not to be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can sometimes be exemplary) but in its original precepts. These include: - Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous - The doctrine of blood sacrifice - The doctrine of atonement - The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment - The imposition of impossible tasks and rules (p. 205)

By placing people in a state of dependency and then demanding more of them than can be achieved, religion inspires an abusive relationship of intertwined dependence and judgment. Hitchens is quick to note that religion can and has inspired people to good, but he says that this good is not realized because of religion, but rather because of the same humanist impulses that motivate the irreligious to the same moral accomplishments. Discussing the events of the book tour that preceded the publication of God Is Not Great, Hitchens recounts a challenge he issued during a debate:

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven’t had a reply yet. (p. 289)

If religion seems so closely tied to the excesses of immorality and so readily abusive to its adherents, then how can one claim that religion is, in and of itself, moral? In Hitchens’ eyes the answer is clear, and if nothing else his attack should be enough to give any religious person cause for concern. I find this line of attack intriguing because it bypasses discussions of doctrine and attacks religion as an institution: a system with which people have a particular type of relationship. If any incarnate version of religion places people into a relationship of the type described by Hitchens, then it seems religion as practiced by most adherents is inherently immoral. Should one attempt to counter this assertion with a version of religion that does not resemble what has been previously described, I think Hitchens would argue that that thing would not be religion as normally defined and understood. If we take away any authoritative characteristics of religion, then we are left with something more akin to spirituality. That which lacks authority cannot readily be imposed on others, nor is it likely to lead to an abusive relationship between that authority and those under its nominal care.

Counter Attacks

The end of the book focuses on anticipated rebuttals by religious proponents, followed by an impassioned but thoughtful argument for the dominance of secularism, pluralism, and skepticism. Chapter seventeen counters what Hitchens calls “the last-ditch “case” against secularism”, which states: as bad as religiously oriented societies have been, self-proclaimed secular societies have demonstrated themselves to be far worse. Hitchens humorously observes that “it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists. One might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that.” (p. 230) All humor aside, if this argument holds it would seem to give some credence to the idea that religion does make people act more morally, which would in turn undermine the thrust of much of what Hitchens has said up to this point in the book.

Hitchens’ rebuttal hinges on the equating of totalitarianism – the system of government that the “evil” secular regimes of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist North Korea, and the like have imposed on their respective peoples – to theocratic rule. He goes to some length to draw parallels between totalitarian states and theocracies and correctly states that “…the object of perfecting the species – which is the very root and source of the totalitarian impulse – is in essence a religious one.” (p. 232) Hitchens goes on to quote George Orwell, who said that a “totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.” (p. 232) The impulse towards religion and the sort of self-subjugation that comes from religious belief is the same motivating force that allows totalitarian states to exercise the control and influence they do over their citizenry. These states have not eliminated religion so much as have replaced traditional religious beliefs with new secular ones, in which the state itself becomes a deity worthy of unquestioning admiration, loyalty, and worship. Driving this point home, Hitchens paraphrases from The God That Failed (a work concerning the Russian Communist state), stating that “Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it.” (p. 246)

Hitchens goes on to note that this supposed counter-argument is a double-edged sword, since it would seem to implicate religion whenever the forces of the state and the forces of faith have become intertwined to the detriment of the general population. He comments at some length on the Catholic Church’s cozy relationship with both Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, prior to, during, and after World War II. If secularism is to be held accountable for the terrible deeds ostensibly done in its name, then religion should be held accountable when the same deeds are done with faith’s assistance. Secular forces, supposedly guided by rational and humanist principles, are as fallible as any human endeavor can and will be. The advantage for secular forces is that “humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief.” (p. 250) Religion, which has so often acted as an impediment to human progress on all fronts, is simply less well equipped to deal with these excesses of human nature. Indeed, if Hitchens has demonstrated the validity of his criticisms of religion, it seems ready-made to impose those excesses on humanity to the expense of us all.

A Better World

Hitchens closes the work with two chapters that decry the obstacle religion has proven itself to be while simultaneously advocating for the better worldviews of secularism, humanism, and skepticism. This section of the book is less of an argument and more of a plea. He expends a significant amount of effort to show how the skeptical, rational mindset is superior to the religious, faith-based mindset. For instance, he discusses the trial and eventual execution of Socrates for promoting “free thought and unrestricted inquiry” and points out that Socrates stated that, "all he really “knew”…was the extent of his own ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.)” (p. 256) Hitchens goes on to say that:

…Socrates was mocking his accusers in their own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods – but I am as certain as I can be there you do not know, either. (p. 257)

The advantage that secularism holds over religion is that it is self-limiting when taken in conjunction with skepticism and humanism. The certainty required to justify some of humanity’s most grievous errors is simply not available to anyone willing to take the time to reasonable question everything while taking into account the fallibility of one’s self and one’s cohorts. A dash of this self-doubt goes a long way. Had this mindset prevailed throughout history, we might not have gone through the destruction of the ancient libraries, the suppression of philosophical thought, and the looting of our intellectual heritage by those whose certainty of faith has robbed us all. This is not to say that humanity would not have endured a long and winding road from our pre-history to the modern day. As Hitchens rightly observes:

No doubt there would still have been much foolishness and solipsism. But the connection between Athens and history and humanity would not have been so sundered, and the Jewish people might have been the carriers of philosophy instead of arid monotheism, and the ancient schools and their wisdom would not have become prehistoric to us. (p. 274)

We are at a point in history where we can reasonably choose to throw off the burdens of religion without immediately incurring its wrath. However, religion is much like a wounded animal, which can be the most dangerous at its most vulnerable. The opportunity is there, but we must be careful in pressing the attack. When confronted by those who would have us choose faith over reason, we must be willing to respond resolutely:

In point of fact, we do not have the option of “choosing” absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive – or to intimidate – others. Of course, it is better and healthier for the mind to “choose” the path of skepticism and inquiry in any case, because only by continual exercise of these faculties can we hope to achieve anything. (pp. 277-278)

Hitchens strongly believes that the current state of the world is one in which religion poses an outright threat to the survival of key cultural values: free speech, inquiry, and expression. We live at a time when religious zealots can impose their will with frightening effective violence. Dissent can be obliterated with the pull of a trigger or the pressing of a button. Secularists must be willing to meet this foe, an enemy often violently flailing as its increasing irrelevance becomes apparent to more and more people.

… confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit. (p. 283)

We have better alternatives at our disposal. The loss of religion is ultimately, Hitchens believes, something that will free us to become better than we collectively are. We need no longer be bound to ancient tomes, filled with words that are increasingly dated and devoid of meaningful guidance. However:

The loss of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy and Proust, all of which was also “man-made” (though one sometimes wonders, as in the case of Mozart). (p. 151)

Religion has had its time, and Hitchens is adamant that it has over-stayed its welcome. There are far better alternatives that are at our disposal, or are waiting to be discovered, for the important questions we must all face. It is time for secularists to actively engage an enemy that has haunted humanity for too long:

”Know thyself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it. (p. 283)

I, for one, could not agree with the man more.

Follow me on Twitter and Google+ and check back weekly for new articles and podcasts. You can also follow [37G] on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or YouTube.
A hole in the border fence. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection photo/GAO)

(CNSNews.com) - During a six-year stretch of the Obama presidency, people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border cut 9,287 holes in the “pedestrian” fencing that currently covers only 354 miles of the 1,954-mile border, according to a report published by the Government Accountability Office.

Only 654 miles of the 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border currently have any type of fencing, according to GAO. The other 1,300 miles of border have no fencing.

Of the 654 miles of fencing, 354 miles consists of what the Department of Homeland Security calls “pedestrian” fencing. The other 300 miles is “vehicle” fencing.

“Border fencing types,” explains GAO, “include pedestrian fencing, which is primarily intended to slow down and deter pedestrians from crossing the border, and vehicle fencing, which is intended to resist vehicles engaged in drug trafficking and alien smuggling operations and is typically used in rural or isolated locations that have a low occurrence of illegal pedestrian traffic.”

The report notes that the 300 miles in “vehicle” fencing on the border is not designed to stop smugglers and other illegal crossers from entering the U.S. on foot.

“Although Tucson sector officials stated vehicle fencing has been effective in slowing and prohibiting drive throughs,” says the GAO report, “vehicle fencing is not designed to slow or deter illegal entrants from entering or smuggling contraband into the United States on foot.”

37 miles of the 354 miles of “pedestrian” border fencing is backed up by a layer of secondary fencing, according to GAO. Another 14 miles of that is backed up by tertiary fencing.

A hole in the border fence. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection photo/GAO)

The GAO report noted that it is common for “illegal entrants” to cut holes in the existing border fences so they can enter the United States.

“Agents we spoke with in the El Paso and Tucson sectors explained that one of the most common methods employed by illegal entrants involves cutting openings, or breaches, in pedestrian and vehicle fencing,” says GAO. “Once breached, illegal entrants can cross through the fence or smuggle people and contraband into the United States.

In six years during the Obama administration, “illegal entrants” cut 9,287 holes in the pedestrian fencing along the border.

“Between fiscal years 2010 and 2015, CBP recorded a total of 9,287 breaches in pedestrian fencing,” says the report. “According to our analysis of these data, illegal entrants breached legacy pedestrian fencing at an average rate of 82 breaches per fence mile, compared to an average of 14 breaches per fence mile of modern pedestrian fencing.”

The report refers to any fencing constructed from surplus Vietnam War-era landing mats or fencing designs used before Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act in 2006 as “legacy” fencing. It refers to fencing designs developed after the Secure Fence Act as “modern” fencing.

The report says holes cut in the existing border fences cost an average of $784 per hole to repair.

The report describes how the Border Patrol on the ground in the El Paso Sector tried for seven years to get DHS to approve replacing the "compromised" fencing in Sunland Park, New Mexico—which is right across the state line from El Paso, Texas.

Because the fence in Sunland was not replaced, illegal entrants deterred from crossing in El Paso--where there was a good border fence--could simply move to the West to Sunland and cross there.

“In addition, sector officials stated that modern pedestrian fencing in downtown El Paso, Texas, had diverted illegal entrant activity to Sunland Park, New Mexico, where the primary legacy pedestrian fencing is compromised,” says the GAO report.

“El Paso sector officials,” says the report, “stated that while the Sunland Park, New Mexico, area of operations has the greatest amount of illegal activity in the El Paso sector, the condition of the primary legacy pedestrian fencing does not achieve its intended purpose of slowing the progress of illegal entrants.”

“El Paso sector officials stated that sector officials provided Border Patrol headquarters written justification documenting the need for a fence replacement project in the Sunland Park, New Mexico, for seven years,” says the report. “Border Patrol approved the identified need and in fiscal year 2015 CBP began implementing the Sunland Park fence replacement project.”

Illegal entrants use instruments ranging from pipe cutters to power tools to cut holes in the existing border fencing.

“Agents we spoke with in the El Paso sector explained that creating breaches in legacy pedestrian fencing requires less effort compared to modern designs, and can be done using bolt or pipe cutters,” says GAO.

“Agents we spoke with in the Tucson sector also told us that while pedestrian fencing is generally easier to breach, they have also observed breaches in more modern fence designs, including bollard fence, which agents stated were cut using portable power tools,” says GAO.

“In addition,” says GAO, “agents in the Tucson sector stated that illegal entrants scale the taller pedestrian fencing designs, such as bollard fencing. In contrast, agents we spoke with in the San Diego sector stated that some segments of legacy fencing are low and that they have witnessed illegal entrants jumping over the fence.”

The original version of this GAO’s report on border fencing was presented to the members of Congress who had requested it on Dec. 22, 2016. But the Department of Homeland Security objected to releasing that version to the public.

“DHS deemed some of the information in the prior report as For Official Use Only—Law Enforcement Sensitive, which must be protected from public disclosure,” GAO said in the redacted version of the report that was released publicly on February 16. “Therefore, this report omits sensitive information on sustainment of TI [tactical infrastructure] and our analysis of Border Patrol data on fencing and enforcement activities.”

The 9,287 holes that were cut in the border fencing from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2015 equals an average of about 4.2 holes per day.
Kyrie Irving was the #1 pick of the 2011 draft and had the weight of Cleveland on his shoulders as the new franchise player that ...(Read more)

Isaiah Thomas outscores Kyrie Irving 26-7 in 44 point win over the Cavs

Kyrie Irving was the #1 pick of the 2011 draft and had the weight of Cleveland on his shoulders as the new franchise player that will make Cavs fans forget about LeBron. Isaiah Thomas went to the Kings with the last pick (#60) of the 2011 draft and the only thing on his shoulder was a chip. A massive chip for the small (5’10”) point guard out of Washington who watched guards like Bogdanovic (#31), Shelvin Mack (#34), Charles Jenkins (#44), Goudelock (#46), Travis Leslie (#47), DeAndre Liggins (#53) and E’Twaun Moore (#55) get drafted before him when his game was as big as lottery pick guards like Brandon Knight and Kemba Walker….and Kyrie Irving.

Last night in the Kings 44 point win over the Cavs, Thomas showed why his name belongs with the top guards of the 2011 draft class and any other class in the NBA when he scored 26 points including 15 in the 2nd half against Irving. Irving only scored 7 points on 3 of 14 shooting and some of his fans would probably just say it was just one of those nights for him and the Cavs but that logic can’t be contributed to Thomas’ success because he’s been this good all year long with a season average of 19.3 points and 6.3 assists and 20+ points in 8 of the Kings last 10 games.

Let’s hope last night’s game opened up a few more eyes and reminded others that bieng the “shortest” and/or the “last” doesn’t mean you can’t play the biggest and be at the top.
There’s Something Wrong With This Staten Island Church

Last weekend, I was scouting some locations on Staten Island, and the last on my list was this church at the southern tip of the island.

At first, everything about the 185-foot tall Church of St. Joachim and St. Anne seemed perfectly normal.

But as I was taking some angle shots, something started to feel…off.

Then, as I walked around to the side, all of a sudden it occurred to me…

What happened to the back of the church??

It reminded me of old cartoons where Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny would build an insanely impressive mansion facade in front of a normal-sized house to fool people.

From the rear, you can see that a concrete wall holds most of the upper structure up:

As it happens, this incongruous pairing was the result of a tragic fire that ripped through the original church in 1973 and destroyed most of it.

Miraculously, a sizable portion of the facade survived and was later installed as the front of the new, smaller church.

But you want to know the weirdest thing? You’ve seen this church before.

Sure you have! You mean you’ve forgotten? It was back in 1972, a year before the fire.

If I recall, you were there for a baptism…

Full then-and-now look at The Godfather coming soon!

-SCOUT

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Restri­cts total expend­itures on marria­ges

PESHAWAR: The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly adopted a landmark piece of legislation on Thursday, barring a bride’s family members, relatives and outsiders from making dowry payments to the groom and his family.

The law also restricts the maximum value of gifts given to the bride by her parents, family members or any other person to Rs10,000. It is now illegal for anyone from the groom’s family or anyone on their behalf to ask or force the bride’s family for dowry. If they still do, they shall be liable to a two-month prison term and a fine of Rs300,000 or both.

The law titled, ‘the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Dowry, Bridal Gift and Marriage Functions Restriction Act, 2017,’ states that the total expenditures on marriages, including on baarats or valimas shall not exceed Rs75,000 and other ceremonies, including nikah, baraat or valima shall be concluded before 10pm.

Anti dowry campaign: Constant effort against gender violence called for

Similarly, the law restricts the valima to a one-dish banquet of rice, gravy and sweets. It also states that a person or family celebrating the nikah or baraat or organising the marriage ceremony of other person shall not serve or allow anyone to meals or other edibles, excluding beverages, to people participating in the ceremony.

Under the law, anyone who contravenes or fails to comply with any provision of this law shall be liable to pay a fine not less than Rs200,000 and an imprisonment term not exceeding two months.

The bill, tabled by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s (JI) Rashda Riffat, was unanimously adopted by the house.

Services of more than 3,000 employees of the health and irrigation departments were regularised after the adoption of two separate laws tabled by Pakistan Peoples Party lawmaker Sardar Fakhar Azam Khan.

The assembly also adopted a resolution asking the provincial government to include chapters on the life of celebrated humanitarian and charity founder Abdul Sattar Edhi in textbooks taught in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Expensive weddings

Concerns on Fata reforms

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Qaumi Watan Party (QWP) expressed concern over the five-year plan for merging the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) into the province.

Senior Minister for Irrigation Sikandar Sherpao of QWP objected over the delay, saying that the assembly had passed resolutions asking the federal government for an immediate merger.

“We want local government elections in Fata this year and general elections next year in accordance with the committee’s report,” he said, adding that the cabinet had adopted the report with a five-year delay in the merger was an injustice with the people of Fata.

The provincial minister for public health engineering Shah Farman of PTI also condemned the delay and accused the federal government of dishonesty.

“We see the delay … with suspicion and we view it as the federal government’s dishonesty … We condemn this move,” he said.

Will dowry deaths never end?

Opposition leader Maulana Lutfur Rahman of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) said that the people of Fata should have been consulted before the decision.

“This can be done via a referendum,” he said, adding that all stakeholders should be taken onboard while making decisions regarding the future of Fata.

Financial crisis

Rahman also criticised the PTI-led government over the financial crisis in the province, saying that if the government continued to move at the same pace, the next governments would not have enough money for development projects.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3rd, 2017.

Read full story
Redmond-based tech giant Microsoft has revealed in a new report that it provided details of 1050 users to the Australian government in the first half of 2013.

The company said that it received a total of 1219 requests for access to user data, with Microsoft granting access to email addresses, locations, IP addresses, and names for 86 percent of them.

Of course, Redmond issued a statement to explain that it only shares user details based on federal requests, as it continues to treat private information very carefully.

“We place a premium on respecting and protecting the privacy of our users,” the company was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph.

“At the same time, Microsoft recognises that law enforcement plays a critically important role in keeping our users and our technology safe and free from abuse or exploitation.”

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the company received more than 37,000 requests from a total of 64 governments, including the US, UK, France, Germany, and Turkey. The company complied with 80 percent of these requests, it said, with some including what it called imminent emergencies, such as suicide threats.
Sheffield United are set to receive a welcome cash boost after former Blades defender Harry Maguire completed his move to Leicester City.

The 24-year-old's move to Leicester could be worth as much as £17m - and The Star understands that United inserted a sell-on clause, thought to be 10 per cent of any profit made, into the deal which took Maguire to Hull in the summer of 2014.

The defender was about to enter the final year of his contract with Hull and becomes Craig Shakespeare's first signing since he took over as Leicester's full-time manager last week.

“It’s obviously a very exciting time for myself," Maguire, who has signed a five-year deal, said.

"Once I had my eyes on this club, I always wanted to join. Thankfully I’m here so I can’t wait to get the season started and kick on.

“There were a number of clubs interested, but when I met the manager here, he pretty much swayed it into the direction of this club. He showed me the way that the Club is going. It’s on the up and it looks very promising for the future, so credit to the gaffer.

“You can see that with the structure of the club, it’s going to look upwards rather than down so that was a big reason why, as soon as I knew there was an interest, I wanted to jump at the opportunity.”

Maguire was a stand out in the middle of Hull’s defence last season despite their relegation to the Championship, with the young defender picking up the Players’ Player of the Year and Fans’ Player of the Year awards.
SHE’S famed for her vegetarianism, having penned seven veggie cookbooks, and been at the pinnacle of the London food scene. She’s counted Sir Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox and Prince Charles among her clients.

But these days Nadine Abensur is more likely to be chowing down on a burger than a Brussels sprout.

The French-Moroccan chef and author followed a strict plant-based diet for 29 years after an incident when she was 19-years-old that shocked her into a meat-free lifestyle.

“I was at uni and I remember walking past a butcher’s shop in the north of England in 1976 and a truck pulled up with a whole dead cow in the back. It was obliterated. I just took one look at it and was completely horrified,” Nadine says. “So I became vegetarian overnight.”

Looking back now, however, Nadine says her food choices during those almost three decades were misguided.

“I can honestly say that for every single day of those 29 years I felt unwell and I was in complete denial about it because I assumed, like everyone else did, that I was on a healthy diet. I ate lots of vegetables.”

Nadine’s food journey began early. Born in Casablanca to French-Jewish parents, her paternal grandparents arrived in Morocco – on foot – in 1917 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Nadine’s mother came from a long line of Spanish Jews, who’d gone to Morocco from their home country following the Spanish Inquisition.

“(My family are) really, really sophisticated and varied and brilliant cooks. Every single one of them was a brilliant cook. So I saw a lot as a child.”

In 1950s and ’60s Morocco, wealthy families often had servants, so Nadine would have people cooking for her during her early years. Yet when she stepped into the kitchen herself, she says it came naturally.

“It was in my blood,” she remembers. “When I started cooking I just knew how. I never had to have a lesson or go and train with anybody.

“It was just in there.”

And it still is, despite her drive to break free of her cooking pigeonhole.

“People would say to me: ‘Oh, you’re such a brilliant cook’, and I would bristle because I’m so much more than that. It used to really upset me. So when I came to Australia I was determined to do something else.”

On the trail of the late spiritual leader Barry Long, whose teachings she had closely followed for years, Nadine arrived in Australia in 2000.

“(Barry Long) taught everything that now has become so commonplace, like meditation and what we now call mindfulness, which is just a euphemism for meditation.”

Yet Nadine’s move didn’t go quite as smoothly as she’d planned. She contracted whooping cough, an illness that would plague her for seven months and resist five courses of antibiotics.

“I just got sicker and sicker and sicker,” she says.

“One morning I woke up and said: ‘I want a beef burger.’ So I went to a restaurant in Bangalow and I ordered the organic beef burger and I said: ‘No chips, no bread.’ The guy looked at me and said: ‘Well you won’t have much to eat then.’

“I took one mouthful and it was like every pore that was in my body just lapped it up. Then I went back three days in a row and ordered the same beef burger and by the end of the third day, I didn’t have whooping cough anymore.”

As a self-described “born again meat eater”, it took Nadine some time to move on from her years of strict vegetarianism.

“I resisted it. I’d buy a piece of salmon or a piece of chicken that was already cut and just sort of tip it out of the tray without touching it because I was so grossed out. It took me years to surrender to the fact that, actually, I felt 100 per cent better when I ate meat and poultry and fish.”

What triggered Nadine’s latest personal food revolution was a cicatricial (or scarring) alopecia diagnosis. An auto-immune disorder that destroys hair follicles and replaces them with scar tissue, in some cases hair loss is gradual, without noticeable symptoms, and may go unnoticed for some time. I

“I got to my wits end about it, so I decided I had to do something,” she says.

So she took to her diary, listing all of the foods she felt no longer agreed with her body.

“Then, two days later by complete fluke, somebody wrote to me and mentioned AIP. I Googled it and found ‘auto-immune protocol’. And, I mean, you could have made a carbon copy of my diary pages, it was exactly the same thing. And I knew I had to do this.”

Now focused on a diet of meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and “zero sugar, zero dairy, zero pulses, zero nuts, zero seeds”, Nadine says she’s never felt better.

“People often talk about the sense of deprivation, but I don’t feel remotely deprived. I feel liberated from my addiction to sugar, which I loved. I was the biggest chocoholic on the planet.”

Once a jetsetting cooking teacher, Nadine now prefers to hold monthly local events, and for the past nine years has focused on her Mullumbimby Art Piece Gallery.

It’s where her love of all things creative comes together, and food is never far from

the focus.

When painter James Guppy exhibited at the space, and due to the dark and gothic nature of his work, Nadine held a themed sit-down dinner to complement an artist talk, which she catered herself.

“We turned the whole gallery into a medieval banquet and ate off stone plates and the waitresses dressed up as medieval kind of wenches,” she chuckles. “It was absolutely fantastic.”

“People look at me like I’m crazy, like having an art gallery in Mullumbimby, I must be nuts. But they have no idea who pulls up outside. I had Princess Mary in here last year.”

Seems even holing up in Mullumbimby couldn’t stop the twinkle of foodie fame from following Nadine Abensur.
UPDATED 1:52 p.m.

CORTLAND, N.Y. -- The Jets roster lined up along one sideline, ordered to run dreaded gassers. They sprinted the width of the field twice, and repeated about 10 times, before the double whistle signaled the end.

This was Rex Ryan's punishment when a second straight training-camp practice went beyond competitive, and became combative.

"Being physical is one thing," the Jets coach said today. "Going past that is something else. That’s what I didn’t like. That’s why we stopped, and we had to remind guys that enemy is not in green and white."

It was the same message Ryan delivered after practice yesterday, when a melee of about 20 players erupted on the sideline after post-play extracurricular activity between running back Joe McKnight and safety D'Anton Lynn, the son of McKnight's position coach.

Evidently, the message didn't get through the first time. So Ryan stopped practice twice today.

He first stepped in when he saw rookie running back Terrance Ganaway try to run through linebacker Demario Davis in what he called a "thud" period, when players are instructed to simply thud off of each other. A skirmish began, and Ryan quickly stepped in, scolding his team.

"That’s not what you are looking for; that’s not being physical," Ryan said. "That to me is being selfish. And so I told the guys about it and sure enough, apparently someone never got the message."

That someone was cornerback Antonio Cromartie. Later in practice, during passing drills, Cromartie jawed at Stephen Hill after holding the rookie receiver. Ryan had issued a warning to his team, dangling the gassers as punishment, and the following play proved to be the final straw.

Cromartie, a seven-year veteran, delivered what Ryan considered an inappropriate hit on tight end Dustin Keller.

"I thought 'Cro' should have backed off and not hit Dustin," Ryan said. "He's trying to be physical and pick his play up. We always talk about developing habits. But in that situation, that’s your teammate. You don’t want to do it. I thought 'Cro' was wrong in that situation."

Cromartie declined to speak to reporters today, loudly expressing his disdain for the media when approached by a member of the team's public relations staff.

The practice field became stunningly quiet as the players retreated to the sideline for the gassers. When the sprints were complete -- Tim Tebow, for what it's worth, out-ran all his teammates -- Ryan huddled his team at midfield.

He urged his players to be smart, to play physical but yet protect each other. When Ryan was done with his speech, quarterback Mark Sanchez stepped in to echo Ryan's message.

It was the first time Ryan, entering his fourth season as the Jets head coach, has ordered his team to run gassers.

"I just wanted them to know how serious I am about it," Ryan said. "And I also wanted to run them until I was tired."

Ryan has resolved not to lose "the pulse" of the team this year, as he admitted happened in 2011, and to stay on top of any potential tension in his locker room. But he bristled at the reference to last year, and said he's always tried to be in control and create a positive culture as the Jets head coach.

The past aside, that was certainly what Ryan did on the practice field today.

"I know what my job is. My job is to get this team ready to go," Ryan said. "And be the team that I envisioned having. We are going to, and that’s it."

Many of Ryan's players said his message got through loud and clear.

"I don’t know if we disappointed him, but we aren’t practicing the way we should be right now," safety Eric Smith said. "Go be physical but stop on the whistle."

Davis called it "great coaching."

"Whatever he says, goes," Davis said. "We’ll always be loyal to him, and whatever he says, we’re going to always respond to it. (If ) he wants the extra (hitting) to stop, and he wants us to focus on playing, that’s what we'll do."

Ryan said after the gassers, the team practiced "exactly how I wanted them to practice." He clearly dislikes the public perception -- fair or not -- that his team is undisciplined and prone to chemistry issues.

"Everybody has a right to their opinion, there is no question about that. No matter how wrong they are," Ryan said. "I think we are a little more disciplined than what the general perception is out there or what have you. You can't have the wins that we've had in the past and not be a disciplined football team. It hasn’t been good enough, and we haven't won the Super Bowl yet, but certainly we’re able to."

The Jets' first preseason game is Friday, so they'll have a chance to hit another team then. Until then, Ryan left no uncertainty about what he expects in practice.

"I bet we don’t have (a fight) tomorrow," Smith said with a smile.

Jenny Vrentas: jvrentas@starledger.com; twitter.com/JennyVrentas
Immerse yourself in a fictional world of spies, criminals, terrorists, secret societies, government agents and more.

Unique document-inspection gameplay with escalating challenges.

Decide the fate of countless hopeful immigrants while balancing your income and family needs.

Congratulations. The October labor lottery is complete. Your name was pulled. For immediate placement, report to the The Ministry of Admission at Grestin Border Checkpoint. An apartment will be provided for you and your family in East Grestin. Expect a Class-8 dwelling. Glory to Arstotzka.The communist state of Arstotzka has just ended a 6-year war with neighboring Kolechia and reclaimed its rightful half of the border town, Grestin. Your job as immigration inspector is to control the flow of people entering the Arstotzkan side of Grestin from Kolechia. Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists. Using only the documents provided by travelers and the Ministry of Admission's primitive inspect, search, and fingerprint systems you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested.

Copyright 2013 ©, 3909 LLC. All rights reserved. “Papers, Please” and the red eagle logo are trademarks of 3909 LLC.
After the conclusion of the current competitive cycle one of our main tasks was to make a decision whether or not we want to continue playing with our current line-up. On the one hand, we are overall satisfied with the performance and the commitment to practice of players individually. On the other hand, even in the end of the split our results in certain games resumed to be unsatisfactory. Eventually our head coach and management agreed upon removing Konstantinos "FORG1VEN" Tzortziou from our starting line-up and moving him to a substitute position.

This decision obviously was not simple, since we expected to achieve more with him on our roster. Even though FORG1VEN's individual performance was nothing short of outstanding, we failed to come up with an approach to the game that would allow him to transition his individual proficiency into a significant in-game impact.

We are not interested in keeping FORG1VEN on our bench until his contract expires by the end of LCS EU Spring 2016. He has already experienced this unpleasant situation. Besides, we believe that he will be able to fulfil himself in another team. Consequently, we are putting him up for transfer and are ready to negotiate deals with interested parties.
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Before Sunday’s loss to the Colts, FOX’s Jay Glazer reported that, if Broncos coach John Fox were to become available, other teams would be interested. After Sunday’s loss to the Colts, a separate report emerged that the Broncos don’t plan to make Fox available.

Citing multiple unnamed sources, Mike Klis of the Denver Post reports that the Broncos “had never discussed firing Fox.” Klis points to Fox’s three-year contract from early 2014 as proof of the intent to keep him around.

“I’ve seen all kind of reports in the past, I’m sure I’ll see some moving forward. I don’t make those decisions, I don’t control that,” Fox told reporters after the game. “My intentions are to be a Denver Bronco and have been since I got here. It’s not about me; it’s about this football team.”

Klis speculates that Glazer’s report could mean that Fox in considering retirement. But Glazer said nothing about Fox walking away; Glazer said that if Fox is “available,” other teams would be interested.

The report from Klis could mean that the Broncos think Fox may be hoping to become available, and that the team won’t be making it easy for Fox and a new team by firing him. The deeper message could be that if, as Glazer believes, other teams are interested in Fox, those other teams should approach the Broncos about a possible trade.

Even if the Broncos would otherwise be inclined to move on from Fox, it would be foolish at this point for the Broncos not to wait and see whether the Jets, Bears, 49ers, Falcons, and/or Raiders make a phone call — and in turn make an offer.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption A look back at the life of Claire Rayner

Tributes have been paid to agony aunt Claire Rayner, who has died at the age of 79.

The award-winning journalist had remained poorly after intestinal surgery in May. She died in hospital near her home in Harrow in London.

She told her relatives she wanted her last words to be: "Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him."

Her husband Des Rayner said he had lost his soul mate and best friend.

She worked for the Sun, Sunday Mirror and Woman's Own and was named medical journalist of the year in 1987. She also wrote a string of novels.

Her restaurant critic son, Jay, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "She had been through a hell of a lot of health troubles over the last five months and some of us thought towards the end that she actually just wanted to give up.

"But late on Sunday night, when things were looking a bit bleak, she was offered one last chance and I honestly thought she would say, 'No, just let me go,' and she didn't.

"It was very much in the nature of her that she said, 'I will try the dialysis.' It didn't work, unfortunately. She had led an absolutely amazing life and I am very, very proud of her."

Mrs Rayner, who had two other children - Amanda and Adam - and four grandchildren, will have a humanist funeral for family and close friends.

A former nurse and midwife, for many years she was also president of the Patients Association.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer at 70, but beat the illness. In 2006 she wrote about her experience on the BBC News website.

Image caption Claire Rayner's son described her as an "agent provocateur"

Her husband of 53 years, Des, said: "I have lost my best friend and my soul mate. I am immensely proud of her."

Mr Rayner, who was also her agent and manager, said: "Through her work she helped hundreds of thousands of people and doubtless, by talking frankly about the importance of safe sex in the 80s when almost nobody else would discuss it, helped to save thousands of lives.

"Right up until her death she was being consulted by both politicians and the medical profession about the best way to provide the health services the nation deserved and nothing mattered to her more than that. Her death leaves a vacancy which will not be filled."

Her son Jay added that she had been a great parent and a great journalist who did not shy away from controversy.

"The thing about her was she was an agent provocateur, she liked to make mischief, she liked to infuriate people," he said.

In 1996 she was awarded the OBE for "services to women's issues and health issues".

She was involved with 50 charities, and was a member of the Prime Minister's Commission on Nursing and the last government's Royal Commission on the Care of the Elderly.

Her no-nonsense manner led to the BBC employing her to demonstrate how to put on a condom and she was one of the first people used by advertisers to promote sanitary towels.

Born into a Jewish family, she later became president of the British Humanist Association, whose chief executive, Andrew Copson, said: "Claire Rayner found meaning and inspiration in living and the enjoyment of life, in trying to fulfil her potential, and in the wonders of nature and the marvels of the cosmos.

"She was a remarkable woman with broad interests and deep sympathies who lived an exemplary humanist life and we all feel lucky to have known her and to have had her support for so many enjoyable years."

Campaigner

The chief executive of the Patients' Association, Katherine Murphy, expressed her "deep sadness" at the news and added: "For almost 30 years Claire has devoted so much of her time and energy to championing patients' issues. She was a figurehead and inspiration to us all."

Neil Churchill, chief executive of Asthma UK said Mrs Rayner was one of the charity's "most charismatic supporters", adding: "She was truly an inspiration and will be deeply missed."

Her close friend, Baroness Helena Kennedy, said: "She was an extraordinary woman - passionate, committed, warm and exuberant. The key thing about Claire was that she was a campaigner to her toes - her mission was to improve the lot of others and she did it with great humility and common sense."

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Simon Hughes also paid tribute to Mrs Rayner, who joined the party in 2001.

She wrote in the Independent at the time that she felt disillusioned with Labour after 50 years of supporting them.

Mr Hughes said: "Claire's campaigning was an inspiration to millions and especially to Liberal Democrats, who were so proud that she was a member of our party.

"Continuous work and campaigning to improve our National Health Service for all our patients will be the best sort of tribute our country can give her."

BBC News website readers have been emailing their memories of Claire Rayner. Here is a selection of their comments.
This story appears in the May 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Banish your preconceptions of robots as stiff, herky-jerky metal machines. An “octobot” less than three inches wide is changing the robotics landscape.

The octobot is the world’s first completely soft, autonomous, and untethered robot. It is free of wires, batteries, and any hard material—like its namesake, the octopus, which has no internal skeleton.

A Harvard University research team led by engineering professors Robert Wood and Jennifer Lewis tried more than 300 designs before they came up with one that worked. And now the octobot could revolutionize the use of robots. Traditional robots are “fantastic for what they do in terms of automation, but they’re not geared toward human interaction,” Wood says. Soft robots provide a safer solution: “If they run into something, it’d be like bumping into a basketball. It won’t hurt you.”

Before the octobot, soft robots were either hybrids—pliable exteriors with hard guts of batteries or wires—or soft models tethered to an external cord. The octobot eliminates these restrictions. It moves by pneumatic power: An internal circuit triggers chemical reactions, turning its liquid hydrogen peroxide fuel into a gas, which inflates the robot’s limbs and allows them to move. The whole assembly is created from silicone using a 3-D printer.

The octobot is currently a prototype, but its writhing arms prove that the technology works. The goal, says Wood, is to find viable applications, such as in health care. Soft robots could be made from biocompatible and biodegradable materials—and, he says, might even be formed into capsules to be swallowed for more effective and less invasive endoscopies.
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That is the view of Mark Watts, director of multinational design firm Arup and a leading expert on sustainable planning.

Mr Watts told the MIPIM property conference in Cannes that cities faced unprecedented challenges - with the population soaring, and human beings now consuming more natural resources than the earth was able to replace.

But he said there were enough examples of smart, green thinking throughout the world to make him optimistic about the future.

Mr Watts outlined a model 'future city' investing heavily in cycling, electric buses, energy-generating buildings and urban farms.

And he said that ecologically sound policies adopted throughout the world had often been adopted for economic, rather than environmental, reasons.

Mr Watts said Copenhagen - where 35pc of all trips to work are by bike - had not only reduced spending on more expensive transport infrastructure, but was saving one dollar in health costs for every kilometre cycled.

And he said an app being used in San Fransisco, alerting drivers to empty parking bays throughout the city, had cut congestion by 10 per cent.

Mr Watts said the most successful 40 cities in the world had all seen the biggest increases on spending on cycling.

He added: "Most cities in the world which are judged to be the most liveable and most efficient are the ones that have sustainable transport systems.

"I think that we are going to see the return of the old-fashioned bicycle in the most successful cities in the world, moving forward.

"There are huge savings through going down this route."

Mr Watts said 'future cities' were going to have to 'run on data' - with a much better awareness of who was consuming what resources, and when.

And he said diminishing resources, natural disasters and uncertainty over energy supplies meant cities would have to be more 'self-reliant'.

He told delegates: "In the future we will see much more of a move back to cities growing much of their own produce, while also creating flood plains and green spaces for people to enjoy."

Mr Watts said national governments had often failed to work together on ecological issues - but city leaders had been much more forward-thinking, showing 'a huge amount of collaboration'.

He said: "The whole attitude is about seeing what works elsewhere, copying it and claiming it as your own.

"There are enough examples of really good ways of getting to be a sustainable future city throughout the world that if those can be replicated in every city, then there is hope for the future."
DONALD Trump wasn’t the only holder of an honorary degree from a Scottish institution to court criticism.

ROBERT MUGABE

Robert Mugabe was stripped of his honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh earlier last decade. Photo: Jesse Awalt

During the early 1980s, Mugabe was awarded an honorary degree for services to African education by the University of Edinburgh,

Twenty-three years after it was awarded to the oppressive ruler, Mugabe’s degree was revoked by the same institution off the back of concerns over human rights injustices which he has presided over.

The removal of this award made him the first international personality to be stripped of an honorary degree by a British university.

SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH While the nature of Attenborough’s accomplishments is not controversial, the face of countless wildlife documentaries is believed to hold at least 32 honorary doctorates from universities across the UK, making him Britain’s most academically awarded celebrity.

Sir David Attenborough has approximately 32 degrees to his name. Image: Sarah Ward

When asked by the media as to why he accepts the degrees, the broadcaster and naturalist said: “It’s a compliment from the academic world. It’s a real compliment - it would be churlish not to accept one.”

DONALD TRUMP

Back in 2010, Trump was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Business Administration at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, thanks largely to his company’s efforts in building the Trump golf resort in Menie, Aberdeenshire.

Now, the US presidential candidate’s qualification has come under fire from more than 17,000 signatories who are demanding that the university strip him of the qualification following his intent to ban Muslims from entering America if elected.

Calls against Trump have intensified after a series of “unrepentant, persistent verbal attacks on various groups of people based on nationality, religion, race and physical abilities” have been made during his campaign speeches and he has since had his degree removed.

RICHARD DAWKINS

The outspoken evolutionary biologist was rewarded with an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen 150 years after Charles Darwin had published his magnum opus “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.

While the November 2009 award was widely accepted, some religious and social organisations opposed the Doctor of Science award because of its recognition of Darwinian principles.

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI

Scotland’s oldest university bestowed upon the ex-Iranian President the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 2006, amid protests from the National Union of Students regarding his country’s questionable human rights record.

Khatami’s speech focused on compassion without borders, with then-Scottish Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson describing Khatami’s St Andrews as a “slur on Scotland”.
Alternate history buffs are about to be whipped into a frenzy! OK, maybe not, but they will find this interesting.

An ancient “super-megalithic” site has been found in the Siberian Mountains. Found recently in Gornaya Shoria (Mount Shoria) in southern Siberia, this site consists of huge blocks of stone, which appear to be granite, with flat surfaces, right angles, and sharp corners. The blocks appear to be stacked, almost in the manner of cyclopean masonry, and well…they’re enormous!

Russia is no stranger to mysterious ancient sites, like Arkaim or Russia’s Stonehenge, and the Manpupuner formation, just to name two, but the site at Shoria is unique in that, if it’s man-made, the blocks used are undoubtedly the largest ever worked by human hands.

Here’s the story, as reported by archaeologist John Jensen via his personal blog and Academia.edu:

“I subscribe to a couple of Russian Blogs and Websites that post various data and information without the typical hype and filters of Western Science, Academia and the Press, let alone the fringe and “Alien” woo-woo crowd interests. The following are photos of some Super Megaliths from Southern Siberia near the mountains of Gornaya Shoria. The super megaliths were found and photographed for the first time by Georgy Sidorov on a recent expedition to the Southern Siberian mountains. The following images are from Valery Uvarov’s Russian website. There are no measurements given, but from the scale depicted by the human figures, these megaliths are much larger (as much as 2 to 3 times larger) than the largest known megaliths in the world. (Example: The Pregnant Woman Stone of Baalbek, Lebanon weighs in at approximately 1,260 ton). Some of these megaliths could easily weigh upwards of 3,000 to 4,000 tons. There is little commentary on Valery’s site, so the images are displayed here without much comments, other than my own limited observations.”

As Jensen pointed out, the monolith at Baalbek is considered to be one of the largest single stones used in an ancient megalithic site, but the blocks or stones at Shoria are much, much larger.

You may recognize the name Valery Uvarov, but if you don’t, it should be known that he is Russia’s foremost UFOlogist and a long-time proponent of various alternate history theories. He was involved, as a primary player, in the Russian Screws scenario, some of the details of which are specious. His website is a veritable mountain of questionable but compelling claims about ancient civilizations, alternate explanations for megalithic constructions, and OOPART speculation.

It turns out that Georgv Sidorov is also a proponent of unconventional theories regarding humanity’s past. This doesn’t necessarily warrant discounting the entire story, but it is important to understand that both men are known for seeking out evidence in support of their belief systems, as we all are wont to do to some degree.

At the release of this story, some are excitedly claiming that the Shoria site is evidence of an ancient lost civilization; a civilization capable of incredible feats of engineering that even with our modern technology would be virtually impossible. Others though are wisely urging caution. The pictures are compelling, and the typical observer would be hard pressed to come up with a natural explanation, but there may be one.

In 1987 a group of recreational scuba divers stumbled onto another apparent super-megalithic site in Japan. The Yonaguni Monument, which sits off the coast of Yonaguni, which is the southern-most island of the Ryukyu Island chain, is considered by some to be the most compelling evidence for a lost civilization in our past. Others are less convinced, however.

Boston University geologist Robert Schoch believes that the features of Yonaguni are the result of natural geological processes. He cites well-defined parallel bedding planes and earthquake activity, and since there are similar formations in the region that are known to be completely natural, this seems a safe bet.

The Shoria site, however, isn’t in an area that’s prone to frequent earthquakes, and the stone involved is much harder than the sandstone of Yonaguni, but our weird world is known to have created some startling rock formations that defy explanation. The Giants Causeway of Northern Ireland and The Waffle Rock of West Virginia come to mind. Both of those sites are now known to have been completely natural, but when viewed from the perspective of the layman, it seems incredible to think that they aren’t artificial constructions.

In any event, the site at Shoria has yet to be studied by experts in the field, all we have at the moment are the pictures, which in-an-of-themselves are quite impressive, but hardly conclusive. Future investigation should prove interesting.

Be sure to check out all of the pictures provided by Jensen!